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.
  

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! 

Family Visit: Part 1

12.22-23: Madrid

Oh, my jet-lagged family. Nothing like trying to find a coffee shop in the middle of the overpacked center of Madrid because people are so tired they can barely stand. After visiting the Cathedral and deciding the Palacio Real was too expensive for tours, my brother literally fell asleep at the table when we stopped for coffee near the Plaza Mayor. Jet lag? Jet lag. At least he didn't snore that time.

On Saturday, Jake was still in Madrid as well, so he and Cordis could at least keep each other entertained with football talk (of which I understand nothing, since I've been away from the sports news for so long!) and the new game they made up just for Spain–scarf spotting. Jake absolutely refuses to get a scarf… Cordis wanted to buy one while we were waiting in the train station when we left Madrid.

Trying Mom's scarf on...

Sunday was museum day. Lucky for us, museums are free on Sundays! We visited the Museo del Prado and the Reina Sofia for free. Win. Win win win. So I showed my parents La Guernica by Picasso, Las Meninas by Velazquez, Goya's dark period, the family portrait of Carlos IV's family where they painted in a faceless woman for Carlos V's wife (he hadn't married yet), religious paintings by El Greco, and we looked at a lot more art than I'd seen on our big group tours. Quite the day of paintings, but I guess four months in Europe makes you a lot better at surviving the art museums!

Prado Museum... may have gotten in trouble for this photo. Oops.

12.24-27 Salamanca

On the morning of Christmas Eve, we embarked on the train to Salamanca! Our hotel was right next to the Catedral Vieja, and the room Cordis and I were in had the best view of it. It made me so happy.

Merry Christmas!

On Christmas Eve, basically everything was closed, as could be expected in a largely-catholic country that takes a daily nap time break. It was like a ghost town. We managed to find a place that sold empanadas for lunch, and ate them in the Plaza Mayor.

I took Cordis scarf-shopping (since we didn't find one in the train station…) and we found a reasonably-priced one at H&M on Calle Toro. I'd like to just put this into the universe–I got my brother to go shopping at a store he'd normally avoid like the plague, a place that sells skinny colorful jeans for dudes. I feel that should be stated for the record. We did find a pretty spiffy scarf though, he looks very European (and enjoys saying so at every opportunity).

European Munchkin

Dinner was at a cafeteria I've walked past every day, so I finally got to see what the food was like! The Cafeteria Casino is delicious, just so you all know. We all got food we were quite pleased with, and since we eat really early by Spanish standards (we tend to be the first people in the restaurant after it opens…), we were able to get out of their hair before it was obnoxiously late for the employees to go home to their own Christmas festivities.

Christmas involved a lot of sitting around, walking around aimlessly, and sitting around some more. We bought snacks at the supermarket before, so we had a feast of pistachios, chocolate, and "gourmet" potato chips. And Fanta Limón, the drink I will miss so much when I go home! But more places were open for dinner at night (for the Spanish, Christmas Eve is very family-oriented, while on Christmas Day it seemed to be more acceptable to go out), so we found a place from Mom's guidebooks on Rúa Mayor, where we had fantastic food! I got some kind of mystery cut of pork, I still don't know what the menu item translates to, but it was delicious.

The next day we finally got to have our tourist day, soooo we did everything! We went to my favorite coffeeshop, the famous Mandala, for breakfast, where I discovered that my favorite coffee comes in a large size instead of the little baby one I usually order. Too bad I won't get to take advantage of that… but who needs that much caffeine anyway?

We explored the Cathedral and I showed my parents the human arm that's in one of the chapels along the sides. Main attraction. Still don't know why it's there.

After that, we went to the automotive museum, and I'm so sad Jake was too sick (and I was too busy) to make it to this, because he would've loved it. 100 cars, 60 motorcycles, and a whole lot of old stuff. The greatest delight for anyone who loves both history and cars. Like my dad!

Next, the Cathedral towers. Unfortunately, it was super foggy, meaning my family didn't get to see the amazing view from the top that I was hoping for. Plus they're restoring the bell tower, so there's scaffolding up all over the place. At least it's pretty enough that all this didn't totally ruin the experience! I love the top of these towers.

