Goodbye Spain!

Well, in about 20 min I will be leaving for the airport to catch a plane to Venice. Spain has been fun, has been crazy, has been frustrating, but definitely enjoyable, and I feel ready to leave. I´m not sure if I will be able to post in Italy, but, after I get home I will probably post more stories and pictures that I didn´t get a chance to talk about earlier. Thank you all for reading and sharing with me. See you soon!
Gianna

Wow, it has been a little longer than I´ve wanted since I´ve written last. Let´s see if I can fit everything in to one post.
Last Thursday we went to a Corpus Cristi celebration in Cumuñas. I don´t completely understand Corpus Cristi and this didn´t help at all. I guess it is a really old tradition here dating back hundreds of years, so I guess that it is why it is so weird. So we arrive there, it is at least 85 degrees outside, and there is this huge group of men dancing around in the town square. They are in capes and costumes covered in ribbons and have red masks sitting on top of their heads. They all have tambourines and there is a guy beating out a rhythm on a drum and they were just dancing around in that circle forever. I thought they were going to get heat stroke with all of that heavy clothing. I was getting kind of bored with the circle dance but then they started the procession. The streets were covered in rosemary and in the heat everything smelled wonderful. The ground was either painted with symbols of the celebration--like masks or symbols of the sacrament--or carpets had been laid out to mark the path of the procession. Flowers in baskets were strung up in the air between the houses so they crossed over the procession path.
So we lined up to see what everything was all about and let me tell you I was not prepared. Everything started out okay. They had pulled their masks over their faces, they were all red with huge long noses and some of them had horns or black painted facial hair. They had a special little dance they did as they walked down the street and they were all still playing drums or tambourines. We could see their capes better at this point and all of them were painted with religious scenes like Christ on the cross or doves. Some of them were pretty elaborate. So all of the masked dancers pass us and behind them are four girls probably in their 20´s. They are all wearing the same nice dress and this traditional Spanish headpiece that is covered in lace and drapes down like a shawl. The main girl is carrying a 6 or 7 foot crucifix that has a wreath and a statue of Christ on it. In complete Spanish fashion, one of the cross bearer girls had a lip ring and I thought that Jesus probably didn´t appreciate that. Behind them were a bunch of little girls in white dresses throwing flower petals and behind them was a priest. He was carrying some sort of sceptre and there were four people walking with him holding up the posts of this device that I think was supposed to shade him. About the time the flower girls start walking by a lot of townspeople had drifted into the procession. The mothers of the flower girls fixing their hair and giving them water, and old people and nuns walking with the priest.
So we are still trying to figure out what was so exciting about this that we drove two hours to see it, and then we start hearing people screaming. We walk up towards the cross bearing girls and the masked men are running at them yelling at the top of their lungs. Right before they reach the cross they rip off their mask with a flourish, bow to the cross and run away. They run one at a time one after the other. They make this kind of high pitched Xena the Warrior princess battle cry as they run, about ten feet before the cross they do a little leap, and then they keep running and end in a bow. They just kept doing this over and over again for a couple of hours. I guess the dancer men represent sinners and the different colors on their costume represent the kind of sins they have committed and the longer the noses are, the more sins they have under their belt. When they reach the Christ statue they are purified and they remove their mask which is representative of their sins. Very beautiful symbolism, but just a weird way to present it.
During the procession they of course have to have breaks, so around the city they have place various shrines with statues and flowers. When the priest at the back of the procession reached a shrine this old man with a musket would fire it and everything would go quiet. The music would stop and all of the dancers would take a knee and remove their mask. The priest would say some sort of blessing and then everyone would recite an Our Father, and the dancers and women in the procession took this time to drink water handed to them by family members standing on the sides of the procession. After the Our Father the gun would go off again and everything would start all over again. It was a bizarre yet interesting experience. After we watched the dancers for a while we got tired of pushing to get a view and we started lagging towards the back of the procession with the priest and the elderly. This was actually my favorite part. While all the craziness was happening at the front of the line, these people were all walking slowly together. They were dressed in their Sunday best singing peaceful hymns as they walked. It was really touching to see these people who still held on to their faith and probably still went to Mass every Sunday rather than slipping into worldliness that is pretty prevalent in Spain. I was really beautiful.
Also on this trip we went to the windmills that Cervantes wrote about in "Don Quijote." They were really picturesque and I´ll post some photos of them if I get time.
We went on another trip on Saturday and, among other things, we went to the Vally of the Fallen. A little background information, I´m a little fuzzy on the dates, but from about WWII to around 1976 Spain was under a dictator named Francisco Franco. He was pretty awful. He involved them in lots of civil and foreign wars and a lot of people died. The Valley of the Fallen is a monument built by Franco. It is completely in the middle of nowhere on the top of a mountain in the middle of a huge forest in the Spanish countryside. It creates a beautiful sight because there is this vast carpet of green trees and then on top of the highest peak there is this giant cross hundreds of feet high. The base of the cross has these colossal figures of mythological characters and animals. One of their toes was probably longer than my whole arm to give you an idea. The thing is massive, I really can´t describe it properly. So this monument was built to commemorate all of Franco´s soldiers that died in battle. But the whole thing is bittersweet because it was built by the slave labor of prisoners of war and many of them died in construction. I guess if one of them died, or maybe they didn´t even have to be dead yet, they would get dumped into crevases of the monument and the other workers would have to build over them. A lot of Spaniards don´t like to go up there because of everything that happened. I guess Franco´s grave is there as well but I didn´t realize it until we had already left. My friend Julie said it was in this huge, cold, dark marble tomb and his coffin is at the end of a long hallway. She also said she spat on his grave, but I´m sure a lot of people have or wanted to have done that.
Hmmm, what else have I been doing. There are three fantastic art museums in Madrid and we have been visiting them a lot lately. On Sundays admission to the Prado is free so we took a train up there after church. We saw a lot of amazing paintings by Carevaggio, Rembrandt, Raphael, Titian, Tintoretto, Velazquez, el Greco, Ribera, Murrillo, just to name a few. We ended up looking at all the Goya paintings because they have an entire floor dedicated to him. I don´t know if any of you know anything about art, but Goya´s paintings are absolutely crazy. But also intensely interesting and I was really excited to see them. The most confusing are his Black Paintings that he did shortly before his death. They are all creepy with really dark themes and the weirdest part is, they were all murals that he painted on the walls of his house. I would have hated to be his maid and to walk through that demented place every day. Just to give you an idea, one of the most famous black painting is called "Saturn Devouring His Son." There is a classical myth in which Saturn receives a prophecy that one of his children will kill him, so he ate every one of them as soon as they were born. Goya´s painting, of course, depicts this ancient man with wild hair and bulging, crazy eyes holding a partially devoured body. Goya painted this in his dining room. I would personally never have an apetite while looking at that, but maybe he just got used to it. If you want to see a few of them here is a website: http://www.theartwolf.com/goya_black_paintings.htm. I´m not sure if they have bigger versions but if one interests you I´m sure it´ll be online somewhere.
On a lighter note, a Van Gogh exhibit opened in the Thyssen the other day and we got to see it! We were actually planning on going just to see the permanent collection but while we were on the train to Madrid a newspaper on the seat next to me had an article about it. Right place at the right time, I was so happy. The exhibit is called the Last Landscapes because he painted them all in the two months before he killed himself. They were all so interesting and beautiful, but Spain, being the frustrating place that it is, attempted to ruin it for me. Everything has to be as inconvenient as possible or the country just won´t run right. We got there and first, they wouldn´t let us buy a ticket to the whole museum, just to specific exhibits, which meant we could only look at the Van Goghs. So we pay our 3.50 Euros and are all pumped to go when the ticket lady tells us our tickets are for 1:oo. We have to meet our friends at 2:00 and it is only 12:20 so we had 40 min where we weren´t even allowed to go look at the rest of the museum. They only let you buy tickets for specific hours so the exhibit is really crowded and you have to maneuver around people and sneak into their spots when they go to look at other paintings. But no matter, it was amazing to see them and there were even some paintings by Cezanne on dispaly so I was excited to see those. I´ve decided that I´m going to sacrifice another 4.50 Euros because I´ve heard the rest of the museum is great. Hopefully the museum of modern art has a free day and I´ll visit it then.
Hmmm, so random in random events, my lit teacher continues to change our syllabus, but he has gotten kind of lazy so he keeps canceling assignments. The previous two days he only played a movie so I skipped class both days to go to Madrid. So many people ditched yesterday that he just canceled class. Today we turned in another big paper and I just couldn´t stomach writing another one for Monday. My friend Julie--the grave spitter--is really bold, can easily get her way, and speaks way better Spanish than I do, so I decided to collaborate with her to lighten our work load. She played a large role in the cancelation of our final test so I had confidence in her skills. I asked her to suggest that the last paper be canceled, and it just happened to be one of the student´s birthdays, so she asked if, as a birthday present to him, if we didn´t have to do the final paper. At first I thought he wouldn´t give because he started asking us why we didn´t come to class the day before. He acted like he had prepared some grand lesson--which, by the way, he has never done in the history of our class because all we ever do is read photocopies of his lesson book and listen to him go off on random tangents about unimportant information that we immediately forget--but really we knew that the only thing we would have done is sit in the dark and fall asleep. So we can tell he is annoyed that we ditched out on him, but Julie starts up again breaking down his defenses. Finally, after whining that we have to prepare a final project and study for a test, we get him to agree to just a quiz so we can prove we read the book. He said that we must all be studying economy or something that involved being able to weasel out of work. I don´t feel bad, though, because it was just busywork and I´m not sure if he even did more than skim it. Our teacher also dropped a Spanish F bomb today when he couldn´t remember someone´s name. He has sworn like this multiple times and I wonder if he just doesn´t notice or just thinks we don´t know what he is saying. But I don´t know how that could be true because Spanish people use that word about 3 times per sentence so there is no way we wouldn´t have heard it before. Mexican and Spanish curses are different, so most of us came not knowing any of the Spanish ones. When my neighbor found out what it was, she said she had been wondering for weeks what the word meant because her host brother used it every other word but she couldn´t understand what he was saying. After I figured it out I noticed that word used frequently in dinnertime conversation or every once in a while we could hear the teenagers in the house yelling it when we were up in our room. I wonder why it is so common.
Well, I´m glad I got to write to you all, but I´m running out of creative juices so I´m going to end this post. We´re going on our last trip tomorrow so I´ll be sure to tell you all about it. See you all soon!
Gianna

