An actual update

It’s ironic that I haven’t been on the ball about updating this with the many things I’ve been doing, and now I’m updating you on nothing in particular, but I was walking home after my class today and stopped to sit in the Park of Princes, which is near my apartment, sat down on a bench and now I’m typing. Here's my view:

Looking right

Looking left

I can’t help but think of a Jack Johnson song that says, “Love calls just like a wild bird, it’s just another day…spring wind blew my list of things to do away.” I’m not in love but I’ve definitely lost track of my to-do list.

My class this morning was Anthropology of Andalucia (the region of Spain where I reside), and the teacher was great. He was enthusiastic and used powerpoint, which was a major help in terms of my focus over the course of two hours. Here's a couple pictures of my university:

Every Tuesday and Thursday I’ll be done with class at 1 and have the day to myself. I want to try and either work or volunteer in a hospital but am a little worried that right now my language won’t quite be good enough to do much. So at least for today I’m just sitting in the park. My days are pretty busy here, but nowhere near the business of my previous American life. And so far that’s been really great. I can’t remember the last time I went to a park in Columbia, or even just took a walk.

There’s something to be said for the fact that almost 1/3^rd of the workforce here is out of a job, but even before what they call “the crisis”, life moved slower and people make a point of taking walks and meeting with friends, which although I think a lot of us Americans like to think we do, we really don’t. There are always a million people out on the patios and in restaurants here and there’s always a lot of conversation. It’s embarrassing to think about how many conversationless dinners I’ve spent with my own family, let alone friends at school and just the people around me.

I don’t think the point of it all is to say that Spanish people have it right, and Americans have it wrong, but I do think we all need to see the value in investing in eachother’s lives. Trust me, Spaniards absolutely do not have “it” right (see my previous post on their library), but I hope I can remember here and at home to put more time into people than I put into things.

This past week

This week was exciting but now that I haven’t kept track of things, I can barely remember what I did. Thursday I went to the Great Cathedral and up in to the tower, but I’m doing a separate post on that. I took a lot of pictures of dogs, but there’ll be a post on that too. So I’ll try and remember what I can.

Monday was eventful because I had a paper due in class, and after using internet in El Centro, I had to bike home for lunch and then back for class. However, I went the wrong way out of my study center, and found myself pedaling around thinking I knew what general direction I was heading. I remember seeing a tapas bar called “Levies” and thinking to myself, “Why do I know that place?” The answer should’ve been a resounding, “That’s the last thing you remember from last week when you got lost and wandered for an hour”. Unfortunately, I had no idea and forged ahead. After about 10 minutes on bike, I realized I needed to find a street sign, but that’s not terribly easy here. So I biked on for a while and then saw a sign ahead. Unfortunately the sign was for “Rhonda de Cappucinos”, which to my chagrin placed me about twice as far from my home as I was when I left the study center.

I’m not sure how I did on that paper, but the miscalculation ended up being a blessing in disguise because although it was stressful biking all the way down to the river and following that for what would end up to be a half-hour sprint, I found the greatest bike/jogging trail so far, which rolls on right down at the riverfront through a park. Although in very different circumstances, I kind of felt like ****** with ET riding in the basket of his bike, that I was going to take off into the air at any moment.

I literally have no idea what I did Tuesday, which is a little scary. But I think that means it’s likely I just played guitar all day except for when I went to class.

Wednesday was a great day because I got a birthday package from my mom. It was only just a little more exciting than the email I would receive a few days later giving me the details of my birth. But here’s the contents of the package spread out on my bed.

It contained a few good books (it got really painful not having good books…in English…over here), a box of chocolates, some candy, a LOT of fruit leather, and some birthday trinkets, my favorites of which are pictured below.

Also in the package was a new camera! And I must say I’ve been using it a lot and it’s incredible. I’m really glad I decided to ask for one and gladder my parents decided to send me one. It should make the pics much better.

Probably my favorite gift from the package was a cd of pictures my sister compiled for me. I didn’t realize before I came that my laptop doesn’t have a whole lot of family pictures on it because it’s mostly pictures of landscapes of taken on trips. It’s weird how quickly it affected me, but I love being able to browse through family pictures when I’m so far away. I read one of the books, and the chocolates, candy, and a lot of fruit leather are gone, but I’ll always have those pictures.

