España, ya te echo de menos

I can’t believe I only have three weeks left in Spain!  I can’t say I feel like I just got here—I’ve experienced so many new things in the past few months that last summer seems like forever ago.  But at the same time, I am amazed by how quickly the time has gone by and by how soon my study abroad experience—which I’ve been looking forward to since middle school—will be over.  It’s been an awesome couple of months, and even though Thanksgiving has made me particularly aware of how much I’m looking forward to going home, I’m already missing Spain.  Here are just a few things it’s going to be hard to leave behind:

1) Traveling!  There are so many amazing places to visit here in Spain, and I can take a weekend trip to Morocco or France if I want. 

2) Catching sight of the Alhambra on a regular basis.  Even after living here for three months, it still kind of takes me aback.

3) Free tapas. 

4) Being called “guapa.”  Yeah, we all complain about getting hollered at on the street, but no one’s really that angry about being told they’re guapa.

5) My friends and my host mom.

6) The food!!  And especially olive oil.

7) Spanish nights (when everyone is out and everywhere is open and there are always fun places to go).

8) The light homework load.  It’s been a really nice break.

9) Passing 5 pastry shops on my way to class.

10) Helado.

11) The Andalusian accent.  I’ve gotten fond of “Granaa” for Granada, “no pa’ na’” for no pasa nada, and “ma’ o me’o’.”

12) Living in the middle of a city but being able to walk from my house to the hills.

13) The language.  Spanish is prettier than English. 

14) The crumbling fortress walls by the Río Darro, getting lost in the Albayzín, the fountains, and the flamenco music that wafts into the Sacromonte streets late at night.

This post is already getting too sentimental for me, but even so I feel compelled to include this poem by Juan Ramón Jiménez we read in my lit class that expresses very well how I’m feeling about Spain right now:

¡Nostaljia aguda, infinita,

terrible, de lo que tengo!

Mint Tea and Kind Strangers

Morocco was pretty bizarre.  Over the course of a few days, we drank mint tea in the kitchen of a closed restaurant to wait out the rain, passed a random camel and a policeman with a monkey on the way to the ferry station, enjoyed breakfast with a Moroccan real estate agent from New York at a hostel he’d arranged for us, watched a snake charmer, and realized that we never would’ve made it anywhere if Moroccans hadn’t been the kindest people in the world.  I wish I could sit down with you all and tell you about it, but I can’t, so here’s at least some of my experience.

Five of us went—me, Megan, Kimberly, Lee, and Casey—and we fit a lot into a long weekend.  On Friday we stayed in Tarifa, a pretty little Spanish town just 35 minutes away from Morocco by ferry.  Then we spent Saturday in Tangier, Sunday in Meknes, Monday in Fes, and all of Tuesday making the hellishly long journey back to Granada.  There’s so much to write about that I don’t know where to begin, but I guess I’ll start with our trip to Meknes.  In Tangier we were with a guide the whole time, and for some reason this made me feel kind of distanced from the city.  We didn’t have to worry about anything (except for the price of the guide—after spending more time in Morocco, we realized we’d been pretty hardcore gypped); the guide picked us up at the ferry station, showed us where to eat lunch, and, at the end of the tour, we were dropped off at the train station.  But as soon as we were on our way to Meknes, things got a lot more difficult.  I expected that we would struggle a little bit with the trains since no one I was traveling with speaks any French or Arabic—the two official languages of Morocco—but I thought that we would be able to understand enough French to figure out when and where to switch trains or get off.  Unfortunately, in Morocco, train stops aren’t announced and there are very few signs, so we realized pretty quickly that we were going to have a hard time.  We ended up making it to Meknes fine.  We met a ton of really friendly people on the train, and by the end half the people in our train car were guiding us to our final destination.