Odds and Ends

I just finished a gigantic paper and gigantic test so now I get write!!!!! Hooray!!!!! I´m getting a little homesick here, but I´m ok. One of the problems is school, but we just got over a big hump and that stress is over, and the other problem is our family. My host dad is still in the hospital and it is pretty obvious that they don´t want us around anymore. They have to feed us and put up with us being in their house and they are sick of it. We just feel awkward. Well I guess there is a third problem and that is Europe in general. It can be a pretty frustrating place at times, and it can make one a little grumpy. Just the cultural differences and the way things run here makes you miss America. And the food, the food could definitely improve. That is part of the reason why we know they are tired of us, their like for us is directly proportional to the amount of time they spend on our meals, and they have been getting pretty bad. But not to worry, Ricardo comes home next week and school is getting easier, so our family won´t be stressed and neither will I.
Our teachers can´t really make up their minds about how difficult they want our classes to be. My lit class has a different syllabus every other day, usually for the worst, but today the happy change was the cancelation of our final test. Now our final will be to bring in poems and read them to the class. Today we went to the changing of the guard and it was interesting for about 5 min. They had all of these guards riding around on horses and in carriages that were towing cannons. They would interweve around and around each other in circles and it was a little repetative. My favorite was the head guy who did circles by himself in front of us and then would force his horse to walk sideways. His horse was pretty ticked about it. So after all of the horses went away it was just people so we went to our favorite cafe for lunch and then went shopping. Then we had to go to dreaded class and to cheer ourselves up we went shopping again after that. We took the train to a city we had never been to because we´d heard some good things, but we had no idea where to go. We were trying to figure it out when this random African guy walked up to us and started speaking to us in really good English. The border is really close so there are tons of African immigrants here. I was kind of wary of him because men are constantly whistling or kissing at us and basically just being intolerable so I was afraid he would give us the typical ¨Blonde I love you¨ ¨Hey girl¨ or ¨Americana!¨ cat call in broken English that the Spaniards are so fond of, but he was really nice. He asked us if we were looking for the mall and gave us directions, asked us where we were from, and then told us to enjoy his home town as if he was the mayor or something. He was really a breath of fresh air compared to a lot of Spaniards. They are such a cold people! Or they are just plain crude/rude. The other day Kristen and I were hurrying down a street and this creepy guy old enough to be our father asked us to have coffee with him. We always get senile old men approaching us and asking us weird questions. We have no tolerance left for these people. The coldness is usally pretty evident when we go shopping because the salesgirls can be absolute terrors. They think we are all incompetant drooling morons because we can´t speak perfect Spanish and they treat us accordingly. My friend asked one where to find a specific blouse and the girl purposely misled her, and maybe it doesn´t sound that bad, but these stores we shop at usually have 3 to 5 levels so you can get sent on some wild goose chases. I had a bad experience with one girl today. I was trying on clothes and granted I was taking my time, but I wasn´t occupying a dressing room for no reason. I left my dressing room to show my friend my pants and the salesgirl tried to let someone into my room. I told her I was still using it and she answers very snottily that I can´t just hang around, I have to let other people through. Well, yes, I´m not from Mars, I understand how dressing rooms work, but if you insist I´ll just wear this unbought clothing right out of the store. But some people, like that nice man today, really redeem the country. Like in Salamanca we went into a cd store looking for a specific type of music and the saleswoman spent ten minutes with us showing us different cds and playing different selections for us. Another time I was in a different store looking for a cd, and a different saleslady looked through every row of discount cds to help me find the one I wanted. You really learn to appreciate that kind of thing here. Today a man heard us speaking English and he walked up to us and said, ¨God bless America!¨ and then excitedly asked us what part of the states we were from so he could see if he´d been there. My absolute favorite episode occurred when my friend Robynn got bombarded by a pigeon. We were walking into a cathedral and we passed a beggar in a wheelchair. There are tons of beggars here so you kind of have to learn to just walk by them, even though you feel terrible about it. So we reach the door and Robynn gets splattered with crap and we are all digging for tissues to try and get her cleaned up. In the midst of all of this, the man in the wheelchair quietly approaches, offers her a tissue and directs her to the nearest bathroom. He was so kind to us after we had passed by him without even a glance, it was a very touching experience.
I can´t think of anything else good that we´ve done lately, so I´ll just share some random obervations about Spain. Speedbumps: Spanish streets have speedbumps about every 50 feet, so good luck trying to get anywhere in a hurry. Some of them also have dividers all the way up the middle, so if you want to make a left turn, you have to go to the end of the street, enter a roundabout and then drive back to where you want to go on the other side of the street. Some of the crosswalk signs here have a little man who actually looks like he is walking. His legs move when you are allowed to cross, and when it gets towards the end of the time, he runs really fast. Typical Spaniard: typical Spaniards are shorter than I am dark-complected and have very large noses. They also all speak in the same nasally voice. We will always here our host dad talking behind us and then turn around just to find some random man. They really all sound exactly the same. They also all say the world ¨Vale¨ about 100 times per sentance. Chocolate: Spaniards are obsessed with chocolate. Everything has chocolate in it. My favorite is the granola cereal we eat every morning that contains milk and dark chocolate flakes. Cereal boxes: all of the cereal boxes here are obsessed with telling you how healthy they are and all the reasons why you should eat them. But, in my experience, Spaniards don´t really seem to care that much about their health because the only things they seem to like doing are smoking, drinking, and driving recklessly. Cigarette cartons: all of the cigarette boxes here are printed with giant warnings that you can read from about 10 feet away. Common ones are ¨Smoking can kill,¨ ¨Smoking causes impotence and lowers sperm count,¨ and my favorite, the one I wish everyone would consider, is ¨Smoking greatly endangers your health and the health of those around you.¨ There is a sucker company I have seen that makes fun of this. The box is shaped kind of like a cigarette box and has ¨Sucking can´t kill¨ printed on it just like the cigarette warnings. It cracks me up. Ice cream: They have ice cream/candy/pop stands here about every twenty feet. Just stick your hands out in both directions and you are sure to hit one. Siesta: Spaniards have a siesta from 2 to 5 every day. Stores are usally closed at this time. This is very frustrating because most stores open at 10 to 12 in the morning and close at 7 so it is basically impossible to buy anything. Things are open longer hours in Madrid, but here in Alcala I have no idea how stores stay in business. One day, I was craving a bacon egg an cheese buscuit so I wandered into McDonalds at 10:30 in the morning. The man told me to leave and said that they didn´t open until 12. I was really sad to be thwarted by one of the most American institutions every. You should be able to rely on McDonalds! Even if it is mediocrity it is familiar mediocrity! Milk: milk here comes in boxes and doesn´t need to be refrigerated. It really sucks having warm milk on your cereal every day. Couples: Spanish couples are rediculously overly-demonstrative. They will make out and grope in public without the slightest bit of shame. Once I saw a girl on the bus trying to give her boyfriend a hicky. Every morning we ride the bus to school with a couple of 16 year old that are almost constantly making out. I´m guessing they have a pretty high teenage pregnancy rate here. Nuns: they have nuns everywhere here. Once, I asked one for directions and she grabbed ahold of my arm. She told me I was pretty like the virgen and kept kissing me on the cheeks. I was really happy when another nun drove by to pick her up because I´m pretty sure she was trying to kidnap me and force me into the convent. Ants: we have an ant infestation in our kitchen. Someone in the house likes to kill them, but then doesn´t clean them up. Yesterday I walked down to breakfast and the table was littered with mooshed ant corpses. But on the bright side, our family has finally started covering our food when they leave it on the counter! Every cloud has a silver lining.
Well, I´m exhausted so I am going to bed. See you all very soon!
Gianna

Hello all!
This is just a quick note of apology and explanation. Some of you have sent me e-mails and I haven´t been very prompt about answering them. I am getting to them, but the blog is very time intensive and I have just passed a very stressful workload in my classes here, so time has been scarce. I haven´t forgotten you! Don´t worry! So, thank you very much for writing and you can all expect responses very soon.
Love you all and see you soon!
Gianna

Once again, it´s picture time!