As you saw from one of the pictures above, I hadn’t shaved for a while, so Thursday morning I gave in and must say as I took to the streets, I felt like a new man. My mom probably wants me to put up more pictures with me in them so here’s the proof…

Much of Thursday and Friday was spent reading the book “Water for Elephants”, which I would highly recommend, but it is necessary to point out that Friday my professor, Jesus, wore one incredible Canadian tuxedo. I wanted to get a better picture of it but he seemed to be pretty fond of me and I didn’t want to ruin that. But here it is…

Saturday: Studied all morning on the rooftop for my final, took the final, and then went home. Later that night I had what you could call my first real night on spanish time, which means that everything was shifted way later. I was hanging out down by the river and an incredible thing happened: I made my first spanish friends. Four engineering students from the University: Miguel, Carlos, Alex, and Daniel. They were incredibly nice and although my friend Mark and I were skeptical at first, it seemed like they genuinely enjoyed talking to us, which is rare at times.

So we went with them to a bar called “Al Capone”, which to them doesn’t have a whole lot of significance other than the fact that “Capone” is a play on their word “copa”, which means “drink”.

At “Al Capone” something almost as shocking as making friends occurred: I first encountered the spanish elite. I came to spain with a picture of high fashion and very dark jeans, but what I found at this bar was basically a frat party. I would say 90% of the guys there were wearing a button-down shirt underneath a v-neck sweater. And nothing but the lightest of pastels. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but regardless I was very disappointed that I didn’t have my camera or phone to capture it. Moral of the story: Conformity is not solely an American epidemic.

After the bar we went to a discoteca called “Elephunk”, which still had some of the v-neck crowd, but also blended in some of the dark jean/euro-mullet crowd. It’s probably hard for a lot of you to see why or how, but I did have fun at the place, even though I spent most of the time just people watching.

Around 4am, Mark and I were dead tired, and ready to leave, but the night was not yet complete. The only way to end a night here is with churros, and that’s what we did. The most well-known churro stand is right by one of the bridges we use to cross the river and get to Triana (our neighborhood), so we figured why not?

When I crawled into bed at a quarter to five, I was definitely ready for a long sleep.

…Antonio woke me up at 9:30 to let me know that it was my birthday, which in hindsight was very endearing of him, and further illustrates why I love my family, but at the time wasn’t very pleasant. But after I didn’t move he said to me, “Yas, we breakfast”, and I had no choice.

Here's a picture of Antonio holding his 4th grandchild, Noelia. The picture's blurry because he's dancing with her. He's not the most descriptive man but when I was watching them dance he said. "We're dancing. It's what I do with all my baby grandchildren". I love him.

I’m not much for birthdays and had a good time the night before, so Sunday I took our dog to the park and hung out by the river with my great Mizzou friends, talking about our families here and at home. I went to bed early to prepare for the first day of semester-long classes, and was very thankful to be alive, in Spain, but with people like you at home who care deeply for me.

Cordoba last Sunday

Hey gang. Thought I'd put up some pictures of the last Sunday I spent in Cordoba, Spain. Everything was very interesting but unfortunately our guide was not great for non-spanish speakers. Thus, I can't really tell you a whole lot about the sights, but I'll do my best.
This is the welcome statue that guards the town from evil Arab invaders from Africa. After about 500 years of Arab occupation, I guess they thought the statue would bring them some luck for the next 500.

They have a "Giralda" of their own in Cordoba...and not surprisingly...more oranges.

Here's another view of the tower down one of their little streets. Would be postcard worthy if the sun had been out.

This man allegedly performed the first surgery to remove a cataract.

Here are a bunch of pictures from the Cordoba royal gardens. They were unbelievable, but I must say still pale in comparison to those of Sevilla. But nonetheless they had incredibly nice fountains and groomed trees.

And now we shift attention to their Mosque. Interesting fact: This mosque is under controversy because it is a Catholic mosque. That's right.

