day trip #2

our first day trip was to segovia, our first week... and all of our trips since then have involved us staying at a hotel somewhere. today, we went to some of the places around madrid that aren't too far but still interesting and historical to visit.

el escorial: was built in the 16th century. it's a giant palace/monastery complex (another one of those) that was really interesting and cool. it really kind of bugs me that we can't take pictures inside of these places. but i did sneak one in the library because i couldn't help it. it's a little blurry but that's okay. the ceiling in the library was fabulous... and of course, the books were amazzzzing as well.

valle de los caidos or the "valley of the fallen": fransisco franco, the most loved/hated man in all of spain, built this memorial to the men who died in spain's civil war. it's one of the largest basilicas in the world: carved out of the middle of a mountain, with a huge huge cross coming out of it. it was built by franco's prisoners of war, many of whom died in the process... which makes it all the more poignant and impressive to visit. franco is actually buried here as well. it's now a law that you can't have large pro-franco gatherings here any more, like there used to be (somebody told me).

going into the basilica was creepy... there were statues of "angels" on the walls that looked like ringwraiths from LOTR and it was all dark inside and franco's presence kind of dominated. it was strange to even compare it to our temple, La Casa Del Senor, where we got to visit on thursday and do baptisms, which is so opposite.

i also got to see my dear friend rique there... she got to join our group and then we explored madrid together. (she has the pictures of us.. i will be getting them soon!) it was great to see her and take a break from studying abroad, if that makes any sense. she informed me that there are now, what, 94 days until school starts up again in september. so we need to live up the rest of the summer!

the plaza mayor

sorry, this is the third post of the day and all, but i went to the plaza mayor today and yesterday and thought i would share some of the beautifulness that is in the plaza. p.s. this is where i bought a whole bunch of art from this man in the plaza.. i should have gotten a picture of him! i will have to go back. p.s. the first picture makes me think of rique.

i'm now somebody who gives my loose change to street performers

because i am SUCH a huge fan of them here! they can make things SO much more enjoyable with their beautiful music or interesting feats... i love them. and i like taking pictures of them. so i HAVE to give them some money to keep them from hating me.

things that are different from america in spain, part 1

1. they speak spanish here.
2. they have eurocuts and dress with european style: tighter jeans for men, a definite lack of "dressing-down", which i classify as sweatpants and sweatshirts... you rarely, rarely see those here EXCEPT when people are running.
3. practically nobody wears shorts. (again, except for running... but then again most people are wearing sweatpants. interesting story about that: our professor, jesús, told us that the reason for that is when franco was in power that people over a certain age were not allowed to wear shorts and had to wear pants. so it even today, that image of only children wearing shorts has carried over to today's society. interesting, no?)
4. the lightswitches for the bathrooms are always OUTSIDE of the bathroom. i have no idea why. but every single place we go, whether it's at our house, mcdonalds, la universidad, or the hotels we stay in, the lightswitches are on the wall outside the bathroom. not any other rooms, though. little kids must have a heyday playing with that. i would. heck, i'm still tempted to turn the lights off on my roommates while they're showering... i've thus far abstained though.
5. their meals are a lot later: lunch, which is their main meal and where we eat a TON, is usually at 2:30-3:30, and dinner, which is just a snack or a sandwich, is at 10:30 to 11. that's apparently early for them, too.
6. everything is smaller. the houses, the streets, the beds, the showers, the kitchens, the cars, the stores... everything except for the cathedrals. super, super small.
7. they have weird laws and rules: (i think this might have been a lie) but we heard that women are not supposed to go swimming without a man there. i know that this is a fact: busses need to stop every 2-3 hours for a half an hour break or they can be seriously fined. a lot of the supermarkets make you lock up your bags/backpacks in a locker before you go in so you can't just stuff things into your backpack. kind of weird things like that.
8. teenagers walk around with their phones that they've downloaded music to and play them loudly and obnoxiously on the busses, metros, trains, etc., and it's totally acceptable and normal. nobody looks at them twice. if kids did that in america, everybody would growl at them and be really annoyed. i don't know, it's just kind of weird to me.
9. public transportation is much better.
10. the history here is a lot a lot a lot cooler. even here in alcala, you just walk down the street and there's a 800 year old church on your right and miguel de cervantes' birth house a block over... that doesn't happen very much in the US.

this is all for now. i'm sure there will be ensuing continuations of this post later.

p.s. i love you

i forgot, i would just like to thank all of my friends and family for all of their constant attention and emails! it definitely brightens my day to check my email and have emails from all of my roomates, family, friends, neighbors, pets... i know that this blog is long and extensive and boring and i totally don't expect people to be faithful readers of it (other than you, mom and dad, because you are the reason i am being so faithful with updating this hahaha) but i really do appreciate all of the emails and reminders of love from you all! i've even gotten 2 letters from missionary friends since being here; elders oaks and parkinson deserve prizes. it keeps me from getting homesick and gives me something to look forward to at home in alcala.