Hey everyone! Things have been kind of quiet around here since our trip got canceled last week. But we went traveling again and saw a lot more interesting sights. We started out by going to Segovia. We saw some beautiful old churches, Ferdinand and Isabella´s palace, and a Roman aqueduct, and I got pooped on by a pigeon! It was really exciting! Actually I got pretty lucky because the pigeon pooped on the girl next to me and only a little of it splattered on me. I felt pretty bad for her because there was so much that she had to buy a new shirt. There are a ridiculous amount of birds in Europe and you´d be surprised how often an occurrence this really is. Other interesting events in Segovia was getting yelled at by the locals. We really attract a lot of attention, especially in smaller towns. As we were walking to the palace a boy was yelling all the English swear words he knew at me to get my attention, and another boy yelled at my friend to take off her clothes. I really don´t understand these tactics. What do they intend to accomplish? I really have no idea.
Next we made our way to Salamanca. We went to the nunnery and sang hymns in the nuns´chorus to hear the acoustics. The nuns there are cloistered so they don´t see people and they barely even talk to each other. I´m still trying to figure out how they earn a living in there. Maybe admissions to see the church. Some cloistered nuns sell cookies or nuts through this intercom system so they don´t actually see you, but I still don´t see how that could support them all. Anyway, after that we went to a church that was actually two churches built almost on top of each other, but just in different styles. Then we went to the famous University of Salamanca and read some poetry, and then we got free time to explore the city. That night we went down to an old roman bridge that was discussed in one of the 16th novels we read for class and reread the portion that occurred on the bridge. Pretty fun!
Today we got up and wandered around for awhile before we head back for Alcala. We stopped in Avila (that is where I am in the picture) to see the last fully walled city in Spain. If you look closely you can see that I bought a University of Salamanca sweatshirt out of desperation because it was freezing there. When we got here the weather was unbearably hot, but then it went through this rainy/cold phase and the only thing I brought with me was a very thin zip up. But now that I actually have something warm it will become stiflingly hot again. Okay, I´m boring so I´ll move on to the pictures. Oh, and I was experimenting with different picture layouts, and it didn´t exactly turn out that great, so sorry for the awkward organization.

This picture is actually taken in the same place where we took the Avila picture. I´m not sure
exactly what this is, but it was really beautiful so I thought I´d share.

This is in the Palace of Ferdinand and Isabella. It was full of suits of armor and they even had models of horses and riders decked out in their battle gear. I´ve just realized that the feet of the armor in this picture don´t show, but their shoes are metal but the toes are really long and pointy. Referring to the pointy-toed shoes that are in style right now, our director said, ¨You can see that their footwear is actually quite modern.¨ It was pretty funny.

In case you were wondering, I haven´t recently become a giant, 7-foot-tall Amazon. Spanish people are actually pretty short, but that doesn´t even compare to how short they used to be. All the inner doors in this nunnery were no more that 6 feet high.

Many old buildings here are covered with a ridiculous amount beautifully detailed carvings. The weather can be pretty extreme and sometimes they´ll use materials as weak as plaster, so a lot of modern restoration goes on so as to not lose completely the building´s facade. When the restorations occur, the artesans sometimes include modern details to record the time period in which the work was restored. Our director asked us if we saw anything in the facade that wasn´t supposed to be there, but the carvings, like the one on the left, are only a little bigger than a hand, so we didn´t see anything strange

at first. Then, I noticed this little beast for his sheer creepiness. As I looked closer to examine him, I

realized he just happened to be eating an ice cream cone, two scoops.

I then looked up a little ways and was even more surprised to find this guy. They defininitely didn´t have space suits back then. They like to include all sorts of weird stull like this in the decorations. A different facade was decorated with a lot of skull carvings and one of then had a frog on its head. In Salamanca, a frog is a sign of luck, so if you see the frog skull, you´ll have luck all year. All of the tourists shops have little skull and frog figurines in case you want to bring some luck home with you.

And speaking of luck, in the church we went to there, they have a very interesting custom for bringing luck. There is an ancient tradition that seniors at the University of Salamanca would perform to prepare for their final exams. They simply go to the cript of a specific bishop--all cripts have lifesize carvings of the deceased lying asleep over their coffin--and touch the carving of the bishop´s feet. You can touch with your hands or your feet, the luck comes either way. They would even do these quiz sessions where the student would sit touching the feet, and all of their professors would stand around asking questions while knowledge flowed into them from the dead bishop´s casket. Then, if they passed their exams, they got to write their name on the outside wall in bull´s blood. You can still see a lot of names written on the university walls. It´s really weird, I know.

This is a walk-up window at a McDonald´s in Madrid.

There is a certain street in Madrid where they have what is called a book fair. They whole thing is lined with kiosks buying and selling books. Some of them are really old and kind of odd. But we did find something familiar. If you look at the dark blue book in the center you will see that it is a Spanish Book of Mormon. We were just passing random tables and we saw it laying out there with all of the other books. We looked inside and it was obvious that someone had been using it for missionary work. There was a picture of the family who had given it, along with their names and their testimony. They also had written prayer instructions, all in spanish. I have no idea how long this place has had it because the book was the pre-footnote edition and all of the family members had some majorly horrendous big hair and their clothes looked like they were from at least 1975. I´m really tempted to go back and buy it.

This was our dinner one night. It still had eyes, legs, antennae, and a tail. Thankfully, our host mom knows I don´t like seafood and only made me eat one. This is how it happened: she first shows us how to remove the head, tail, legs, and shell and puts them on our plates. I tried to avoid looking it in the eyes while I ate my dinner, but it was impossible to completely avoid looking at it because its atennae were so long that they stretched across my entire plate. My roommate like seafood so she started to eat one. As she pulled off the head, she squeezed too hard and its brown liquid brain oozed out everywhere. I was horrified. I waited until it was the only thing left to eat on my plate before I began the process. I used a napkin to pull off the head to control any brain leakage, and I just got really grossed out by touching it. Then I pulled off the tail and discovered another brown liquid that looked suspiciously like excrement, so I squeezed that out and wiped in on my napkin. There is only about two small bites once you take everything off that is inedible, so I just popped in the whole thing because I knew once I´d finished the first bite, I probably wouldn´t be able to take another. I chewed it on the side of my mouth so I could taste as little as possible and then tried to swallow the whole thing at once, which made me gag, but I eventually got it down. My host mom asked how I liked it, but saw my uncomfortable smile and knew I hadn´t. I said, ¨It had eyes.¨ ¨Well, so do cows.¨ ¨But they aren´t on my plate.¨ She laughed again and that was the end of dinner, and hopefully, of seafood.

This is one of the Barbies from the exhibit I went to. It is supposed to be Queen Elizabeth.

Apparently, after the U.S., Spain is the second highest country for immigration, which means they also have an extremely large amount of illegal immigrants. The African border is really close, so people come from there, but also South America and all over Europe. It seems to me that U.S. politicians try to be pretty tactful when they talk about it and not take a stance that will greatly offend people. They don´t really believe in that here. This is one of two anti illegal immigration posters that are plastered everywhere around the city. This one says: Don´t be an ostrich. When facing illegal immigration you shouldn´t hide your head. The other one says: Not even one more. They are sponsered by a group called ¨Habitable Alcala.¨ I really don´t think people would even try to get away with that in the states.

Mmmmm, kelp soup! And by ¨mmmmm,¨ I mean really weird with awkward texture and completely without flavor. You can even see it hanging off of our spoons. Spanish food leaves much to be desired, it can´t wait for Italy.