Making it to our hostel ended up being a lot harder.  All we had was an address, but I figured this would be enough—we could give it to the taxi driver, and he would drop us off outside the door.  Now that I’ve explored Morocco’s medinas, though, I realize that this was a flawed assumption.  The medinas are markets, and, since we were visiting some of Morocco’s larger cities, they were huge.  More importantly, the majority of the streets are too narrow or rough for cars, so this meant that our taxi driver dropped us off late at night in the middle of Meknes’ old medina, without a map and—since Meknes is further south than Tangier—with less chance of finding someone who spoke English or Spanish. 

This was the only part of the trip where I felt kind of worried.  It became clear pretty quickly that there was no way we were going to find our hostel on our own, and, having been warned about Morocco, I was hesitant to ask for directions.  We were pretty desperate, though, and as it turned out, everyone on the streets was as friendly as the people on the train.  Probably about four or five people gave us directions (although unfortunately we couldn’t understand much of anything), and finally a guy ended up taking us to our hostel.  This sort of friendliness continued throughout the trip.  Everywhere we went, people helped us find our way, even though I’m sure we seemed kind of idiotic.  At one point—and this, to me, was the epitome of the kindness we encountered—we were once again trying to take a taxi to a hostel, and our driver didn’t know how to get there.  If he’d let us out we would’ve been pretty screwed, but instead some random stranger on the street who realized we were lost ran in front of the taxi for awhile to lead us to our destination.  Even though it was pouring rain.  I keep thinking about how we treat people who don’t speak English in the United States, and I’m coming to believe that we all need to spend some time in Morocco to learn how to act.  If someone came up to me on the street and starting talking to me in a language I didn’t understand, I would almost certainly say sorry and walk away.  Nobody blew us off like that in Morocco, though, and instead almost everyone we asked for help went out of their way to provide it. 

A guy we met on the train to Fes, Amin, was particularly friendly.  We started talking to him about our hostels, and he said that we were overpaying and that he could find us a better place.  So, he called a friend, made a reservation for us, arranged for someone to pick us up at the taxi stop, and then came to our hostel the next morning with some “soup of the beans,” apparently a traditional Moroccan breakfast.  It’s true that he was probably in part being friendly and in part just trying to get more business for his friend, but even so we ended up paying half of what we were initially going to pay.  Furthermore, since Fes turned out to be the most confusing city of all, I’m pretty sure we never would’ve found our original hostel. 

The streets were so narrow!

The medina in Fes.  We managed to sort of navigate the medina in Meknes,
but here in Fes it would've been completely impossible without our guide. 

The tannery in Fes.

People’s kindness is probably the aspect of the trip that will stick with me the longest, but another interesting part of my experience was being a girl in Morocco.  There are no women at all on the streets at night, and even during the day, it’s hard to find a restaurant or café with women.  We ended up eating mostly at tourist places, since everywhere else seemed to be unofficially guys-only.  Initially, we had planned on going to Morocco with just three girls—me, Megan, and Kimberly—and looking back on it, I think that would’ve been a bad idea.  The Moroccan men aren’t as bad as we’d all been led to believe, but we did have at least once instance where a couple men followed us through the medina for quite awhile and wouldn't leave us alone.  I think it would’ve been a lot harder to shake them if we hadn’t had the guys along, and it definitely would’ve been more disconcerting.

So far in Spain, I've been blown away by the sites we've seen--the cathedrals, the Mezquita in Córdoba, the Alhambra, and lots of others.  Morocco, though, was more about experiencing a different culture rather than siteseeing.  We spent our days wandering through ancient medinas, and, at least once we got out of Tangier, we encountered very few other tourists.  There’s lots more to tell, but that’s going to have to be all for now.  I miss and love you all!

