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
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)