Wow that was really long and hopefully I didn´t bore you all. This trip is just slipping by so fast, pretty soon I´ll be home to tell you guys what I did in person. I hope everyone is well!

Gianna

Monday night almost our entire group was going to a bullfight. I was never interested in going but all of my friends were, and I didn´t want to have nothing to do. I´d just heard how bloody and gruesome they are and that just isn´t my thing. A guy in the group said, ¨Come on! It´s the culture, you have to experience it!¨ To which I replied ¨Smoking and drinking are a part of the culture, too, and I´m not taking part in that either.¨ I teetered on the fence, but then I went to a museum instead...only to find that all museums in Europe are closed on Monday. Major bummer. But I´m not sad I didn´t go. Then I went home and had Family Home Evening at our director´s house. They had made us chocolate chip cookies and popcorn and we were all so desperate for American food that we made ourselve sick hogging it down. We got home and our dinner was on the table, but we had to ask to eat it for lunch the next day because we were too full. But actually, we only ended up eating a third of it, because the other portion was this fatty caserole that had been sitting on the counter uncovered for at least 36 hours and I had no interest in eating microbes, so we wrapped it in the foil that had covered our food and chucked it.
We got our first papers back yesterday for our classes. Very interesting. In our first class, history and culture, she handed back our homework and everyone had gotten B´s!!! Being the overachievers that we are, my girlfriends and I were freaking out. She can´t give us all B´s! We did exactly what she said! Etc. Etc. She finally said that B meant Bien, and our fears were calmed. We´re just hoping that we weren´t supposed to be getting an E for Excellente. Then we got our first grades in our second class. This guy is totally crazy. He read all of our grades aloud to the class. Embarrassing, especially since he had not graded as easily as he said he would. Today, he actually passed back our papers and he told everyone what they did wrong, in front of the whole class one by one. He would read a section, tells us he didn´t understand what we meant and then ask us to explain it. Then he would tell us we were wrong and pull some obscure term out of his butt to explain what we should have done. He seriously expects us to know a ton about Spanish literature, but we´ve only studied it a semester, and he is a terrible teacher so we won´t learn a thing more from him. We all enjoy berating him on the bus home.
Later on, my neighbor Melissa said the bull fight was really cool and not that violent. But then Leslie described how one had vomited blood and other such disgusting details and I was one again pleased that I hadn´t been there. Most people went just to say they went, and I don´t need the bragging rights that badly. Today was really cool though, because we went to a flamenco ballet in Madrid! The theatre was pretty small and we were really close to the stage, so we saw everything maybe a little too well. Don´t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but it wasn´t the most spectacular thing. The dancers kept messing up and talking to each other on stage. There was this one heavier dancer that was always so dripping in sweat that it would fly off of him in drops when he did turns and soak through all of his costume shirts. He also liked to keep his shirt open to display his ¨impressive¨ amount of chest hair. There was another male dancer that we were pretty sure was really a teenage girl. His/her looks really could have gone either way and they always kept their shirt all the way buttoned when all the other guy dancers would have them completely open. They had some amazing flamenco guitarrist play during breaks and sometimes while the dancers performed, which was really cool. But the best part was this 65 year old lady dancer with a tremendous ego. We think she was their choreographer and that she only agreed to do it if she could perform. She would come out on stage in a racy costume and dance some highly excitable number. Her face was intense, she would stare at the audience, yell and stamp her feet. Total diva. She kept making eyes and beckoning to one of the guys in our group. She danced three times and she would take extra bows and wave her hands to encourage more applause, then when we gave them to her, she would get this immensely self-satified look on her face in an, ¨I´ve still got it after all these years,¨ kind of way. She killed me.
One last note before I head off to the bus stop. To all of you who are worried about Ricardo, don´t. He really isn´t that bad. I mean, I´m not exaggerating his behavior, but it is laughable and therefore tolerable. Yeah it would be better if he was completely nice and reliable, but I´m having fun and whatever weird stuff he does just gives me an interesting story. He isn´t ruining my trip or stressing me out or anything like that. Besides, he has been in the hospital for about a week now, I think it has something to do with his liver, so when he gets back he´ll probably be resting and not around very much. Sorry to worry you all! I´ll write again soon.

Welcome to Lisbon, would you like to buy some illicit drugs?

I wrote this about a week ago and just now published it, sorry for being behind, but I put up three posts today to make up for it. It is raining here and I am so pleased about it. When we were preparing to go to Lisbon they told us it would be cold and windy because it is so close to the ocean, so I packed warm. Big mistake! Lisbon was at least 85 degrees and I was dying of heat! I´ve been sticky and hot for the past three days. And Alcala isn´t much better. Once we got off the tour bus we had to walk ten minutes to the plaza where the internet cafe is, carrying all of our bags from the trip, and sweating like crazy. It is terrible. But it was okay that we were hot because Lisbon, or as they call it Lisboa was so beautiful! I don´t know if it was becaue we were in their capital, but it seemed a lot nicer than Spain. Cleaner, less grafitti, just overall better. And everybody there speaks English! It was so nice, because we definitely don´t speak Portuguese. There was one thing that was way worse though, and that was the people who prey on tourists. They are a lot more common and more bold in Lisboa. Wherever we´d go, there would be a gypsy woman selling scarves, some creepy guy pushing sunglasses, old women shoving fans in your face, all of then yelling and approaching you to buy things. It was TERRIBLE when we went out to have free time. I guess we were in a fairly touristy area because there were people trying to get your money everywhere. We were sitting in an outdoor cafe, and every so often gypsies would pass by and hold out a cup for donations. One time they did it in teams. A man with sunglasses and a woman with a donation cup passed on each side of the tables at the same time. These women cracked me up because most of the time, people have a gimmick to get your money. They sell you sunglasses, play the guitar, are horribly crippled in some way, or they even steal it, but these ladies had nothing. They didn´t even try to inspire sympathy by wheeling by in a wheelchair or wearing dirty tattered clothes, they just expected us to hand over our money because they shoved a cup in our faces as they walked by. They didn´t even hang around annoyingly so we would pay them to go away. I guess they wouldn´t do it if it wasn´t profitable, but I never saw anyone give them money. There was this other guy with a recorder that was pretty terrible too. He would wander around playing, but when people passed him, he would stop playing so he could follow them and harrass them. And he had long scraggly hair and was really dirty, so he wasn´t the kind of guy you´d feel comfortable approaching you. He would have done much better to sit and play. There were also a lot of hobos in this area, but they were surprisingly unenthusiatic. They just laid around listlessly on the steps of this old cathedral and didn´t even try. They looked kind of asleep, but I was trying to avoid all eye contact so I couldn´t be sure. We did see a really cool street performer though. We were walking down the street, and if there hadn´t been people gathered around him, we never would have seen him. He was standing in the middle of the street on a podium and he was painting and dressed like an old-fashioned bronze statue that had greened with age. He would stand perfectly still and then bow to whoever gave him coins. We were so intrigued that we staid to watch him for about 15 minutes at least. His eyes are closed when he waits for money, but he obviously noticed us all standing their giggling, so he would often smile or look at us after he had bowed to whoever had paid him. I gave him 5 centavos for his efforts, but people were giving him money left and right, so I´m sure he made it out fine. Oh, I almost forgot! Not only would people walk up to to sell normal things like sunglasses, t-shirts, fans, etc, but there was also a fair amount of people selling cocaine! With no shame at all, they would offer it to you as you passed and they didn´t even try to hide it. You could see the drugs in their hand 15 feet before you passed them. They were pretty nicely dressed, too, so I guess the coke business is pretty lucrative. I wonder if it is illegal.