i'm almost halfway done with my wonderful time here!

the siesta

so i was supposed to go into toledo today to go watch the corpus christi procession... and the phone, which i was using as an alarm, was on silent. so i woke up, ironically enough, at exactly 7:45, when the group was supposed to meet at the train station. man, i'm so disappointed... the only thing that's making me feel a little bit better is the fact that it's supposed to be raining buckets all day long over there and it's supposed to be really cold, which would be miserable. oh well, these things happen; now i'll be sure to check the phone every night before i use it as an alarm again...

anyways. i thought i would share the joy that i find from the spanish tradition of the siesta. it's something kind of incomprehensible to our american minds. it's something incredibly amazing that i hope doesn't change any time soon. it's the tradition of having everything, absolutely everything in a town shut down for 3-4 hours every afternoon so that the workers can go and enjoy themselves their lunch and take a break. seriously: businesses don't open until 9 am (which is reasonably late to me; even the panaderias here don't open until then) and then they usually close from 2:30 in the afternoon to 5ish when they open again until 8 or 9.

a part of me wants to be the owner of the annoying american large chain store that comes in and begins the competition of keeping my store open during these hours and forces the rest of them to stay open... and the rest of me likes it so much that these people still feel that pleasure and LIVING are more important than working all. the. time. and MAKING their living. and i especially love it how after lunch, it is fully, 100% understood (in fact, almost expected) that you take a nap. i usually just take advantage of this on sundays. like today, when i slept from 4:30 to 7:15... so i clearly give my stamp of approval to this tradition.

LISBON, PORTUGAL

this trip was probably the best decision i have made while i've been here. it cost $150 to fly here and probably another $50 for the hotel and public transportation/food costs but it was SO worth it... who knows if i will ever make it back here, and this is someplace i definitely would not have wanted to miss. it was incredible! we spent almost exactly 24 hours in portugal, which i know is not a very long time... but i would not have changed it at all. if i could give somebody advice, i would give them the exact same itinerary. definitely.

we got off the plane and hopped onto a bus to head out into lisbon. it was a really weird feeling to get out into an airport and.. not have anybody there waiting for us. i mean, if you think about it, you pretty much ALWAYS have somebody there waiting for you when you get off a plane. it was fun though.. one of the best adventures i've had to go to a foreign country where i don't speak the language (basically everybody there speaks english though) and navigate my way around. the first thing we did when we got off the bus was stare out at the water. this was actually the bay, not the ocean, but it was still cool. we appreciated it.

we headed out to the tower of belém, which was pretty far away from the center, and climbed all the way up it. it was built in the 15th century as a part of the defense mechanisms for the city, and stands on the river to protect them. it was decorated with all of these balloon things, which actually made it look cooler, i think. the view was INCREDIBLE... you can get some really really good pictures from all of the different levels, of the ships going by and the city behind it.

afterwards, we went to the jerónimos monastery right down the road (profe would be proud of us for visiting a religious monument). it is another one of those actually beautiful buildings. and it was incredibly large, one of those impossible to capture in one photograph buildings? so i bought a postcard with it on it and called it good.

we stopped by the plaza do comercial on our bus ride back into the city, where this cool, city-wide art project was being displayed (actually, i don't know why i'm describing it like that.. we really have no idea what it was for). they looked like mushrooms but then we discovered they were trees, painted in cool ways. very cool.

this little girl was relaxing under this tree.. it was really cute and i snapped a picture.

so then we started to make our way up to the castelo de sao jorge, and i was accosted by this man. he put a bracelet on my wrist and said it was free because i was a very nice lady, and i, not being a complete stranger to stories about con artists like this, tried to not take it and say thank you and walk away.. but he insisted i take it as a gift and then continued to insist that i give him money so that he could drink some beer. i escaped after giving him 2.50. story made short, i was robbed by this man. if you go to lisbon, these men are EVERYWHERE... watch out for them! i managed to capture him doing the same thing to this woman... i wish i could have warned her, but it was too late... but the view once we got to the castelo was worth it.

after walking around and eating dinner (at this amazing, delicious, hole-in-the-wall himalayan food restaurant), we made it the trek out to our hotel... on the beach. the town our hotel was in reminded me so much of balboa, i loved it: a total, normal little beach town. it was nighttime when we got there, so we had a midnight picnic on the beach and ate some ice cream and then woke up way early and got out there before we headed back into the city to take some pictures of us at the ATLANTIC OCEAN FROM THE OTHER SIDE! helllloooooo, north carolina!

we caught a bus up back to the center of lisbon and made it to the grand central station of lisbon: gare do oriente (whatever that means in portugues). it's this really cool architecture of a building that i really wanted to see at night (look it up on wikipedia, it's great at night) but it was still gorgeous in the day.

then we walked through the equally cool mall across the street (i don't know if you can see, but there was water going across the roof all the time... it was cooooool) to get to the...

