Segovia, Carnaval, and Food

I've been in Spain for a full week now, it's been great so far.

On Saturday, we took a day trip to Segovia, a town about an hour outside of Madrid, that is known for its Roman churches and aqueducts, as well as the Alcalzar, a castle that inspired Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty's Castle. To see the pictures, check out the link below. I put explanations of all the pictures and the stories behind a lot of the places in the picture captions, so check it out!

http://georgetown.facebook.com/p.php?i=1409416&k=S3L544SZW3TF6BD1PBZZX

This weekend also kicked off Carnaval, which is a lot crazier in Spain than in the US (though not nearly as much as places like New Orleans and Brazil). It's basically like a Haloween to them....which makes sense, since there were all kinds of costumes being sold in the stores, but I had no idea why! When we went out Saturday night, we didn't realize that Carnaval had started, so we had no clue why there were all kinds of people in crazy costumes on the Metro. Once we got out of the station, we knew why. The entire plaza was filled with people in all kinds of flamboyant costumes (including a lot of guys in drag dressed up as things like schoolgirls) dancing crazily. It was quite the spectacle! I really need to start bringing my camera out all the time so I can take pictures of this crazy stuff I find (but I'm always scared that it will get stolen...)

And then yesterday, on Sunday, I met up with a few friends for coffee near Puerta del Sol (a really touristy commercial area that's very pretty), and we randomly decided to walk to the Plaza Mayor, which I had never been to before (every city and town in Spain has at least one plaza, right in the center of town). Unknowingly, we got there right before this huge and crazy parade/show. It ended up being a show of the epic battle between Dona Cuaresma (some kind of sea goddess/saint type woman, who was on some kind of elevated platform on wheels with a dress over it that made her look 20 feet tall) and her army of skeletons, sea creatures and mourning people/ghosts, against Don Carnal (a really gluttonous king) with his medieval revelers and court jesters. It was pretty spectacular, with fireworks and smoke and flashing lights. Again, I wish I had brought my camera....

The biggest thing for me is getting used to the food, since I really do not like any kind of pork, and that's all they have here for meat pretty much! After watching baby suckling pigs being butchered at the table with ceramic plates in Segovia (and then being served to us, which I couldn't bring myself to eat!) and being served a soup of kidney beans and pig body parts (seriously! the guy across from me had an ear, someone else had a snout, and someone else had the tail!), I was sooo relieved to find a Burger King and just have a cheeseburger(I never thought I'd say that...I normally hate fast food!)! The program director was right when she said that it doesn't bother Spaniards that the meat they eat still looks like the animal it came from (their shrimp and fish still have heads and eyes and everything, and my host family keeps a pig's leg in their kitchen that they cut ham off of), whereas Americans prefer an ambiguously shaped block of boneless meat that has no indication that it ever actually came from an animal. I sooo agree with this...I would much prefer ground beef or a boneless chicken breast!

Spain has a lot of other weird food things, half of the time I don't know if something on my plate is animal or vegetable, which kind of weirds me out sometimes. They don't refrigerate their milk(it comes in 1 liter boxes) or eggs(they don't refrigerate them in Latin America either), any coffee you order is essentially espresso, and they don't have American staples like peanut butter, hershey's chocolate, and twizlers (although I did find them for ridiculously expensive at the American import store).

However, there are a few things that I do like. My favorite thing so far has been the chocolate, which is like hot chocolate, but it comes in a really tiny cup and is super rich and thick. It is more like they melted a chocolate bar into a cup than anything else. A lot of the time they come with churros, which are like fried donuts (but much lighter and thinner than any kind of churro you would get at a state fair or Mexican restaurant). I could eat this every day!

The whole tapas thing is pretty cool too. It's basically like appetizers that you have when you drink (Spaniards don't do the 'getting drunk' thing when the go out). At any decent (or not even) place, they serve a plate of tapas with your drinks. The drinks don't even have to be alcoholic either. One night we went out to eat at this really sketchy hole in the wall restaurant, and just ordered bottled water (they told us they didn't have tap water...that should have been our first sign to not eat there, I won't even go into the food..) but they served us tapas with that for free. There is also this other bar that for every drink you buy, you get a huge plate of tapas, and the beers are less than 2 euros, so it's a great deal! However, a lot of the tapas involve some form of pork, which I am not too fond of, but there's a lot of stuff I like, such as croquetas (like mozarella sticks with ham in them, I only eat the ham in these because you can't taste it), tortilla espanola (like a potato omelet), calimari (much better than in the US), and various other things.

Next time, I will write more about classes and the Spanish language (or my lack of it).

~Yessi (as my host family calls me)

Bienvenidos a Madrid!

I'm finally in Madrid and all settled in at my house! It's really nice, I like it a lot here so far.