The story: Under the Arab rule, an enormous, intricate Mosque of arched columns of marble, granite, limestone, and alabaster was constructed. It's about the size of 2 football fields and at times would have around 40,000 people inside at a given time. The mosque was so well-known in the Iberian Peninsula and northern Africa that when Christians took back Spain and drove the Arabs out (largely into Africa, where they would go on to cause a few problems in numerous regions, most notably Darfur), instead of demolishing the mosque or leaving it as a historical fact, the Christians decided they would rather use it. So they built naves typical of gothic cathedrals at the time, and in the middle, built a grand cathedral for worship. So in the pictures below, the arched columns constitute the majority of the mosque, but the pictures of the cathedral are taken from the very middle of the edifice.

It is absolutely impossible to take a picture of this place that has any sort of size perspective.

This picture above is of note because it is of the choir area where people the choir would sing. They sat when they weren't singing, and the back wall of each chair, so to speak, has a different scene from the life of Jesus Christ. Only the elite could read, and only priests had Bibles at the time this cathedral was constructed, so the pictures served to help the common people understand Jesus' teachings.

The organ.

This last picture demonstrates that europeans can be tacky as well. America may have its share of Renaissance festivals, but pictured below is one that's nearly year-round, and may be the most cleverly devised tourist trap ever. Advice: Don't buy candy at the first booth you get to. Around the corner is a lot more vendors selling much more substance.

I apologize for the probably large number of typo's so far in this blog.

Urgent Post

I haven’t completely given up hope of updating the blog, but for now I need to make a post detailing a situation that happened today. Today marked the first day of my semester-long classes at the University of Sevilla, which is an absolutely massive building that is school for over 80,000 students. I was happy to finally be starting “real” school, but around an hour ago I walked into the library for the first time, on the hunt for whatever I needed to obtain wifi. As soon as I walked into the room, a couple things happened. First, it felt like everyone was staring at me. Second, I realized that this library was about the size of one half of the computer area at Ellis Library, and it’s totally inadequate for a university of such magnitude. But the third and most troubling realization was that the entire library smelled absolutely horrible. Not the kind of horrible that makes you leave immediately out of nausea, but the kind of lingering, pervasive horrible that you know will make it impossible to spend more than a half-hour at a time in this room. I cannot believe students actually study in this room. In fact, the looks on their faces made it seem like unfortunately, this is normal.

Honestly, I should’ve seen it coming. The symptoms have been all around me this whole time:

Symptom 1: Stylish coats. Spaniards take great pride in stylish outerwear and I’ve gotta give it to them, they do look good. All ages, really. But something I’ve noticed is that pride goes before the fall, and it can feel like 90 degrees in a crowded café, and they refuse to take off their impressive coats. It’s no less than 60 here during the day so they need to downsize in the first place. I had thought that maybe their bodies are just used to the elevated Mediterranean temperatures during the summer months, and they really are cold here. What I learned in the library today is that their bodies have not adjusted. They may be able to hide sweat-stains with their jackets, but it takes a lot more to hide the smell. Which brings me to symptom 2.

Symptom 2: Lack of anti-perspirant deodorant. I was on the search last week for some degree/old spice deodorant and came up short. I simply could not find anything more than a “deodorant spray” or just cologne. I might as well just pretend the shower I take every morning will keep me fresh all day. Yeah right. How can they not have a plethora of anti-perspirant here? It’s over 100 fahrenheit for most of summer! With such a void in the economy, it’s no wonder their libraries smell.

Symptom 3: Lack of ventilation. Whenever my window is open, my senora knows, no matter what room she is in, because she says it’s windy. I haven’t seen one fan yet, and again, I have no idea how this can be in such a warm region. The library is on the 4^th floor of the school, and its air is more stagnant than air in airplane cabins. They have an entire wall of windows that don’t open, and any students that sit by them probably walk out of the library feeling like a boiled egg, and likely smelling worse too.

I know you all don’t read this blog to hear me complain about my adjustment issues, so I want to make it clear. This is not an adjustment issue. This is a hygiene issue, and one that I can only assume leads to many academic issues. No amount of fast wifi is worth the smell of this library, and it was very distressing to think I had just lost another viable option for internet as I walked out…but then the door closed behind me, air began to clear, and I was just glad to be breathing again.