La Corrida de Toros

On Saturday I got to experience a very unique part of Spanish culture: a Corrida de Toros.  A corrida is what most people picture when they think of a bullfight, though there are actually many types of bullfights in Spain.  I was pretty apprehensive about the corrida; a lot of people in my program were strongly opposed to going, and I was anticipating a lot of gore.  We’d read about corridas in class, so I knew roughly what to expect.  In each corrida, there are 3 matadors and 6 bulls.  The matador has (I think) 20 minutes to kill the bull, and this time is divided into three tercios.  In the first tercio, a picador—a member of the torero's team on horseback—jabs the bull with a pica, a lance, to test its bravery and diminish its power.  Next, the banderilleros have to stab the bull with banderillas, short poker-type things.  Throughout these two tercios, the matador’s team is relatively unprotected.  They run around, luring the bull closer, and then they have to run behind protective walls at the edge of the plaza when the bull charges.  In the last tercio, the matador faces the bull with his muleta, a red cape that he uses to attract the bull.  He wows the crowd by drawing the bull closer and closer, and at the end he has to kill it as cleanly as possible.  Anyway, all this sounded pretty bloody, but I was trying to keep an open mind and not pre-judge the corrida. 

The corrida was potentially the least boring two and a half hours of my life.  The crowd is extremely focused on what’s going on—obviously—and though I’m not a sports fan, it felt like the attention level was probably similar to that of some championship game.  Except that, whereas someone who doesn’t know anything about football can be completely bored during an important game, that’s not the case when there’s a massive bull charging around a plaza.  Another interesting difference is that instead of judging athletes based on points missed or earned or good or bad plays, in a corrida, the crowd is judging the matador and the bull based on their bravery and fierceness.  The crowd is upset when the bull is made to suffer more than it should rather than when a point is missed.  Maybe this doesn’t make a difference, but it was interesting to me. 

I think one of the key things I learned through going to the corrida and then discussing it in class on Monday is how easy it is to misunderstand what’s going on.  After seeing the bullfight, I was more opposed to this type of spectacle than I was going in.  The bull is, apparently, stabbed repeatedly throughout the fight--first by the picador and the banderilleros, and finally by the matador--and it seemed to me that it was suffering a lot.  Furthermore, it looks like the horse is getting really hurt—when the picador tried to poke the bull, sometimes the bull would stab at the horse with its horns, apparently getting in under the horse’s protective armor.  One of the arguments in favor of bullfighting is that these toros bravos live long, dignified lives in exchange for a few minutes of suffering—a way better deal than the animals who are raised and killed for food.  I still felt pretty uncomfortable with the violence, though, and I could see why so many people oppose bullfights.  Then in class yesterday my professor talked a lot about corridas, and I realized that I hadn’t understood a lot of what was going on.  The horse, for instance, is completely protected—to an uninformed spectator it looks like it is getting injured, but it is actually in very little danger.  The banderilleros had been the most disturbing to me, since it seems like they’re just tormenting the bull, but actually they stab the animal in a part of its back where there’s about 8 inches of fat.  This serves to weaken the bull (by bloodletting, I think, though sometimes I’m not 100% sure what my professor is saying), but it doesn’t cause it a lot of pain.  Furthermore, if they didn’t do this, it would be harder for the matador to kill the bull, making it suffer more.  Finally, bullfights are highly regulated so that the bull suffers as little as possible, and the corrida is overseen by a president who can intervene and command the matador to kill the animal quickly if it is suffering too much. 

I went in to this bullfight with very little knowledge, and I came to uninformed conclusions.  I’m still not sure whether I support the corridas, but if I’m going to get upset over animals rights, I should definitely start with factory farms, since they make bullfights seem humane by comparison.  Since these bulls suffer less and are treated better than the animals we eat every day without thinking, it seems like the most upsetting aspect of a bullfight isn’t the killing but rather the fact that this killing happens out in the open for entertainment.  I can see how this would be disturbing, but it’s not like the crowd has come to laugh at the animal—it’s given a lot of respect.  And it seems to me far better to kill an animal out in the open, where people have to actually think about what’s going on, than to slaughter it out of sight.  