PARK OF THE NATIONS! site of the world expo in 1998, it's this ginormous ginormous park area that has a lot of modern art sculpture and is right on the bay. we walked around here until our flight a few hours later. it was absolutely incredible. and huge.

all in all, it was a successful "vacation from our vacation", as we called it. we explored, navigated, got lost several times, but thanks to the wonderful pop-up map kristine purchased beforehand and dane's resourceful abilities to ask people for directions in spanish and understand their portugese, we managed to survive and 100% enjoy ourselves. i'm so glad we went... who knows if i will ever have the chance to country-hop like this again? when will i ever get to come back to portugal? who knows? thank goodness!

windmills

so we have been on several trips since i last wrote. we did indeed visit toledo, but as i am returning there tomorrow to visit for the corpus christi procession (more info about that later, when i talk about it) i figured i would just cover toledo in one fell swoop. but here are some pictures of the windmills we visited, made famous by the honorable DON QUIJOTE who mistook them for giants and tried to attack them. they are beautiful.. and we were there on a really beautiful, clear day. thankfully it wasn't raining. but it definitely was windy.



Profe read the part of Don Quijote to us when he attacks the windmills.. it was cool. he was really into it, so i got a good picture.



it looks fake, right? sooooo cool. i was a big fan.

el parque del buen retiro

today, a few of us went into madrid and visited el parque del buen retiro. it's basically the central park of madrid. the royals used to repose here when they got tired of ruling and beating up on the other lower classes; just imagine coaches and carriages and horses and fat, white people with hoop skirts. it's absolutely huge and AWESOME.



look, you can rent boats and go rowing on the lake there. this cute old couple were probably creeped out that i was trying to get their picture. but i really want to do this at some point while we're here.



okay, i kid you not... these were the most GIANT DUCKS I HAVE EVER SEEN... none of the pictures i took really show how gigantic they were. they were bigger than murphy! seriously, i have never been more impressed with the size of a waterfowl than with these. it was incredible.



there were these beautiful rose-covered archways there... love

this man was my favorite.. i really kept wanting to go up and ask him if i could take his picture but i was too afraid so i took one from afar. you know, just chillin there against a pillar in this national monument, playing his random instrument thing... it was really really cool.

we of course got ice cream. it's a staple here.

oh, yes! tomorrow we leave for TOLEDO! we'll be there wednesday and thursday.. i'm so very excited! and then spending friday and saturday in PORTUGAL! woop woop!

mercadillo

so we visited this market again! it was incredibly fun. i didn't really buy anything this time, but we're still scoping it out and i'll probably be purchasing a good amount of cool things here. the tradition has begun of buying a caja of strawberries and eating them. 2 euros for an entire kilo. these are some of the photos from the mercadillo. it really is just like a cooler, cheaper version of the OC swap meet. i'm a big fan.

documentation of the adventures

enjoy these pictures!


the catedral in leon...

the doors to the entrance of the catedral in leon.

an example of the windows in the cathedral. imagine these covering the whole building. awesome.
the museo de arte contemporaneo in leon... soo cool!

mr. mark rowan, everybody... he likes to make fun of my non-functional buttons on my shirt. very nice of him.



random statue.



a pilgrim walking along the pilgrimage route! captured from a moving bus!



the one time it actually rained while we were in burgos.




the view from the castillo of the city of burgos.




just this nice walkway right next to our hotel..

k so my one of my favorite things about spain: the random statues that they have in random places without any explanation or plaque or anything... like that girl with the umbrella and this random merman (he's covered in barnacles if you can't tell). i am a big fan of these. i'm taking pictures with as many of them as i can.

this is what the burgos cathedral looks like at 6:45 am when the sun is rising, but you can't tell because there are too many clouds to see the sunrise.

okay, does this look familiar to anyone? anyone? salt lake city, maybe? i'm surprised how much the SLC temple looks like some of the cathedrals here. but i've heard about how the architect for the SLC temple was sent to Europe to look at the cathedrals as a model for how it should look.. which would make sense.



just some doors in the cathedral...

within the catedral de burgos... one of the many, many, many hallways.

these shells are placed all along the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela. we were literally walking along one of the most famous and ancient pilgrimage routes in the entire world. it was kind of neat.

just a dog... wearing pants... in covarrubias. sorry, this is random. but how ridiculous is that?!

a SECRET PASSAGEWAY we discovered in covarrubias!

it may not have rained on us that much, but you can see by how fabulously green it is there how much it must rain. this is what our bus ride consisted of... hours and hours of looking at absolutely stunning scenery looking like this. i think i was destined to live in the country.. i just love looking at fields like this.