Last Saturday (Cont.)

After I got home from the Real Alcazar, I took a quick siesta before I awoke to really fast spanish. It was my Senora's birthday and her family was arriving. She has four total sons and 2 of them came, with their wives and children. Santiago stayed at his girlfriend's mother's house with their baby. One mother in law came, and a spanish woman of whom I missed the family connection was there too. Overall it turned out to be a lot of fun, but early on I was completely overwhelmed. I was basically like a clown sitting at the dining room table, holding everyone's attention (definitely not by choice), and mumbling out spanish in clips. I realized just how important it is for me to see people's lips move when they speak to me and there were easily 4 people talking to me at every moment. And when my answers didn't make sense, they would ask the same thing louder, which meant things escalated quickly.

The party settled down a little bit when we brought all the food out. We had a great layered cake, hot chocolate (which is basically like chocolate syrup), and a lot of random pastries. I was especially fond of the hot chocolate, partly because my senor Antonio had been preparing it all morning. I spent about 15 minutes before the party watching him stir the chocolate while he described his exact stirring method. I love the guy. So when the party settled down, Antonio and I were just sitting at the table, spooning hot chocolate, and every once in a while one of us would look over at the utter and quietly say, "Esta muy bien".

But first we had to sing. We sang 3 versions of happy birthday, only one of which I had heard before, and when the crowd got really into a tizzy, they decided that the children (who are learning english in school) and I should sing happy birthday in english. Probably not my favorite idea, and I have to say I didn't get a whole lot of help from the kids, but I'll tell you what I sang happy birthday like I was a 7 year old to the party's delight. Here's a picture of Dolores trying on her present.

Here's another note on why Antonio is the man. Antonio lights the candles and whispers to me, "Mira" ("Watch"). We count down Dolores to blow out her candles and when we get to one, Antonio leans over and blows them all out. He starts laughing to the point of tears and high-fiving me in a way that combines the awkwardness of being both foreign to the high-five, and pretty old. Most of the party didn't think it was quite as funny as we did but it was great. This is Antonio going after 3 of his grandchildren.

After things settled down, I had a real conversation with of of Antonio's daughter-in-laws and I found out she is a nurse. I told her I'm studying to be a doctor and we just started talking. She told me in pretty good detail about Socialist medicine here, and although I couldn't catch everything, I definitely understood that she thinks it's a disaster. She said there is a very long wait to have any sort of procedure done, and her quote was that they have "a million family doctors whose only job is really to tell people to stop smoking and lose weight". She was very aware of the healthcare system in America and probably knew more than I did about the proposed changes. It was very interesting to hear the perspective of someone who is both a patient and an employee in Spain's medical system, and to be honest made me a little worried about healthcare in America. I'm not trying to push any issue here, but the conversation was really great for me because it was the first conversation that wasn't just about where I'm from, and how I like Sevilla. It's hard to describe, but I've found myself wishing badly that I could find someone to talk about anything deep with, and for the most part I've come up short with Spaniards. Moral of the story, had a great convo last Saturday.

Here's another picture of the family, and the woman in red is my nurse friend, Beatriz.

A great thing happened to me on Saturday night, I rented a bike for a week. I can't tell you how much better it is to be able to go to class and the center of the city in 20 minutes rather than 45. Unfortunately, the bike rental system where you drop the bike off at stations all over the city and pick one up when you need it, said to me Wednesday morning that I had a bike out already...meaning it indirectly thinks I'm either stealing, or lost a bike. Because of my 150 euro security deposit, this was very troubling. I'm happy to say that although I haven't had a bike these past few days, the problem is under control and I've decided to spend the 150 euros I thought I had lost on another guitar. Just kidding.

More posts coming soon!