Sorry, guys—I guess I ended up just processing la corrida, so this post wasn't very informative.  In other news, this weekend I also slept too little, lost my voice, prepared for exams, and visited the Alhambra.   

Abrazos!

Flamenco, Mezquita, y Fiesta

I haven’t updated this in awhile, in part because I’ve been busy and in part because, when I sit down to write, I feel like I can’t describe certain experiences in a way that would really communicate how cool they were.  This past weekend was full of those experiences, but here it goes anyway.  


Friday night a group of girls from my program and I went on a hunt for a flamenco bar.  We had heard there was a show at some place called El Sur de Granada (I think), but we didn’t have a very good grasp on where this was.  Which was okay, because getting lost in Granada is kind of like getting lost in Powells City of Books—you always stumble across something awesome.  Friday night, for instance, as we were wandering in the general direction of the flamenco bar, we heard music and followed the sound to an outdoor concert by an orchestra next to a massive cathedral.  I’ve come across outdoor concerts before, but in Newberg they’re hardly ever in the shadow of a 16^th century cathedral.  

We listened to the music for awhile, and then continued hunting for the flamenco bar.  We got semi-lost in a kind of sketchy area, but it was sketchy in a good way, with narrow streets and windy alleys that made their way uphill to the Albayzín.  The flamenco show ended up being in the basement of a little bar.  It was small and cramped, with less than 50 people easily filling the room.  There were one dancer and three musicians—a drummer, a guitar player, and a singer/clapper—and somehow I ended up enjoying this little show more than the impressive espectáculo that we saw at the Alhambra.  I think seeing the dancer up close really made it.  She was this beautiful, tiny little person, but when she was dancing she seemed to grow a foot.  I don’t know much about flamenco so I’m going to sound like an idiot if anyone who actually knows something reads this, but it involves a lot of pounding and clapping and stomping which is so much better up close.  The dancers’ feet make a rhythm with the clapper and the drummer, and it’s just really intense (like I said, I’ve given up trying to describe this effectively).  Since I’ve been here, I’ve been amazed many times by Spain: it’s everything I hoped it would be but told myself not to expect.  Anyway, sitting in the basement of this bar drinking vino tinto, listening to mournful flamenco songs, and feeling the floor shake was sort of the epitome of Spain surpassing my expectations.  

On Saturday we went to Córdoba, which was also pretty incredible.  During our free time, a couple friends and I explored the Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos, a fortress built in the 14^th century under Alfonso XI where the Reyes Católicos lived for awhile.  

Alcázar de los Reyes Cristianos

Alcázar and its gardens

In the afternoon, we got to tour the Mezquita Catedral de Córdoba.  The Mezquita is beautiful; it dates back to the 8^th century I think, though it wasn’t finished until much later, and it was originally a mosque.  It was turned into a Christian church after Córdoba was captured during the Reconquista, and in the 16^th century a cathedral was built right in the middle of the building.  Finally, after the Mezquita, we headed to a recreation of an Arabic bath house where we soaked in pools and everyone got a full body massage. 

Unfortunately, most of my pictures from the Mezquita didn't
turn out because it was darkish, but you should google image it!

I was pretty exhausted Saturday night and thought about going to bed early, but instead I ended up going out and getting back around 5:30 in the morning, like a true Spaniard.  

Salobreña

Yesterday a bunch of people from my program took a bus to Salobreña, one of Spain’s whitewashed coastal towns.  Sorry, Pacific, but the Mediterranean has you owned!  For swimming, at least.  It’s warm, the waves are gentle, and it’s super salty so it was really easy to swim and float.  It was by far the most pleasant water I’ve ever swum in. 

