Barcelona, Toledo, Lisbon, and Paris!

Okay I know it’s been forever. 4 weekend trips, in fact. (That’s how we count time here, in weekends.) I have an excuse though, because we’ve been having ridiculous internet problems here. We supposedly have wireless in our classroom building, but we’ve been without internet for probably a total of 2 weeks out of the 4 I haven’t updated about. So when last I wrote, I was about to go to Barcelona to meet up with my friends from ND. Tim and I ended up taking the overnight bus because the train was sold out (it was a holiday weekend here in Spain) and that was definitely an experience I would not like to repeat. We got into Barcelona around 8am and trekked to our hostel, which wouldn’t let us check in until noon, so we dropped off our stuff and went to have breakfast next to Sagrada Familia. We met up with Jessica (studying in Rome) and some of her friends from Rome, Shauna and Kelly, at Parc Guell. We had a disastrous adventure trying to meet up with Rebeca (coming in from London) and then had lunch at Sagrada Familia and then finally met up with Rebeca and checked into our hostel. We spent the evening walking along Las Ramblas and had a ridiculously expensive tapas meal with a horrible waiter and then met Eileen, who had just gotten in from London. We entertained the idea of going down to the beach, but instead we just went to bed. Saturday we went to the Picasso museum and then the chocolate museum and then had lunch at Barcelona’s Arc d’Triomph and Eileen, Rebeca, Tim, and I went to tour Sagrada Familia while Jess, Shauna, and Kelly went shopping. We met up again at the beach and walked through various parts of Barcelona before having another disastrous dinner. We finally got to see the Agbar tower, which Tim really wanted to see because it’s on the cover of one of our textbooks.

The next weekend I stayed in Toledo, for the first weekend since the first weekend we were here, because I kind of needed to study for midterms. I had a great time wandering around Toledo and seeing the parts I hadn’t walked through yet.

Midterms week was stressful as usual, but a little more so because I’d had up until that week a very laid back work schedule, and so all my work came in a rush. I think I did well on all my midterms and papers (I get them back this week, so we’ll see.) I added stress to the week by moving out of my host families house because we weren’t really getting along that well and I was sick of the hour-long commute each way to the classroom building. The weekend after midterms Tim and I went to Lisbon on the overnight train and met up with Tricia and Caitlin, who had traveled separately but were staying in the same hostel. Portugal is so much more different from Spain than I expected. I usually had no idea what people were saying when they spoke in Portuguese because it sounds so different from Spanish, but almost everyone we encountered spoke some English or Spanish, so we got around pretty easily. Our first day Tim and I participated in a 3-hour free wine tasting before lunch and then we all climbed up to a castle in the heart of Lisbon. This trip felt more like a vacation than any of our trips within Spain, so it was really relaxing after midterms. Saturday we went to the Thieves’ Market to look around and then out to a little town outside of Lisbon called Sintra, which was described to us by the woman running our wine tasting as “like a fairytale.” It was full of castles and completely gorgeous. We spent the day there touring a castle and just walking around and then came home. That night Tricia, Tim, and I went to Café Luso, which is famous for its fado (a Portuguese singing style.) We had a great time listening to fado and sipping on sweet port. Tim and I still had most of Sunday since we were also going back on the overnight train, so we spent Sunday wandering the area of Belen and going to the puppet museum and generally enjoying Lisbon’s gorgeous weather.

This weekend Tim and I went on our last trip together before the end of the semester (which is coming up so fast!) to Paris. Spain had a long weekend this weekend because of All Saint’s Day, which is a solemn religious occasion or an opportunity for travel, depending on to whom you talk. Halloween isn’t really celebrated at all here except a little bit by very small children and of course by the American students. I dressed up on Wednesday as a mudejar tower, which is an architectural style we’ve been studying in my art history class. Friday Tim and I left for Paris on the first flight I’ve taken since I got here. We got to Paris around 9pm and walked about two hours from where the bus from the airport dropped us off to our hostel past all the tourist attractions. On Saturday we went to Versailles and spent most of the day there. When we got back into town we went to the Eiffel tower (for the second time) and then headed back to the hostel and had great Italian food for dinner. Sunday we had actual amazing Parisien croissants for breakfast and then went to mass at Notre Dame (I was embarrassingly wearing a Notre Dame sweatshirt by accident). After mass we saw some more sites and then went to the Musee d’Orsay and then up to Sacre Cour. That night we finally actually went up to the top of the Eiffel tower and I was almost exactly 6180 kilometers from my house. Monday was our travel day, but we got to see some things in Paris before we left, like a $16,800 dress in Ralph Lauren.

This week is super busy because I have a couple of papers to write, but this weekend I’ll be staying in Toledo and I’ll be able to relax a little.
v

Granada and Salamanca

First of all, last week I posted my pictures from Valencia and Granada on my picture site (http://picasaweb.google.com/clairemusica/). Go check them out!