Sorry I haven´t written in a few days, we had some interesting events take place. So, our classes here are ridiculously easy and terribly boring. We have them four days a week for an hour and a half a piece and it is absolute toture. My literature class was especially heinous, because it was run like an elementary school course. The teacher came every day with photocopies out of his manuel and we would spend the whole time reading useless biographies of authors rather than actually reading literature. Then he would give us a page long snippet of a work and give us comprehension questions for homework. What´s to comprehend if it is only a page long? Anyway, our director got wind of this business and had a talk with the teachers. The next day, which is halfway through the semester by the way, he shows up with a brand new syllabus for us which he pretends is handed down to us by the powers that be at our university. He had assigned us three books a week to read in spanish, and not just Spanish but 16th century Spanish, which is basically their version of Shakespeare, plus at least a two page paper for each book. We were also required to buy these books, and at three a week, for five weeks, with the exchange rate being as it is, after our teacher swore to us we wouldn´t have to buy a single book, things were looking pretty pricey. He kept saying, ¨This isn´t my fault, this is what your director wanted. You have a great opportunity here to be very well read in Spanish literature...blah blah blah.¨ So, we were basically all ready to mutiny because we would rather be experiencing Spain than sitting in our apartments studying. We called our director, and she didn´t really see the problem with it, but we couldn´t let it slide. So, all of us walked straight over to her house to have a meeting. I was terrified because I´ve always been the teacher´s pet who attends every class and always raises my hand, and I didn´t want to get in trouble or be labled a ¨problem.¨ My roommate is the same way, so we held hands to brace ourselves as we walked in to our directors apartment. Everything turned out fine but our teacher, Philipe, kind of hates us now. He was kind of mad at us for not taking our ¨great opportunity¨ and was talking down to us, which of course annoyed some of the other students, who were sassy to him, which made him dislike us even more. So yeah, that is just the long way of saying I had a major increase in homework and had to scramble to get a bunch of stuff done this week.
It was actually pretty entertaining because our first assigned book was short enough to be printed out from the internet, so we took it along with us on a class trip to the Prado. On the way home on the train, this old man with dark glasses, a ponytail, and a very scruffy mustache kept staring at us while we read. We tend to attract a lot of attention no matter what we do, so we just ignored him like we do everyone else. Then, he started asking me questions about what I was doing and where I was from, and without even having to ask, he started helping me with my homework! It was great, he broke everything down and explained the words that were too old to be in my dictionary and helped me understand the poem so much better. But yeah, in addition to the crazy homework increase, I have to share our family´s computer with two other girls, and sometimes there just isn´t enough time for everybody to have a turn.
So about us sticking out. It seems that no matter where we go or what we do, people know we are Americans. Sometimes, they think they are really cute and they will say the one English word they know to us and feel very superior about it. One trip, I was walking next to a little huddle of fourth grade girls and one of said ¨Hello¨ to me while the others giggled hysterically. I turned around to them and smiled and started asking them questions in Spanish. They were shy and a little embarrassed and after about thirty seconds they all ran away squealing and laughing. Another time, a group of us were standing outside our hotel, and a group of Spanish kids walked by. One asked, ¨So they can´t understand anything we say?¨ and the other answered, ¨Nope, nothing.¨ As the were leaving I turned and said, ¨We understand!¨ And the boy turned around, really embarrassed, and almost came back to talk to us, but his friend moved him away. So yesterday, we were in Madrid all day and we started picking out Americans. It is kind of sad how easy it is. They don´t even have to open their mouthes for you to know where they are from. I´m not really sure what it is about us that is so easily recognizable. We even were having a contest in our little group of friends to not speak English, and two Bavarian tourist came up to us in the midst of our Spanish conversation, and asked us for directions in English. Our director told us that we were never to speak English or do touristy things so thieves wouldn´t target us, but we all just hopelessly stick out anyway. It´s a lost cause.
We did some pretty fun things in Madrid yesterday. It has been raining a lot here so our weekend trip got postponed and we got the whole day to spend how we wanted. We went to a Barbie exhibit which showed all sorts of different barbies created throughout the years. Very entertaining. One time, we were in a shop, speaking both Spanish and English to each other, and the song ¨What is Love¨ from Night at the Roxbury/SNL came on. We kind of laughed about it, but then the shopgirl asked us what the song meant and we had a fun time translating it for her. Another time, we in a cafe only speaking Spanish, and a very scary bum walked in. He approached a table of teenagers next to us and talked to them for a long time. I told everyone to start talking really loudly in English, so when he started to approach our table, as soon as he heard our voices, he veered off and walked out the door. Sometimes it pays to be a tourist.

So I went running and a bird pooped on my hand. It was disgusting.
Hmmmm, I´m kind of behind in my adventures but I don´t know what to say. Lisbon was just so pretty. It was a lot cleaner and the people were nicer, and better yet, everybody spoke English! They have this weird abundance of American culture in Spain and Portugal. In Spain, all the tv shows are American and all my family ever watches are American movies dubbed into Spanish. When we´re on the bus they´ll play the radio, and all of the songs are in English. Yesterday, they were playing Tom Jones´¨Sex Bomb¨ and I was just dying. For Arrested Development fans, I heard them play GOB´s ¨Final Countdown¨on the radio one time. It made my day. They will play all the weirdest things and I just think it is so funny that they have no idea what is going on. But in Portugal they have the same amount of American TV and movies and music, but they don´t have anything dubbed. Everything is in subtitles, so I guess they all learn English so they can actually watch TV and movies without having to read the whole time.
We had dinner as a group the last night we were in Lisbon and it was interesting. They gave us disgusting kelp soup and all sorts of other weird foods and they gave us so much that I couldn´t finish even half of it. I told the waitress I was done and she looked very critically at my plate before she took it away. Anyway, the best part of our dinner was our director, Quina. She was telling us all the European social codes we were breaking. Hold your knife like this, your fork like this, never put your feet on the table, etc. Then she saw me pick up a french fry with my hand and she said, ¨Gianna, never EVER do that! Here, we only eat french fries with a fork.¨ Then we asked the waitress for ketchup and Quina was immediately embarrassed to be seen with such barbaric Americans. She said that asking for ketchup was just ¨so not the thing to do.¨ If it is so passe, then why do they have it in stock? I was feeling like the big dumb American that all the Europeans judge us as, but then I remembered all the things Europeans do, such as: whistle, hiss, honk, stare, and make kissing noises at girls almost constantly; smoke in restaurants; let their dogs poop on the sidewalks; blow smoke in everone´s faces; throw cigarette butts everywhere; wear pink/black/polka dotted, etc. underwear under white skirts, pants or whatever so anything that is underneath is completely showing (I see this on a regular basis); and a host of other weird or impolite things that make eating french fries smothered in ketchup with my hands not seem so bad.This also reminds me of their odd food habits. Such as leaving food uncovered on the counter--meat included--for hours and then serving it to us. And our host dad told us about this kind of gourmet cheese they have here that absolutely makes me want to vomit. So they make the cheese, wrap it in leaves, and then stick it in the manure of horses or cows to age. He said the cheese was considered its best when the maggots inside were still alive. I´m not making this up. But he thought it was gross, too, so I guess everybody here isn´t crazy. Well, I´m out of time. I have to catch the bus because we are going to the Reina Sophia today, which is a modern art museum. I´m really excited.

Okay, quickly to answer Natalie and Chase. Yes it is me in the lion picture. The resolution is slightly poorer on the blog so the pictures don´t look as good. In Portugal everybody speaks English so we didn´t need to use our Spanish, but more on that in the next post.