And then, they got to meet María! This was a little more difficult than when Jake met her, because my family speaks about 20 words of Spanish all together. But body language and gestures will get you halfway there! And I got to eat María's tortilla one last time (she makes the best tortilla!).

Both my mamas!!

And last but not least, we went to the building of the old Universidad. Sofia from ISA was a much better tour guide than I, but I remembered a fair amount of her stories from the tour I took before! Plus, my dad loves reading museum descriptions, even I learned some things.

A Roma, Con Amor

Things that happen when I travel:

• My inability to sleep in a moving vehicle makes me really tired
• Being really tired makes me get lost much easier
• It rains

So after basically pulling an all-nighter in the chilly Madrid airport, then getting on my flight, then getting on a bus to the city center, I arrived in Rome. I eventually managed to find the meeting point my cousin Maggie had told me about, Castel Santangelo.

At this point, the weather was switching between pouring rain, and raining sideways. Thank you Rome. So Maggie called and gave me the combo to her school, so I could at least sit inside. At this point I happened to meet Spencer, Maggie's friend who was going to meet both Maggie and I (after Maggie had found me, theoretically) for pizza. But for some reason, Maggie had managed to get lost in Rome, so I just went to get pizza with Spencer, and Maggie met us there!

Also, this pizza was about the greatest thing I'd ever eaten. Partially because the Spanish do pizza wrong–it's like a loaf of bread with some sauce and some cheese and it just tastes strange. The Italians do pizza right. And I was starving. And it had spicy sausage, and good cheese aaaaand it was just the best.

Anyway, Maggie had class, so I went to find the hostel–and got lost in the pouring rain again. Oops. But I got some decent photos of the "wedding cake" as it's called–the giant monstrosity of the Piazza Venezia which is apparently not built on solid ground and has structural problems all the time. Apparently all the Italians hate it.

After a lot of series of unfortunate events, I finally found the hostel, and took a nap until Maggie was done with class. And then we went sightseeing! Unfortunately, it gets dark super early in Rome–something to do with which edge of the time zone they're on–so all my photos are nighttime ones. They're still pretty though!

So we made it to the Coliseum, walked past the Wedding Cake again, and ended up by Maggie's favorite church.

In Spain, churches are pretty, but they have nothing on Italian churches. There is so much color in there. Spanish churches, from what I've seen, have mostly sculpture, and it's usually in either gold or whatever stone the church is made of. This church was just covered with giant paintings, made by a much more skilled artist than I've ever seen in Salamanca, that's for sure.

We also decided to get gelato–which was absolutely delicious, especially when covered with a shell of chocolate. Can't go wrong there!

Right by Maggie's favorite gelato place is the Piazza Navona, which has a fountain from one of my favorite books, Angels & Demons. It was designed by Bernini, as is every landmark in the book, and is called Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi (Fountain of the Four Rivers). Basically, it's the fountain where the main character is almost drowned at the end of the book.

Next, we made it to the Pantheon–the architectural wonder which they apparently couldn't reproduce for hundreds of years because the art of making a dome with a perfectly circular opening was lost for a while. Those genius Romans…

And obviously, we had to make it to the Trevi Fountain–I threw in a penny for me, a euro María had given me, and a nickel María had found for Megan. I feel like that's asking a lot from the fountain though–we'll see how it works out!

We went to dinner that night at a little hole in the wall restaurant with a student menu. We got bruschetta, and then pasta with red sauce–so good! And strudel for dessert. I think it's a good thing I didn't end up going to Italy for study abroad–I would just eat all day long if I was around this all the time!

The next day, we started by exploring and ran across St. John's Cathedral.

Marked with an obelisk (apparently they had a bunch of these just laying around) so you can find the church easier!

We ate some pizza for a very early lunch (it was about 11 AM but we hadn't eaten breakfast, so why not eat pizza?), then set off for the other side of town–which included the Coliseum by day, a very pretty park, and then running into the shopping district. And a Mercedes christmas tree.

