A few last treasures...

I found more photos that I haven't shared!! So here's the Spanish tapas/combo plate feast my dad and I ate the last night we were in Madrid before our flight...

Patatas bravas (potatoes with "spicy" sauce), fried chorizo, french fries, fried egg, bread, and beer with lemon Fanta–so many of my favorite things!!

Here's the suitcase stack my champ of a dad took to the airport...

Blurry photo, but you get the idea. It's a lot of stuff.

And here's my new collection of thimbles from all the places I've been in Spain:

Madrid, Toledo, Salamanca (x2), Segovia, Córdoba, Granada (x2), Lisboa, Roma, and Barcelona (x2). Not pictured: the hotel bottle of shampoo I emptied out then filled with Sahara sand. Plus I'm missing a thimble from Bilbao.

And here is the view from my new apartment in Denver, which I am all moved into now!

I had my first day of classes today, and I'm so happy to actually understand the syllabus, and to be back in classes on subjects that I enjoy. Not that musicology wasn't the greatest adventure ever… but I like hospitality management much better!

Adios!

Differences

So I posted earlier about how walking on the street in Spain is different than walking on the street in America. Which led me to dig out another post I'd been working on since I got to Spain, which is a list of the differences I've noticed while I was there. Some of them are interesting, some of them aren't, but I feel like it merits posting because it describes some of the daily life that I forget to mention in my normal posts.

• You always wear socks & shoes in the house. Always. You want to go to the bathroom across the hall? You wear your flip-flops.
  
• There is graffiti everywhere and it doesn't seem to be a very big deal. It's on the garage doors over closed shops, abandoned buildings, walls of the city… everything. Some of it is artsy, a lot of it is scribbled words, kind of like the USA.
  
• As a foreigner, you get to walk that tricky line between taking large amounts of money out of the ATM to avoid too many fees and then being hated by cashiers for handing them 50 euro bills when your coffee & pastry comes to a grand total of 3.20.
  
• ALWAYS turn off the lights, because electricity is so expensive here. The government controls it, and they keep raising the tax on it. María likes to talk about this. A lot.
  
• People don't go over to one another's houses very often. Houses are for family and close friends. I wouldn't even ask María if a friend could come over to the house to study or watch a movie. Everybody does those things in town. I once had a conversation with my host brother about the kind of house parties that happen in the USA, and he can barely wrap his head around the idea.
  
• They don't use dryers. Which is probably really good for my clothes… it's just annoying when it rains for two weeks so when you pack for Morocco, half your clothes are wet and you have no idea how to pack.
  
• People don't sit at cafés by themselves. If I'm wandering around town on my own, I usually get coffee to go and find a library or some other location to sit at in lieu of taking up a whole table to myself.
  
• People are much better at conversations here. There's a lot fewer awkward pauses when everyone just decides to get on their phones because the topic ran out. That's something I'm going to miss. Plus they all talk over each other, so following a conversation is like trying to watch a crazy ping-pong match, I'm surprised I haven't gotten whiplash yet.
  
• Lunch is the main meal of the day. You know how in America (at least in my world) kids tend to eat lunch with their friends or out of the house, but for dinner you go home and eat with your family? In Spain, you go home and eat lunch with your family, it's the biggest meal of the day. Dinners are much, much lighter (María just eats fruit or something little), and if you're going to eat out with friends, it's usually at dinner.
  
• They have ham-flavored potato chips.
  
• They also have paprika-flavored Pringles.
  
• Pharmacies here are like going to the medicine aisle of Target. If you're sick, you go in, you tell them your problem, they give you something to fix it. Even if you just need something like Nyquil or Ibuprofen, you still go talk to the pharmacist.
  
• Dinner isn't until 8 PM at least, which means kids don't leave to go out with their friends until around 10, depending on the age. I meet my friends in the Plaza around 11 most nights.
  
• It hasn't snowed here. And some of the trees still have leaves. It's rained like nobody's business (although I've been told repeatedly this is not normal…), but I've seen no snow.
  