Hey guys, I´m a little behind on my stories from last week, so I´ll try to catch up now. So much is going on hereª"/(()))¡¡¡¡!! Okay I am going to leave that gibberish to prove a point to you. Our school here has computers but they are all messed up. Someone, I suspect the other foreign kids who go to school here has changed ALL of the punctuation marks on the keyboard, so whatever mark it says it is is a lie and you have to press 15 buttons before you discover where the secret question mark is hidden. It is so frustrating that I can`t even type a contraction without pressing ten other buttons first"/(())¡!!!!!!!!!!
Soooo, last week there was supposedly some festival in Madrid so we decided to hop on over and check it out. Our host dad said he would take us to the train station and pick us up if we got back after the busses stopped running. So whenever our host dad gives us a ride, some disaster always happens and we get there late, so of course we missed the train that our group took and had to go just us four girls who live in the complex. We end up in Madrid and have no idea what is going on so we ask this random stranger and head for the palace. We wanted to see these fireworks that started at 9:30 and so we staked out a bench by a fountain and waited around for a couple of hours talking. So, the hour was approaching and it became very obvious that it wouldn`t get dark until way after ten, and it takes 45 by train back home and the busses stop at 11, and we don`t know when the trains stop and we got really paranoid and just went home. We had some drama when we took the wrong metro but we ended up finally getting the right train and getting back to Alcala at 11:15. So I call my host dad with my last remaining phone card minutes, and he starts yelling into the phone on the other line. I`m trying to be polite and ask him to come and get us and he says yes and hangs up on me. Or at least I thought he said yes. So then we parked ourselves down and waited for about a half an hour for our host dad until we figured that he definitely wasn`t coming. At about this time some really creepy Spaniards stopped and asked all of these questions like, Where are you from? and we lied and said we were from here, and then they asked us if we were Espanish, which means they totally knew we spoke english and we kept pretending like we didn`t until they went away. Except they didn`t go away, they just got back into their car and kept circling the parking lot staring at us! So we got really freaked out and there was only one taxi left so we decided not to keept waiting for our host dad and just take the taxi home. We got home, but not until after the taxi driver insulted us by telling us we had bad accents. We´re working on it, ok! Seriously, everyone here thinks we are the biggest idiots because we can´t speak perfect Spanish. I´d like to see them try in the U.S., except for that is not possible because the U.S. is accomodating and everybody speaks spanish.
Anyway, we finally got home and then began the Spanish Inquisition from Ricardo. ¨Why didn´t you call me?¨ We explained that there had been a miscommunication with the phone and we thought he was coming for us, etc. He started shaking his head and told us we were complete disasters. He told us he´d ¨forgive us this time,¨ but that we were wasting our money because of our stupidity. He also gave me a complete explanation of a proper phone call as if I were an alien from Mars who had never seen advanced technology, ¨Is this Ricardo?¨ ¨Yes¨ ¨This is Gianna, can you please come get me?¨ ¨Yes.¨ Hmmmm, that is actually exactly what I did say, but I decided not to argue. The next day, Kristen, my roommate was really sick with alergies and didn´t come down immidiately for lunch. When she did come down. Ricardo asked her, ¨Kristen, what did I tell you last night?¨ Kristen looked at me puzzled, and said she didn´t know. He said that he had warned her that she hadn´t been wearing enough clothes and now she was sick for not ¨paying attention to her elders.¨ He also referred to the men who had approached us the night before and a senile old man who had come up to us at the bus stop and said that ¨men wouldn´t approach you if you were wearing more clothes.¨ Ummm, yeah, we were pretty annoyed about that.
The next morning we were to leave for Lisbon and Ricardo had offered to drive us. Our director has explicitly told us that she will leave us behind if we are late, so we told Ricardo we had to leave at 7:10 so we would still have time to catch us bus if he didn´t get up--his normal time for waking up in the morning is after 10:00 so we were trying to prepare ourselves. So the morning comes and Margarita was up fixing our lunch, so we were sure Ricardo was going to get up. We were taking our time getting ready and all of a sudden we realize Margarita is gone and Ricardo is still in bed. It is now almost 7:15. Our neighbor girls were really worried and said if he wasn´t up in 30 seconds they were going to the bus stop. We didn´t want to get yelled at for not waking him up, which he has done before, but were definitely not going into his room. I knocked on the door pretty loudly, but he didn´t get up so we decided to leave and deal with him when we got back from Lisbon.We get to the bus stop, which is a short walk from our house and sit down to wait a few minutes. I reach for my bus pass and realize I don´t have my purse, which contains my money, camera, phone cards, house keys, EVERYTHING I need! The bus schedule says the bus is coming in 10 minutes but it is never certain and the stop is a little ways from our house. Plus we live in a minimun security prison and it takes forever to get in and out--I´ll explain later. I´m kind of freaked out, but I decide to run for it and luckily I make it back for the bus. The bus comes at 7:30, the ride takes 20 min and we have to have already boarded the tour bus by 8. We were a little worried. When it gets to about 7:45, Kristen tries to call the director on her cell phone, but it doesn´t worked. We are all totally panicked, so we commence to ask complete strangers to use their cell phones. After that embarrassment their phones don´t even work and we are really scared we aren´t going to make it. The bus barely arrives at our stop by 7:50 and we have to book it to get there. We were the last ones to board. Lesson learned: never, ever accept rides from Ricardo.
But Ricardo really isn´t that bad. He is actually really nice to us the majority of the time. Usually our only issue with him is food, because he is in charge of feeding us. Spanish culture is really generous with food portions and they get kind of offended if you don´t accept. Sometimes he gives us something we don´t like and we don´t want to eat it, but even if the food is delicious, there is just too much of it! It is even worse because the family doesn´t eat with us. They make us our own separate portion and it is really obvious if we don´t eat it. And it is difficult to hide that we aren´t eating it, because he will stay and watch us until we are finished. The worst thing he ever gave us was BBQ lasagna. That is lasagna with BBQ sauce instead of tomato sauce. It was disgusting. The neighbors girls were over so I kept waiting for him to leave the room so I cold force feed them some of my portion, but no matter how slowly I ate, he stayed until the bitter end. And I took a long time. It was too hot to touch when he gave it to me and cold when I finished. Because of this, Kristen and I have gotten kind of creative with our food. When he isn´t looking, we´ll switch plates if our portions are different and someone likes the food more or has a bigger apetite. Or, Kristen will agree to eat all the tomatoes out of the salad if I will agree to finish off here soup. Stuff like that. Sometimes we´ll spot issues beforehand and we can solve them by telling the other person to take the other seat so we don´t have to swith the plates that are already on the table. It works pretty well. So tonight was a typical night of overfeeding, and Kristen and I just couldn´t stomach (I couldn´t help myself) any more. We really don´t like to waste food, but we had no other outlets. As soon as he left the room, we popped open the trash can and moved things aside so we could but our food in the bottom. I didn´t really like what we were eating, so I tried putting in sandwich form so I could finish it more easily. While I did this, Kristen cut up her meat in tiny pieces and put it in her napkin and ate all of the tomatoes out of our salad to make it look like we´d eaten more. We started arranging the trash around so our thrown away food wouldn´t be so obvious. You really have to be creative. Unfortunately, our neighbors didn´t get fed tonight, so we could have given then the other half of our dinner! Bad timing, I know.
Ok, minimun security prison. We live a ways out of town, so you think people would feel a little protected from the crime of the city. Not these people, no, they have to make sure. We live in this giant housing complex. All of the houses are more like apartments because they are all connected side by side, but they are three stories a piece. So anyway, there is a tall brick fence surrounding our complex, there might also be some sort of protective metal on top of that, but I can´t remember exactly. Once you unlock the gate to the entire complex, the only gate by the way, which is really annoying because you always have to walk all the way around to the front, the apartments are separated into cell blocks. We live in ¨H¨ and our neighbors live in ¨F.¨ The cell blocks are closed in by a locked gate on each side, and each gate uses a different key. Once you unlock whichever gate you decide to use, we only have the key to one of them so we don´t have much choice, you also have to have a key to your front door. By the way, the front door locks automatically so good luck if you forget your keys and the door closes behind you. If by chance, you have a visitor, there is a system of intercoms and they can buzz your house to be let in. Oh, and don´t forget the underground parking garage. The houses all lead into a basement which leads into the garage, that door by the way also has its own key which is different from the front door key. Then if you take your car out, there is a garage door that opens to a ramp/driveway, which leads to another gate in the wall surrounding the complex, which finally leads to the street. No word yet on if both garage doors have their own remote, but I´m assuming they do. So lets review: one key for the front gate, two keys for each inner gate, two separate house keys, and two different garage door openers. Don´t forget that the gate locks are often temperamental and you have to fight with them to get them open. So if you can imagine, it was a feat for me to run all the way home, get in and out of the security measures, and make it back to the bus with time to spare. I really don´t know how these people could be so paranoid. I really think a deadbolt is sufficient.
Wow this is a really long post. I hope I´m not boring you all with my posts and I´d love to get e-mails if you all have the time. I hope everyone is well and happy!
Love, Gianna

Picture Time!

Here is my first set of pictures! Don´t be expecting any beautiful landscapes or cathedrals because you aren´t getting any. These are just funny things that I have seen and wanted to share. Enjoy!

This one makes no sense to me. It is obviously George Bush but it says, ¨Less in him and more faith in yourself,¨ which I don´t quite understand. Do people in Spain think that everyone just blindly follows Bush? That people think he is the greatest president ever and nobody ever protests him? I´m not quite sure. It just entertained me, but I have absolutely no political leanings, which probably would have made it funnier. More funny grafitti. It says, ¨I am a FREE bird!¨

This was in an old cathedral that was basically trying to rob me. There were about ten different donation boxes and if they can´t get your money that way, they´ll make you pay if you want to climb their tower and take pictures of the city. They had this really old piece of art there that you can only see by donating a Euro. Its all automated, so when you insert the coin, a curtain will lift and the piece spins on a dias. The whole thing was so comical to me. This sign was the best part, though. It was sitting in front of a statue of the Virgen Mary that they parade around during their holy week. It basically says, ¨We beg a donation for the procession. If you have nothing, give nothing. A little, give a little. If a lot, a lot. Only God, the Sainted Virgen, and you will know it.¨ Talk about a guilt trip!

Portuguese political grafitti. It says ¨Death to Capitalism.¨

I didn´t know Scientology was a global religion! This is the Scientologist headquarters in Madrid. Maybe Tom Cruazy will visit while we´re here. Streets here are really narrow and cramped so all the cars are very small. Nobody has trucks or suvs or anything. But some people take small to the extreme. They drive these tiny little ridiculous clown cars and get really annoyed at us when we try to take pictures of them, so we wait until we find them parked on the street. I would´ve laid down to see if I was longer than the car, but I just couldn´t get that dirty.

