I think the rain is gone for good - I put on shorts today for the first time this semester! This past week has been awesome. One of the girls in our group is playing in an orchestra here, so on Friday night we went to see her concert. It was fantastic! Music makes life so much brighter. In one of my classes we had an assignment to find a song by a Spanish artist (in Spanish, of course) and bring it into class so we could learn some colloquial lyrics. Easy, right? However, there was one stipulation: the song could not be about love. It is incredibly difficult - in any country - to find a song that's not about boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses/heartbreak/fillintheblankallthingslove. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just saying it would be nice to see some more tunes with deep, meaningful themes....like traveling, or food. Food is good. I'm kind of hungry. Which reminds me...after the concert we went to dinner at a restaurant called Hola Pizza Metro. Hola=Hello. Pizza=Pizza. Metro=Meter. The idea is to order a meter of pizza (3.3 feet), which takes up the length of the table! But our group of ten didn't want a meter of pizza - we wanted
two meters of pizza. Slightly disgusting, but oh so delicious.
(My homework song:
"No Dudaría" by Rosario Flores (click to link to video on YouTube)
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| La Capilla de la Mano de Santa Teresa |
To continue my mission of a new church every weekend, on Saturday I went to mass at Nuestra Señora Regina Mundi. It was a very modern church, without the super old Gothic cathedral feel that so many of the churches have here. At the beginning of mass two giant white projection screens were lowered on the wall behind the altar, and throughout the mass they displayed announcements and lyrics - lyrics for the fun, contemporary music provided by a small, young choir and a guitarist. It was phenomenal! I made sure to thank them after mass, because it totally made my day.
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| Paella! (taste test) |
Sunday was a day trip to Ronda, a smaller city in southern Spain a couple of hours west of Granada. It's a place rich with history of bandoleros (think Robin Hood), resistance to Napoleon, and bullfighting. The Plaza de Toros (bullfighting ring) there is supposed to have the largest ring in the world, and the standards for bullfighting originated in the city a couple of centuries ago as well. There's also a chapel called "La Capilla de la Mano de Santa Teresa" (Chapel of the Hand of Saint Teresa), named quite appropriately, because it actually does contain the hand of Saint Teresa of Ávila. While we were there, we also saw some of a Catholic youth group-type concert in the park and a group of Spaniards making ginormous portions of paella. Paella is a traditional Spanish rice dish that also contains veggies, sausage and seafood. It's delicious!
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| View of the landscape in Ronda, with the Sierra Nevadas in the background |
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| Plaza de Toros |
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| Puente Nuevo (New Bridge), built in 1751. I guess it's new-er than the others. |
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| If you are on a bus in Spain chances are this is your view out the window - olive trees are EVERYWHERE |
My host family likes to watch a TV program after dinner called "Hormiguero", which is usually pretty entertaining. They have had lots of famous guests such as Daniel Radcliffe and José Mota (Spanish comedian/impersonator-check out his "Survivorman" rendition), and last night the star of the show was Rafael -a singing icon in Spain who looks about sixty years old. But somehow he's also had a sixty-year career. There's cosmetic surgery in there somewhere, for sure. Anyway, they played a game on the program in which a random person would sing a Rafael song from some point in his career and he would have to figure out which song it was. The catch - the person singing was a non-Spanish speaking individual from China who was listening to the song through headphones, attempting to regurgitate the melody and lyrics. Somewhat awful, yet very funny. Awfully funny.
At the request of one of our professors back at Bucknell, a few of us here Skyped with sixth and seventh grade students from the states to tell them about our experience and answer questions about studying abroad, Spain, etc. Before then, I hadn't taken the time to realize how much I've learned about Spanish, Spain, the world and life in general. Thinking back to my first years learning Spanish, I can remember being a little lost when my teachers talked about tapas, bullfighting, and flamenco. Now, having seen the culture first-hand, I can appreciate it so much more. I never, ever thought I would be in Spain blogging about how much I know about the country, but what do you know - I'm here! Life has a way of being wonderfully surprising sometimes.