At this point, we went on what I am now going to call the Great Belt Hunt of Rome, because it took us roughly a thousand years to find me a replacement belt (I'd left my usual one in Spain, and my pants wouldn't stay up) at a decent price! Luckily, we had success, and could finally go get some dinner. Spencer & Maggie took me to anaperativo, the Italian version of tapas. This one was buffet-style, so they just keep bringing out new plates when one of them is empty, and you can just keep going back for more, even when you only buy one drink. They served a lot of pasta (shocker), except it was cold, which was kind of strange. But it all made for a pretty decent meal!

Saturday was our Vatican day. It began with more rain. And it was not raining when we left the hotel, so I didn't bring my umbrella. Poor life choice.

In any case, we finally made it to the Vatican, soaking wet, but at least there wasn't a line!

We looked at a lot of art (Maggie and I told a lot of jokes about how our parents aren't huge fans of art museums…), but it was really really good art. We saw a sculpture made by the same guy who did the Chicago bean–obviously a photo-worthy occasion.

Rafael's last work

My favorite part was the rooms Rafael painted, because there's a lot of stories behind all the paintings. And luckily, I had free tour guides who knew all these stories! Unfortunately, the photo I took of my favorite painting, School of Athens, turned out like this:

Which is pretty unfortunate. But at least it'll remind me that it was my favorite? 

Also, I broke the Sistine Chapel photo rule… But how could you not when it looks like this?

Sadly, St. Peter's was closed for the night, so we weren't able to tour all of the Vatican. Instead, we went to the grocery store for ingredients, and made spaghetti carbonara for dinner! Which I have no photos of. But it was delicious, I promise! I tried to be helpful, but I pretty much was just in charge of cracking eggs. In any case, we had a really great dinner for about 10 euro all together. Win.

Saturday night was also a night when the museums around Rome were open for free, and included free concerts. Maggie's program was taking them around to the museums, so I tagged along and got to meet all the other cool IES kids. Who were so impressed that Maggie showed me around Rome without getting lost, I'm thinking the fact that Maggie was lost when I showed up in Rome really wasn't that odd of an event. (She was still an awesome free tour guide though!!)

I got yelled at for leaning against an ancient monument while listening to the first concert… in my defense it was made of stone! We also went into Castel Santangelo and got to see the view of Rome from above, and I miraculously got a pretty great photo of St. Peter's from the top. Even in the rain!

Sunday, Maggie and I finally made it to St. Peter's. It is a very large place. It's hard to tell, because the scale is justso massive, but walking from the front door to the altar takes a lot longer than your average cathedral. Like, twice as long in some cases.

And the altar is six stories tall. SIX.

Unfortunately, I couldn't get very close to the actual Bernini altar at the front of the church, because they had it roped off for mass, but it looked super amazing.

We also managed to hit all vertical levels of the church, after accidentally stumbling across the crypt (there was an open door, of course we went to see what was in there!), and then deciding to climb the 551 stairs to the top of the cupola.

So after St. Peter's taught me how out of shape I am, we went back to Maggie's home stay to pick up my stuff, and went to look at even more churches. Mostly, we wanted to go see another Bernini sculpture from Angels & Demons, The Ecstasy of St. Teresa in Santa Maria Vittoria.

After we found the church and ooh'd and ahh'd, I finally headed back to the bus station. Minor loss of the day: standing in that bus line for an epic amount of time because they only had one person working the desk. Minor win: finding stick deodorant in the supermarket when I went to get a sandwich after buying my ticket. I still haven't stick deodorant in Spain, so I'm a little overexcited about this. I still maintain the stuff they sell in Spain doesn't work.

Anyway, one flight, a few new friends, a hotel in the middle of nowhere, a train, two metro rides, and a bus ride later, I am finally back in Salamanca, where it isfreezing but at least it's not raining!

So happy I made it to Roma though, it's totally worth being able to see a Shelton and catch up about our crazy family!! (We love you all!) Plus, the food was just beyond fantastic...