This was taken in a restaurante where we ate in Sevilla. We all felt very European to be eating dinner in an outdoor cafe overlooking a castle and a river. The picture really doesn´t do it justice.

This was photographed on a trip to California. Just kidding, this is spray painting on a fence about twenty feet from the chapel where we go to church. People here apparently really like 50 cent because I see his name tagged everywhere. Grafitti is a pretty big problem here. My favorite is on the bus route to school. It says, in English by the way, ¨Welcome to Curtis Town.¨ It cracks me up every time.

So one day we took a different bus to school than usual and we made a new friend. Sort of. We were speaking Spanish to blend in a little better, but we apparently were doing a terrible job. The girl across the aisle from us was staring/glaring at us so blatantly that we could tell we stuck out pretty badly. She would not stop looking at us, which we found completely hilarious, so we started giggling uncontrollably and speaking in English so she wouldn´t understand, which only made her stare more. The bus ride was about twenty minutes long, and she looked at us so often that we managed to get photos and videos of her. She started smiling towards the end, but we still took the other bus from then on. I guess we should be used to it by now though, we get stared/yelled/whistled at pretty much every day because Spanish men apparently think that is an effective method for picking up women. At least she wasn´t honking and yelling out a car window.

Whoooooo! The Europeans are pretty excited about ketchup! Actually we were too because they usually don´t have very good ketchup, or very good food for that matter, so we´re always very happy to eat something familiar.

I kind of got bored of taking pictures of old buildings and paintings, so I had some fun when I went to Portugal. This is in front of a really old castle. I decided to see if I could blend in to the decorations.

Today we got home from school and we were starving as usual. Ricardo wasn´t home and we didn´t see anything to eat in the fridge so we decided to eat some cereal and take a nap. Well, he came home in the middle of us eating and made this huge deal. He said, ¨Margarita is going to divorce me!¨ And kept saying how bad he felt that we were eating. We kept telling him that we were completely fine with cereal, but he insisted on making us omelets and promised to drive us to fhe. We felt so bad for upsetting him.We were both really exhausted so we went upstairs and fell asleep. I woke up two hours later and started reading grammar book to brush up, but I was really tired so I went back to sleep. I finally got up about an hour before we left for fhe and realized I had to prepare the lesson. I had no resources! No internet, no marked scriptures, no ensign, it was really hard, but I figured something out and it went well. We had some funny cultural experiences today. On the bus on the way to school there was this girl totally staring at us! But not just staring, glaring. It was so weird because she would do it for extended periods of time. We thought it was so funny that we took a picture and a video of her, which I will post soon. So many people here just think it is okay to stare at us! Especially guys.Anyway, later we were walking to the car with Ricardo and it was parked a ways away on the street. Instead of walking on the sidewalk, Ricardo opted to walk through the middle of the street, and with the way people drive here, I wouldn´t recommend it. But he just kept walking like he was doing something completely normal and the cars would just part like he had every right to be taking up an entire lane. We were driving in Junior´s car, and in the backseat there was this sign to go in the window with a giant L on it. As we were driving we saw another one and we asked Ricardo what it meant. I guess in Spain when you commit certain types of traffic offenses you have to wear a huge L in your back window to warn other drivers about how much you suck at driving and tell police to keep an eye out for you. People with an L aren´t allowed to go over 80 km per hour which I think is about 50 mph and they have to keep it for a whole year. Junior has to put one in every time he drives. Funny! Last thing, they leave food out here for entirely too long. One time there was a drumstick sitting on the counter for at least two or three days, and Junior´s dinner from last night is still sitting on the table waiting for him. It smells awful and I really don´t appreciate taking my meals at the same table as it. So unsanitary.Oh, and I almost forgot. Yesterday I left sacrament meeting and one of the missionaries in the corridor had taken a dance class with me my first semester of freshman year. It was so weird to see him in some random chapel in the middle of Spain! Small world when you are mormon I guess.Anyway, that is all I´ve got for today.

Yuck, traveling is so exhausting. Yesterday we drove all morning to get to Granada and then Hermana H. didn´t have anything for us to do so she just let us loose in the city. We went shopping for a little bit and then we heard about this gigantic open air market, and we set out to find it. I asked in a farmacy, but they didn´t understand me. Then I asked these British tourists with a map and they had a really entertaining accents, but gave us poor directions. It is kind of funny because a lot of the tourist places here will have flags on things to signify what language they are written in, and for English it is always the British flag, a lot of times they even have English lingo like rucksack instead of backpack. There are a lot of British tourist with really strong accents here and it almost seems like they are faking it. We were still looking and wandered into a cafe for lunch. While we ordered lunch we asked for directions and they told us the market didn´t open on any day but Sunday. Lame, then we had an hour and forty five minutes with nothing to do. Next we went to this giant cathedral-cript. It was really weird because right in the middle of the chuch there were these giant marble blocks shaped like beds with giant images of the people inside carved sleeping on top. There were all of these ornate decorations all around them, but they wouldn´t let us take pictures. Then we saw this staircase leading into the ground and we actually got to go underground and look at the coffins beneath. Very cool, but also kind of gross.There was a lot of interesting art in this cathedral. There was a painting there that had been featured in my art history textbook, so I was really excited. There was also a painting by Botticelli. They also had a giant statue depicting the moment after John the baptist got his head cut off and his body was falling to the ground as Herod held his decapitated head. The Spanish artists are known for being zealots and now I know why.Next we went to the Alhambra, which was a giant mulsim palace taken over by a Spanish king. There were beatiful gardens and vistas overlooking the city, so I´ll try to post pictures later. By this time I was so exhausted from walking and standing all day, but my director forbade me from going to buy a snack. However, her husband figured out about my blood sugar problems and took me aside and said, ¨How about some sugar?¨ and took me into the corner to give me some chocolate.We left the Alhambra and had dinner at a kebab place. It was seriously the best and most satisfying food I´ve eaten since I´ve got here. Spanish food is a disappointment. After that we got gelatto, talked to some random African imigrants-there are a ton here and they like to sell contraband items in the street-and wandered around the city. We weren´t allowed to go to a discoteca, so there wasn´t much to to but go home. The culture is really weird here because everybody stays out late, but all of the stores close really early. And they don´t eat dinner until like nine pm, which is a major annoyance to me.Today was a marathon of stops that I didn´t even know we were making. We woke up 20 min before the bus came so we were super rushed and already dirty before we started the trek for the day. We stopped at this town called Baeza and looked at this old renaissance cathedral. It was nothing exciting but at every turn there was some box begging for a donation. One of them said they ¨begged a donation¨ and that ¨only you, God, and the Virgen Mary¨will know if your donation was sufficient. Nice try, my euros staid in my pocket. That is until the made us pay 60 centavos to climb the tower. These people were really milking us for all we had. The tower climb was atrocious. There were all of these claustrophobic spiral staircases covered in pigeon poop. We even found baby pigeons in the top of the tower. At the top there was a nice view, and guess what, a telescope that only cost a euro to use! Lucky us! When we got back down, our instructor paid a euro to see this golden statue that unveils when you pay money. I couldn´t wait to leave. There was an old university outside with all of the faded red letters covering the façade. We found out that if people passed their tests, they would write their names on the wall in bulls blood. Next we stopped to use the bathroom which took like a half an hour. But we were also hungry so we drove for a while and then stopped again. Then we drove some more and our teacher got the bright idea to stop at the ¨Versailles of Spain¨meaning this really elaborate palace. It was really pretty interesting because all of the rooms were perfectly preserved, but I was sick of stopping and already hungry again. I was really excited to get back to Alcala, especially since our family wasn´t home, which means we didn´t have to eat their dinner, which means were eating at a kebab outside of the internet cafe. Yay!Hmmm, interesting things here. The birds are OUT OF CONTROL! Everytime we go to a cathedral it is like a Hitchcock movie. They are swooping and screaming and there are tons of them. One of them pooped on my friend Melissa. Also, they don´t believe in condiments. A sandwhich is dry baget bread with a slice of meat and, if you pay extra, cheese.