The trip was long and tiring, since I left Boston at 8:30pm, arrived in London at 8am their time (3am EST), and then got to Madrid at 2:30pm (8:30 am EST). I did sleep some on the planes, but definitely not enough. The transatlantic British Airways flight was great, the seats were really comfy, the food was pretty good for airplane food (and they gave us free wine!), and all of the seats had their own personal tv with 12 movie channels.

I was soo tired when I got here, especially after having to lug that ginormous backpack around Heathrow in London, which was a nightmare. They make you go through security at least twice, once right after you get off the plane, and again when you go into the new terminal. Of course, the people at Logan airport lied to me, and told me that I had to go to terminal 1 in London. So when I got there, my flight wasn't even listed on the screen. Turns out I actually had to go to terminal 2, which was a long walk away, that airport was huge! It was also really frustrating, because they don't tell you the gate number until 30 minutes before the flight leaves practically, so you have to sit there and watch the screen to see where it is, and some of the gates take 20 minutes to walk to .

When I finally made it to Madrid, I waited forever for my luggage, and my big suitcase never came, so I had to file a missing luggage claim, all in Spanish, and I could tell that my face was bright red the entire time! Luckily, they delivered it today. On the smaller bag I did get right at the airport, someone (TSA I guess) had taken off the lock and never put it back on , and my shampoo and conditioner had exploded in the front pocket, but luckily it didnt ruin anything . But luckily, the big suitcase still had its lock, and there was actually a second tsa-approved lock (not mine) stuck in the front pocket of it, so that makes up for the one they took/I lost!

My house is a really pretty apartment in a nice building, everything looks brand new and in perfect condition. I'll have to put up pictures later. The family is awesome, I'm really glad i chose to do a host family instead of a residencia. Cristina, the mom, is really cool. I think she likes having host students because she gets really bored not working when the kids are in school (she's a lawyer, andI guess it's really hard to find a part-time job here,or a job that has the same hours as the kids' school, so that's why she doesn't work now), so I think she likes having the company. The dad, Miguel, is really nice too, but isn't around that much because he works a lot. The two boys, Jaime, who is 7, and Carlos, who is 6, are really cute. They look a lot alike, and Cristina always dresses them in matching outfits (it seems like a lot of parents do that here, at least for the kids I noticed in the park). Jaime is really smart, and very eloquent (at least it seems so to me), and Carlos has a lot more energy, and is pretty crazy. He'll come peek his head into my room and then as soon as I see him, he runs away.

Last night, after I unpacked the first suitcase and took a nap, we watched a movie with the kids, and then Cristina and I stayed up and watched tv/a movie and ate ice cream. Today was some kind of holiday for the patron saint of teachers, so the kids didn't have school (but adults still have to work), so she took me and the kids on a walk to show me the area, and we went to that big Retiro park, and we sat and watched the boys play soccer. It's so warm and gorgeous out, I was hot wearing a 3/4 sleeve shirt, but they said that it isn't normally this warm.

Tonight we have the welcome dinner for the Georgetown program, and I'm going to go with one of the other Georgetown girls that lives nearby, so hopefully with the maps and everything we won't get too lost. And then Orientation doesn't really actually start until 5pm tomorrow, so I still have a lot of free time.

Also, the girl who lived here last semester left her prepaid cellphone here for me. I'm not sure if this will be the one I keep, cause I don't know if this will be the phone plan that everyone will decide to get, but it definitely will save me the money of having to buy or rent a phone! I just need to put more money on it, cause I guess it only has about 2 euros on it (its like 20 euro cents a minute to make a call (expensive!), so that's only like 10 miutes of talking time. I did finally get the internet set up here, too. The only problem is that it tends to disconnect every few minutes, which is annoying.

Anyways, now that I've written a novel and nobody will probably even read this far, I'm going to go and get ready for the dinner.

Hasta luego!

Pre-Departure

I'm really bad with keeping up on blogs and journals, so we'll see how often this actually gets updated, but here goes:

I'm leaving in 4 days(!) to spend the spring semester studying abroad in Madrid, Spain. I'll be there from January 26th until July 1st (back just in time for the 4th of July!). I will be studying in the faculty of Philology (linguistics) at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. I will be living with a host family that has two boys, ages 6 and 7, so it should definitely be a fun time. I haven't had great host family experiences in the past, when I did summer programs in Ecuador and Costa Rica, but I got an email from the girl that lived with them last year, and she said that they were awesome, so I'm really excited about it. She even said that they had wireless internet, at least last year, so that would definitely make things more convenient for keeping in touch.

Speaking of keeping in touch, I will be getting a cell phone once I get over there, so I'll let you all know what the number is, but it will probably be easier (and cheaper!) just to Skype, especially if I do have the wireless internet access in my house. My skype name is jessica.bridie, so feel free to add/call me!

My address while in Spain will be:

C/ Mártires Concepcionistas nº 5 1º D, 28006 Madrid

and my email will be the same as normal.

Anyways, I should probably get back to the packing, which is turning out to be quite the endeavour. I don't know how I'm going to survive for 5 months with only 11 pairs of shoes!

Hasta pronto,

~J