Friday and Saturday

Friday at 3 I had my mid-term for my 2-week intensive Spanish class so I spent most of the morning studying on the roof of our study center. There were a lot of people talking so I put in my headphones and started listening to some Andres Segovia, who is arguably the most famous classical guitar player. He’s like the Mozart of guitar you could say. There aren’t any words so I thought it would be good study music. And it was, but somewhere along the lines I realized that Segovia was composing these songs no more than an hour away from where I sat. It wasn’t a life-changing moment by any means, but the music completely changed sitting under the Spanish sun on a balcony overlooking the steeples and narrow streets. That’s where the music came from and because I think the greatest musicians put their lives in their music, it was incredibly peaceful to just listen to the music where it was meant to be heard.

Peace ended and I took the exam, which was much easier than expected, and then I headed home on the high you get when you’ve just put something behind you and seem to have nothing but freedom before you. I stopped and sat looking out at the Guadalquivir river that runs through town for a while and for the first time was truly happy to be in Sevilla and in Spain.

In the picture above you can see “El Torre de Oro” where soldiers would stand guard and monitor the ships coming in and leaving the harbor. During the 16^th and 17^th century, Sevilla grew immensely in wealth and population because it was the major harbor for all ships heading to the West Indies and the New World.

On top of all this (and something I forgot to mention), when I got home I was told dinner was already on the stove and I could eat it whenever, but Antonio and Dolores were headed to the house of their son’s (Santiago) girlfriend’s house, to see their new baby. I was thinking that the pregnancy was at least a few weeks away, but obviously was way off. It’s a little girl named Noelia and they said she weighs 3 kilos (meaning kilograms), which is about 6.6 pounds. Here’s a small picture of her they brought home.

Saturday morning I decided I needed to quit reading in my room and really see the city. Since I pass it every day to school, I headed first for El Torre de Oro, and climbed the narrow, spiral staircase up to the main terrace. This is a view similar to that of a soldier standing guard in 1600.

And here you see (if you look beyond the skyscraper) the Giralda and a good view of the roof of the city.

Next I headed to the Real Alcazar, which is the old Jewish quarter from before Sevilla was any sort of major city. Royalty and the elite lived here and at various times the palaces served as the seat of government. I went in expecting some pretty views and a lot of placards that I half understand, but left completely amazed and sure that this place is going to get a blog post of its own when I take a full guided tour. You walk in and after wandering around the entryways and early rooms, you get to the back gardens. The gardens are so beautiful and vast you could wander for days. Ironically I spent the first half hour just sitting on a bench trying to catch everything; listening to doves singing in the forest of palm and pine trees, smelling the jasmine and orange blossoms that will emerge in a few weeks. A peacock walked right by me as if I was just another statue or fountain in the garden. There are hundreds of fountains making gurgling and dripping noises that contrast with the doves. I will say that the one downside of it is the labyrinth, which is a lot harder than it looks, and does not have an escape door of any kind. Some day soon I’m going to spend my entire day there and try and capture more of it for you. So for now, just enjoy the pictures and know that they can’t capture this place.

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Italica

I forgot to write that last week my program took an excursion to Italica, which is an ancient Roman city where the emperor Trajan was born. Most of the ruins are gone and all of the beautiful statues were torn down with the Muslim conquisition of Spain. But what remains is still very interesting. They have one of the largest surviving Roman gladiator arenas, and although the top third of the arena was broken down and used to build the giant Cathedral in Sevilla, what’s left is incredible. It’s bewildering to stand on ground where men fought lions and tigers, and where thousands of men met their violent ends.

Here are a couple pictures of the coliseum and remember that originally it went 1/3^rd higher. Royalty sat the highest, then middle class men, and the women and children were right next to the action. You can see the open floor where trap doors released gladiators and wild animals into the arena.

Here is the holy room where gladiators prayed before they went to fight.

And this is an up-close of the ancient latin agreement that if the gladiators refused to fight, they would be killed.

This is a hallway under the stands and as you can see, this arena and others like it is still the basic model for all modern arenas that we have.

Outside the coliseum, you can walk down old roman streets that in the past were lined with soldiers, and on which the soldiers’ families lived. Italica was the main base for the far western front of the Roman army, with which they conquered the Carthaginians in northern Africa.

Like I said, most of the ruins are gone now, but you can still imagine these walls as the bases for avenues and houses of a large city.

From one of the richest homes, this is a mural floor of “The house of the birds”, which would have been the house of someone of high rank.