Right now I´m in an internet cafe in Sevilla and I am baking in my skin. My pant are rolled up to my knees and I´m sweating like crazy. They run us around like machines here. We walk and stand for hours and my feet and legs constantly hurt. I´m going to have to start bringing more food around with me because with the heat and the walking I get dizzy and tired all of the time. I took a nap in our hotel room before dinner and I almost couldn´t get back out of bed again! Yesterday we drove to Cordoba and saw this giant mosque. The muslims invaded Spain in 711 and built all of the mosques everywhere and this one was really interesting because when the Christians took back the area they built a cathedral in the middle of the mosque, so now the townspeople have mass in a mosque. Next we went to these ruins of a muslim palace and then drove to Sevilla.Sevilla is gorgeous. Last night we ate dinner in an open air cafe overlooking the river. The food here is not as good as I´d have hoped. EVERYTHING is some sort of seafood and I just can´t bring myself to eat any of it. They cook everything absolutely drenched in olive oil and when I got my scrambled eggs with potatoes and ham I was kind of disgusted. It didn´t taste bad but the greasy look was unappealing and the potatoes looked like they were frozen french fries dumped into the pan. But, the weather and the view were so beautiful I couldn´t much care, and I was starving, something I seem to be all of the time here, so it helped.This morning we went to two cathedrals. We walked in in the middle of a mass and got to see the end of it. The church was ridiculous. There were paintings all over the ceiling and everything was gilt. there was a giant virgen Mary in the front that was decorated in tons of gold.The next cathedral we went to was so beautiful. The ceiling was probably at least 30 floors above us and the the building was enormous. There were lots of interesting artifacts and paintings. They had a 34 story tower and we only had 30 min to get up and down it. Everyone was trying to run to the top, but I was just too tired so I walked untile I hit a crowed ( about floor 27) took my pictures and went down again. I was by myself and I couldn´t remember where to meet, so I ended up wandering around a little bit. I walked all the way back to the street and back to the cathedral and just barely caught the group. It made me a little nervous, but I knew how to get back to the hotel just in case. Lesson learned, Don´t go out alone!Next we went to the palace of the Hapsberg king Carlos the 5th. There were gorgeous muslum styled gardens and fountains and a really intricately decorated palace. After that we had lunch. I was really excited to try paella, but there was none with chicken so I ended up having a really gross sandwich. They we wandered around for a while and ended up in an art museum. They had a lot of interesting baroque and renaissance pieces, but the best thing was that they had a Picasso on loan from the Guggenheim and I got to see it. It is called ¨La Planchadora¨and I liked it a lot.We wandered around for a while and then finally got to go back to the hotel. I zonked out in my room for an hour and then we had dinner and now I´m here. Tomorrow we are going to the Alambra in Granada.
Things with my family are getting steadily more interesting. The mom just got back from Cadiz and is wasting no time getting ¨aquainted¨with us. We came home from school and she was out on the back deck in a bikini. Then that evening she was wandering the halls in her undergarments, and in the morning when we were getting ready to go to Cordoba, she walked out of her room COMPLETELY nude and started talking to me. I have a few more stories but I´ll just have to tell them in person.

This are two e-mails I wrote when I first got here and are my first real posts
Things are good here. My family is really nice and actually they are mormon! Our house is a little ways out of the city so there is a lot of space, but it takes a half hour by bus to get to class. It´s a pain, let me tell you. A few interesting things: 1. EVERYONE smokes, it is disgusting, even twelve year olds and middle schoolers in their catholic school uniforms. It is not at all taboo to blow smoke in your girlfriend or even your baby´s face. Seriously, we saw this. 2. Everyone lets their dogs poop all over the sidewalk. And now in Sevilla, random dogs just run around and poop. 3. A very popular hairstyle here is the mullet. Only the coolest of the cool guys have them. Mohawks, sometimes combined with mullets, are also very popular. They are called rooster crests here. Girls sometimes even have mullets, it isn´t rare at all! A mullet also usally signifies a facial or ear piercing of some sort. The more the better. But even semi-normal looking people or school children will have a facial piercing. 4. Our host parents have a dog name ¨Lovely.¨ 5. There is a path by our house and Kristen (my roommate) and I have already gone running. My legs HURT! 6. Our room has pink beds and green walls . 7. there is bidet in our bathroom! Sick! I refuse to use it. 8. People here drive like maniacs! It is worse than mexico by far. I constantly feel death coming. Parking is also an issue. People feel that if their fourway flashers are on, they have created a parking zone. So there are always people double parked or in no parking zones.
9. Our apartment complex has a pool and a tennis court, and our apartment has three floors. There is a lot of space compared to most of the other students, so even if the bus ride is long, I guess we´ll do homework.

Things are up and down with my family. They are mormon, but we are sure how seriously. When we got in the car this morning, it was very apparent that the teenaged boy, Junior, had taken it out partying the night before and it smelled strongly of smoke and there was a bottle of gin in the backseat. Ricardo took us too and from church, but didn´t actually go. When Ricardo came to get us he got out to talk to the members and they all hugged him and talked to him, so it seemed like he couldn´t be too inactive, but then on the way home he left us in the car to buy bread. The mom has been traveling and will get back tonight, so we´re still waiting on her. More later!

Sorry, this post is out of order! We will be staying with the same family here in Alcala for the entire time. The mom, Margarita came home today from a vacation and we were really excited. Ricardo, the dad, has been acting really strangely towards Kristen, my roomate, so we wanted a women´s presence in the house. Ricardo has also been fixing all our meals, and while he isn´t a bad cook, he likes to make food that typically a guy would make when his wife wasn´t home, aka french fries, pizza, etc, and we wanted some authentic food. However, Margarita informed us that she is in school and her finals are coming up, so she actually won´t be cooking for us. A little dissappointing, but I can get authentic food when we travel.
So something weird happened today with Ricardo and Kristen. Kristen told him she wasn´t eating last night because she was fasting for church. He is a member of the church so he should understand this, but it caused a problem. This morning she told him she was continuing her fast until six o´clock so she wouldn´t be eating lunch. He started asking all of these questions and arguing with her about what constitutes a fast and claimed that she only wasn´t eating because she didn´t like his food. She said she liked it and he called her a liar. She is going into international relations and he called her a politician and said she was already learning how to lie. It was extremely uncomfortable. Melissa was in the backseat with me and started asking about the words I learned for mullets (punks) and mohawks (cresto de gallo) to ease the tension. Then, Ricardo asked who was the better driver out of all of us in the car. No one heard so Kristen said she was in jest, and then he decided to hold a competicion and told Kristen he was going to make her drive us all to the train station when we went to Madrid later in the day. Driving is scary here so Kristen really didn´t want to and thought he was trying to make a fool out of her. We don´t know why he is being so weird! This was on the way home from church, so a few hours later we went downstairs to go and he was sleeping. We were all afraid of him because of earlier, but it was way too late to take a bus. Finally Kristen decided to wake him, and we had to drive the neighbor´s car so she didn´t drive. When we got back from the Madrid, he made us dinner and said that Kristen was a picky eater. It really is odd that he is picking on her. She hasn´t done anything and the rest of the time he is so nice! I guess if it gets bad they can find us another family, but I really like it here so I hope not.That was a long story, sorry. But it is just bewildering to me because Kristen is so nice and polite.
Here´s another funny story. We went to Madrid yesterday and split up when we went home. Kristen decided to stay longer with our neighbor Leslie and I went home with our neighbor Melissa. We took the metro to the train station and went back to Alcala. We got home about 8 and tried to find a bus back home. The buses don´t come as often on Saturdays, so Melissa and I were freezing our butts off for at least 20 min waiting at the stop. Finally we got on and rode for about ten minutes. The bus driver stopped at a normal stopped, but then turned to us and said ¨Final,¨ and pointed for us to get off the bus. We were in the middle of Alcala and we had no idea where! We were not sure what to do, but we decided to look for the other bus that passes by our house. We were really afraid it had stopped running or we´d miss it and have to wait a half an hour in the cold, so we were running like maniacs trying to find the right stop. We finally did, so we started looking at the schedule to see when it was coming. We waited a loooong time, so I turned and asked if any of the other people were waiting for our bus. They said no, but a nice man told us the number 3, which we needed was still coming, and I told him how we had been on the number 10 and it had stopped. While this was going on this old black lady overheard us and started asking us questions. She got really agitated and kept saying ¨The 10 doesn´t pass by here!¨ She held up her hand in a fist and kept talking about how the number three buss passed by a giant black hand like hers. She just kept insisting over and over no matter how many times we told her we didn´t need the number ten, that it wouldn´t pass by, and then she would wave her hand around in a fist and talk about the number three. She kept making all of these gestures and yelling, and Melissa and I just tried to ignore her. Finally the bus came and we tried to ask the bus driver if it was going to all of the stops, but he couldn´t understand what we wanted so we just sat down. We were on that bus for about ten minutes and then he stopped and told us the line was ending so we had to get off and reboard. It was so lame! About a half an hour later, we finally got home, an hour and forty-five minutes for the whole trip.
Last funny thing, today I walked up the stairs and Junior, the son, was standing in a doorway in his underwear. He said hello and didn´t even try to get out of sight and I was so embarrassed that I said hi and ran back down the stairs. When I went back up with Kristen I insisted she make a lot of noise so it wouldn´t happen again. More soon!