• Gyms are expensive. So I haven't been to one for months, given that when I asked about a pass for the month, I was told it would be 75 euro–50 for the gym + pool, and a 25 euro joining fee. It's nonsense. I tried to do push-ups and stuff like that, but there's so little space in the apartment. I really can't wait to go back to the gym at home, even if it will be overrun with people who just made the New Year's Resolution to work out more.
  
• The food… is just not same. Don't get me wrong, I love María's cooking. And they do breakfasts right, especially at the hotels we've been staying at on our excursions. I don't know exactly how to describe the difference, because the only words that come to mind are "bland" and "heavy", and those ones sound so negative to me. They just use a lot fewer seasonings, and a lot more olive oil. And especially coming from Colorado where people are stereotypically in love with salads and anything fresh-tasting, and believe fats and anything fried is food of Satan, food with this much oil just makes me feel heavy.
  
• If you go out to eat, there is rarely a host to great you. Depending on the caliber of the restaurant, you either just seat yourself or a waiter will snag you between waiting tables to tell you where to have a seat.
  
• People are much more direct. This is something I was personally prepared for from everything I'd learned about Spanish culture and from having a native Spanish professor, but my family was not. It came to light one night at dinner, when my English-speaking family was under the impression the waiter was annoyed with us, when to me he seemed just a little rushed because he had a lot of tables to get to.
  

Home Sweet Home

Home sweet home via Instagram http://instagr.am/p/UDOqjnoVbS/

#barcelona via Instagram http://instagr.am/p/UAw0HVIVSl/

Barcelona: Last Days

For New Year's Eve, we slept in a little bit, explored the lounge and had a lotof coffee and tea (I mean, who doesn't love free caffeine?), explored the hotel grounds, and discovered this would be a super fantastic place for a warm-weather vacation. I mean, the beach, the hammocks, the palm trees…? Beautiful stuff.

 

When we finally got our day in gear, we went down to Las Ramblas, which is basically a giant shopping-district street in Barcelona. We didn't do a whole lot of shopping, but it was definitely fun to see all the people, the art, the food, and the giant market halfway down the road. The market had everything from gorgeous chocolates to dead fishes. There were also skinned rabbits, turkeys, and chickens involved. Nothing like an open-air market with raw meat just hanging out on the counter, right?

We bought some grapes for the New Year, because the tradition in Spain is that you eat a grape at each stroke of midnight. At midnight we realized they were seeded grapes… which makes them considerably more difficult to eat in 12 seconds! We watched the midnight festivities on the TV (Puerta del Sol in Madrid instead of Times Square in New York), tried to eat grapes, and watched the party scene from our hotel window. If you can identify every song being played in the bars from the 8th floor, you might be near bars in Spain on New Year's Eve. There were also fireworks shows put on by a couple restaurants and hotels, which the 8th floor gave us a pretty sweet view of. Happy 2013!

On New Year's Day, we decided to go explore the Olympic Village from the '92 Summer Olympics. Unfortunately, even though most of it is just a pedestrian tour ground, the gates to the cool buildings were all closed because of the holiday. It was fun to see, but would've been cooler if we could get closer. But it was a nice way to explore the city and pass the time for New Year's Day.

 

Plus there was a cool playground…

 

And we got tapas for lunch at a place called TapaTapa, which I picked out just because I really like saying the name. Saying it super super fast. It's fun. Try it. You know you want to. 

After lunch, we went to the hotel and I finally went down to the gym–it's a pretty sweet deal for a hotel gym. And finally getting the chance to work out this week has been fantastic–even if I've been super sore when we have to climb the stairs of the Metro… Still worth it! 

I think we're about ready to head home–we got Chinese food for dinner at one of the first restaurants we ran across when we went to go forage for food. It's been a packed couple weeks! And I am very excited to be back stateside. I'm writing this from the train back to Madrid to catch my flight to Denver, and while I'm so sad that this experience is over… I'm really looking forward to things like seeing the Flatirons and having access to mac & cheese!