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