Salobreña

The town of Salobreña was beautiful.  Much of it is built on the side of a hill, and at the highest point there’s this Moorish castle built in the 10^th century!  Kimberly and I both really wanted to check it out, so wandered around for awhile trying to figure out how to take a bus up the hill.  Eventually, we ran into a British couple who told us that you have to walk since the streets at the top of the hill are too narrow for driving, so we set off in search of the castle on foot.  The way there was gorgeous!  The streets were incredibly narrow and labyrinthine, and the houses were all white and beautiful, with mosaic tile pathways, lots of flowers, and awesome views of the Mediterranean, the city, and the surrounding country.  It didn’t feel like we were walking through a city—maybe a painting or a movie set.  It was just so beautiful that it didn’t seem like real people could actually live there.

 

Pretty much all of the castle that we got to see.  Still, it was definitely worth the walk!

We eventually made it to the castle, but unfortunately it was closed for the afternoon siesta.  This was really disappointing, so we explored around for awhile in an attempt to at least see more of the ruins from the outside.  After climbing up on top of a roof and unfortunately running into the person who lived in the house down below, we decided to save the castle for another time. 

I'm going to put some more pictures on facebook, but they really don't do the scenery justice.  Anyway, I miss you all! 

MUERTE POR CASTELLANO

One of my most important goals for my time here is to improve my Spanish, so I’m really glad that I’m having plenty of opportunities to speak the language.  That said, communicating only in Spanish is exhausting!  It was mostly just fun at first, when I was meeting the other people from my program.  Now that we’re past basic introductions and are having actual conversations, it’s pretty tough!  Forming a sentence in the conditional perfect after a long day of classes sometimes seems almost impossible, especially since most of us are still suffering from jetlag.  I almost feel like I might have to get a bit worse before I get better.  Holding a conversation at a normal-ish pace while speaking only in grammatically sound sentences seems far beyond my reach at this point, so I’m starting to get really, really sloppy.  On the bright-ish side, I’ve talked to several people who are having similar experiences, so at least it’s not just me.  And, fortunately, I have 80 hours of Intensivo to look forward to in the next month, so that will help me improve my grammar.

Flamenco at the Alhambra!!

I just got back from a flamenco show in the Jardines del Generalife at the Alhambra!  That’s probably one of the cooler things I’m going to be able to say in my life, so I felt the need to get it out there.  The Generalife is a beautiful palace constructed in the 14th century as the summer home for the kings of Granada, and the gardens that surround it are incredible.  There are lots of pools and little secluded pathways, and it felt so crazy to be walking in the footsteps of ancient Arab kings.  Our visit was especially cool because we went there at night, which meant the gardens were lit up and we had an amazing view of the city of Granada.  Since it was pretty dark, I never got a good sense of the layout of the area, but I almost think it was better this way.  It was too dark to read the informational plaques if there were any, so we just got to wander around and enjoy the landscape.  We’re also going to tour the inside of the Alhambra in a few weeks, so then I’ll learn about its history.  

That was definitely the coolest thing I’ve done so far.  This morning I went to orientation, where I met some other students, got a tour of the Centro de Lenguas Modernas, and heard scary stories about why not to be out at night in the Albayzín, the historic Muslim quarter of Granada.  After that, Andrea and I had lunch with our host mom, and I got my first taste of a Spanish siesta.  Pretty much everything really does close down.  Stores here have unusual hours, like 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., and even the center of the city, where I live, is pretty quiet.  Although right now I’m too jetlagged to fully enjoy the siesta, I think I’ll grow to like it.  It allows people to make the most of the cooler nights (which they definitely do—when we walked home from los Jardines around 12:30 a.m., the streets were more crowded than I’ve ever seen them, and even little kids were out) and sleep through the sweltering afternoons.

I’m pretty stoked about improving my Spanish while I’m here.  Mark Bennet, the program coordinator, reiterated how important it is that we speak Spanish all the time, and it seems like most of the students are taking him pretty seriously.  We all talked pretty much exclusively in Spanish on the way to and from the Generalife, and even though it makes it hard to have deeper conversations, I think we’ll get there eventually.

Well, I wrote most of this last night and now I have a lot more to say, but it’ll have to wait for another time.  ¡Un abrazo!