Secondly, I have to tell you about Granada and this weekend’s trip, Salamanca. Tim, who is from Chicago and is a Poli Sci and Music major, wanted to go to Granada because he had friends who are studying there, so in the middle of the week we decided that the two of us would go down to meet them. We didn’t make any hostel arrangements because Tim had had trouble booking hostels online before, so we just decided to get a hostel when we arrived in Granada, like true backpackers. On Friday the Fund had a sponsored trip to El Escorial, which is a monastery and summer palace built by Charles V and lived in the most by Philip II. We had a very long tour of El Escorial, but we couldn’t go into the most famous part, the library, because they were filming a Spanish period film that Friday. After El Escorial, the bus dropped Tim and me off in Madrid before going back to Toledo. We got to the bus station and bought bus tickets for the 5.5 hour ride to Granada and then had dinner. On the bus ride, we called all the hostels listed for Granada in my guidebook and none of them had room for two people for Friday night. We arrived in Granada around midnight and walked into the center of town from the bus station, which is about a 5 mile walk. We walked into 13 hostels, hotels, and pension houses before we finally found one that had a room at 2 in the morning. That was our 19th hostel. After that adventure we were exhausted, so we went right to bed and then got up at 7 to get tickets to Granada’s main attraction, the Moorish palace complex called the Alhambra. We spent much of Saturday touring the Alhambra and then met Tim’s friends and spent the evening with them. Sunday we went to mass at the cathedral and then met up with Tim’s friends again before hopping on the 4pm bus back to Madrid.
This week the only two really exciting things that happened were that I got my first grade back of the semester and I met the love of my life. The grade was an A, from an oral presentation in my Cultural Heritage class. Out of the whole class the professor only gave out two As, and I was awesome enough to earn one of them. The love of my life is a soccer player on Toledo’s local team. His name is Pedro. I met him at my job at the tv station because he was there to film an interview on Monday. He told me my Spanish was very good and that I should come see him play sometime. I tried not to swoon.
This weekend the Fund sponsored a trip to Avila and Salamanca. We left early Friday morning and toured Avila, made famous by St. Teresa of Avila. Most of our tour centered around a very old church and the city walls. After Avila we went to Salamanca, where we stayed in a 4 star hotel and got guided tours of the city’s monuments and the university complex.
All of these trips are really fun, and I love the opportunity to get to know my way around cities all over Spain, but I have to say I’m really glad I get to call Toledo home. It’s small enough and has so much character that it really feels more personal than the cities, even small ones like Salamanca. Next weekend I’m going to Barcelona with Tim and some other kids from the Toledo program and meeting up with Rebeca, Eileen, and Jessica, three of my best friends from Notre Dame who are studying in London, London, and Rome, respectively. As I’m writing this, I’m trying to avoid the fact that I have a 1000 essay due Monday (tomorrow) morning to work on. I should really switch over to writing that.

Madrid and Valencia

A lot has been going on since I last updated everyone! On Friday the school took us to Madrid in the morning and we toured the Palacio Real (Royal Palace) where the King and Queen visit occasionally (royal weddings and state dinners and the like) but which is mostly a museum. After the Palacio, we walked up to one of the main plazas and then had lunch at a restaurant. After that we got free time, and I just walked up and down Gran Via (Madrid’s main street) with some boys from Notre Dame. After all our walking we went home to Toledo on the bus with the school, and then Emily, Kate, and I went to the huge and amazing mall outside of Toledo to see Hairspray, which premiered here on Friday. That was really fun because the mall is crazy and Hairspray was all in Spanish except for the songs. Saturday morning we took the AVE high speed train in to Madrid and ran into the President of Brazil in the Toledo train station. We still don’t know why he was coming to Toledo. In Madrid we met up with some of our friends who had stayed overnight and saw all the famous paintings in the Prado. After touring the Prado we went to Reina Sofia, the modern art museum that houses Picasso’s Guernica. For dinner Saturday night we got Chicago-style hot dogs at a restaurant called Chicago Style Hot Dogs Madrid and then made the trek to the famous 7-floor discoteca where we had planned to spend the night, since we didn’t have a hostel. The club was crazy, and we literally partied there from about 2am to 6am, when we went back to the other kids’ hostel to pick up our bags and walk to the train station to catch the first train back to Toledo.

On Tuesday I filmed my first interview for the tv show I work for here. I was told on Monday I’d have to talk about Ramadan in the United States, so I was really nervous, both to talk about Ramadan in a country that is immensely racist towards Arabs and Muslims of all kinds and to speak extemporaneously live in Spanish on television! It was horribly nerve-wracking and I forgot all my grammar and got flustered and sounded awful. My boss told me it was just my first time and I’d be a pro soon enough, but I was still embarrassed. Then when I got home Tuesday night my host family and I watched it on tv and I did just as badly as I thought I had, but they were very excited and proud to have a “local celebrity” in their house.

Friday about 12 of us went to the coastal town of Valencia, famous for its sunny beaches, the America’s Cup sailing competition, its oranges, its paella, and Agua de Valencia, which is made of champagne and fresh-squeezed orange juice (like mimosa). It rained the entire time we were there, but I got to go to their world famous aquarium (their dolphin show was way better than SeaWorld’s) and we did swim in the Mediterranean Sea even though it was rainy at the beach. We also tried paella valenciana and agua de Valencia and I bought fresh Valencian oranges at an outdoor market. Our hostel was a clean and safe, but the best part was the kitchen on the top floor with the rooftop terrace that looked out over much of Valencia. We met lots of people from New Zealand, Canada, Bristol, Sweden, Belgium, and Singapore. We all cooked dinner together in the kitchen both Friday and Saturday nights, and I felt like a cast member of the Real World, swapping hockey talk with the boys from British Columbia while helping the Swedes and Peter the Slovak make spaghetti sauce. If that happens every weekend I’ll have friends from literally every country in the world!

Clases

Hola hola hola y ¿que pasaaaaaaaa? Today is the second day of classes here at the Fund, and I have much to report. So far I´ve only actually had one class, because I have one on Tuesday (that only meets once) and then one on Wednesday that meets twice. Here, because our professors teach at the university in Madrid, each class only meets one day a week, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. The class I have today, the Cultural Heritage of Spain, met in the morning but I didn´t go because I had my welcome interview at my job. My job, for those of you I haven´t told, is with La Tribuna TV here in Toledo, which is a local television station attached to one of the main newspapers. (La Tribuna just means The Tribune.) I´m working on a news magazine show called Más Madera (More Wood, I don´t know why). One segment of the show interviews me every week in Spanish to get the perspective of a North American student on various topics. I´m going to be on tv once a week at 10pm here. It´s very exciting, and the people are all super nice. I almost fainted with excitement at my interview today because I was standing in a real newsroom and discussing with the editor which editing systems they use here. (We also talked about the NBA, but I know less about American basketball than I know about film production, so that part of the conversation wasn´t that exciting for him.) I start work there Monday evening, and I go on the air the first time Tuesday.

Before I forget, I´m taking 5 classes: Spanish Cinema, the Cultural Heritage of Spain, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Art in Toledo, Spain since 1936, and the externship class that goes along with my job.

I can´t think of anything else to tell you at the moment, but I´ll update again on Tuesday and tell you all about our trip to Madrid this weekend and the rest of my classes and my job!

Pictures

I finally uploaded my pictures from the first couple of days here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/clairemusica/ToledoPart1

That album includes a map so you can see approximately where I took the pictures, too!

I have to go because I have to run to mass at the main cathedral for all of Spain (ours!).

Hola de Toledo!

Typing on Spanish keyboards is hard.

Hi! I´m here! So the plane ride was fine, but I didn´t sleep at all, so about when we were getting in (7 here, 1am EDT time) it started to hit me that that wasn´t a good idea. We arrived at the airport and met the Fund people (they had a sign) and found out that the Chicago people were getting in way later
than they were supposed to, so we went on ahead of them. Buses can´t get very far into Toledo proper because the streets are so narrow, so we loaded our suitcases on a truck (this is when I started to think I brought to much) and then walked to the Fund. Toledo reminds me a lot of Italy in the color of the stones and the narrowness of the streets,
and of Assisi with all the hills. Once we got to the Fund (you should have seen me trying to drag my suitcases down the narrow street and
into the Fund. It´s like I couldn´t have packed more comically if I tried) we had some free time, so we (the JFK kids, we bonded on the flight) trekked out in search of cell phones, even though the Fund people are giving us a presentation on them later. We didn´t end up getting any, but we found the ATMs and walked around. We got back to the Fund just before the Chiçago kids arrived, and then had a ton of orientation to pay attention to (in Spanish and I was soooo tired) and then we met our families and they took us home for lunch. I then took a 4 hour nap, because at that point I had been awake for 29 hours
straight and couldn´t even think anymore. My family lives in Poligono, which is the suburb, so I take the bus in to the Fund. My mom´s name
is Ana, and I have a 20-year-old brother, Luis Miguel, who is very cute but very shy, hardly ever in the apartment, and doesn´t talk. But he helped me put my suitcases in the elevator. I also have a 12 year old sister, Cristina, who´s a big talker, and a small dog named Tobi. Tobi loves me and spent the whole time sitting in my lap. He also slept with me after he went for his walk with Ana while I unpacked. My room has just a bed, desk, and wardrobe in it, but everything fits, even my suitcases.

I don´t know when I´ll have a cell phone, but there are lots of computers at the fund and they have wireless that I don´t yet have the password for. Today Ana bused me to the Fund for our placement tests, which were
easier than I expected. Now (11:15) I´m waiting for my placement interview at 12:30. Then I think we´re free for the rest of the day. Tomorrow we have a tour of Toledo, I think. I´ve already taken some great pictures, especially of this little boy who kept playing peekaboo with us on the plane, but I won´t be able to upload them here until I get wireless on my laptop, probably later today.

Contact info

Here are the ways to reach me while I'm in Toledo:

Snail Mail
Claire Musica
Centro de Estudios Internacionales
Fundacion Ortega y Gasset
Callejon de San Justo
45001 Toledo, SPAIN

Email
clairemusica@gmail.com

Skype
claire.musica