Culture Shock Part Dos: Adventures

When getting to know a new country, there is always inevitably some kind of learning curve. In my first week, I’ve definitely learned a few important lessons: 1) Don’t trust guys with directions. 2) When everyone gets out of a bus, follow them. 3) Not every person who wears a UC Davis shirt goes to UC Davis. …I’ll explain.

Friday night in a city right outside Toledo, my roommate Cecily and I decided to avoid the overcharging hotel restaurant, and go in search of a supermercado to make ourselves dinner. It started as Ryan [from Ohio] and Teo [from Colorado]’s idea, and we made the mistake of deciding to follow them. (Since of course they “knew where they were going.”)

We walked south of the hotel onto what looked like a sidewalk, but after a few hundred feet, it started getting thinner and thinner. Cecily and I were wondering why the sidewalk had suddenly disappeared, but they guys insisted we were going the right way. A few hundred feet later, we notice a car driving by – fast. Then another. And another. As we kept walking up this street, we all of a sudden realized that we were walking onto the shoulder of a freeway onramp. [Sorry mom.] Needless to say, that was enough to turn us around.

So after backtracking a bit, we crossed a really sketchy bridge that shook everytime cars passed under it on the freeway, and it dumped us out right next to a lovely junkyard with a large barbed wire fence. The crude map that the hotel concierge had scribbled for Teo indicated that we were close, so we kept waking – until finally we spotted the giant yellow “AhoraMart” sign that we had been looking for.

AhoraMart was definitely no Trader Joes. More like a Wal Mart food section, plus hanging legs of various animals (chicken, pigs, lamb) and people traipsing around with turquoise rolley carts that remind me of those tacky backpacks that were popular back in middle school.We bought ham, (SURPRISE!) and a loaf of white bread (whole wheat does not exist in Spain) coconut yogurt, apples, water, and a bag of Cheetos for the four of us, and it came out to a whopping four euros per person. Talk about a power dinner.

And for my second lesson about getting out of the bus, I think this video will speak for itself. To better understand the context: we were all sleep-deprived, and had a 4 hour bus ride from Toledo to Salamanca to meet our host families. Within ten minutes, everyone (including me) was passed out asleep, and when the bus driver stopped for a break halfway, Cecily and I were slow to wake up and get out. After rolling over and groaning a few times, we both finally got up – then realized that everyone else was gone. We were locked in the bus. And we both had to pee. So while waiting for someone to come back and rescue us, here’s what we did:



After our little dance party, the bus driver came back and let us out (thank God) and we both ran to the rest stop. On my way back out, Jessica [from Florida] mentioned that she saw someone wearing a UC Davis t-shirt in line at the cash register, so I got really excited and decided to go say hello. The guy in question was about 30 years old, Spanish, and absolutely wearing an Aggie blue UC Davis t-shirt. I went up to him and said “Hola! Estudio a la Universidad de California Davis?” [Did you study at UC Davis?] and he looked at me like I was a crazy person. “…No.” he said. Then in Spanish, told me that he had visited California for vacation, and had “found” the shirt as a souvineer. It was very strange and awkward, and I still don’t know what he meant by the fact that he “found” the shirt. But sadly, I’ll never know.

Culture Shock Part Uno: La Comida [The Food]

Hola todos! So first, the good news is I have official gotten over jet lag. The eating breakfast at 9:30am/lunch at 2:00pm/dinner at 9:30pm and bed around 2 or 3am (with a much-needed siesta in the afternoon) has become more familiar, and my ability to speak, barter, and get places using only Spanish has much improved. That being said, there are some things that are definitely going to take longer than a few days to get used to! Take for instance, the fashion. MC Hammer pants and bright colored spandex are totally in. Also, the food. I’ve had some form of eggs for dinner three of the last five nights, and can usually identify about one out of every five kinds of meat and seafood served on my plate. Every day is a new fun, but often shocking cultural adventure, so the next few posts will give you a better idea, with some of the pictures, videos and stories that I’ve collected thus far.

In my last post, I mentioned “broken eggs” which I enjoyed for dinner around 11pm other night in Madrid. Expecting to get some form of scrambled eggs, I ordered the house special “Juevos Rotos,” and was surprised to receive a bowl filled with French fries, topped with two sunny side up eggs, grilled chicken strips, raisins, and roasted bell peppers. It was surprisingly tasty – just… odd.

There is lots of other strange food here – “perritos” (hot dogs) are long and very skinny, and usually wrapped inside a croissant. (I'll put pictures up when I have a faster internet connection.) Spanish “bocadillos” or sandwiches are usually some kind of ham (there are so many different kinds that they have a place called Museo de Jamon – or Museum of Ham – offering 20+ different ways to eat it) and melted cheese ON TOP of the sandwich, with some kind of buttery, mayonnaise-y sauce in between. Aside from the Spanish people’s obsession with all things ham, they also LOVE potatoes, and put them in everything. Sandwiches, salad, (I ordered an “enselada” and got a mix of cut up potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, egg, and tuna) and of course they serve them with the “hamburguesa Americana” at McDonalds, where they offer “patatas crispy” on their one euro menu.

The Spanish are proud of their crazy food, and more than anything they love to eat. The biggest meal of the day here is lunch, and it’s served in 3 courses: some kind of paella (rice+seafood or chicken+spices)/pasta with ham of course/calamari/grilled chicken/random Spanish dish, plus bread, and tomato or lentil soup, and salad. Then after all that, for dessert there’s yogurt, flan, pudding, chocolate, fruit, gelato, mazapan, (a Spanish candy made of almond paste that is really addicting) or everyone’s favorite: chocolate con churros. Oh yeah, and the portions are huge, and Senoras take it very personally if you don’t finish everything that’s on your plate. So I have no idea how everyone is Spain is so skinny!!

Speaking of which, the idea of “eating healthy” is laughable to most families. What is important is taste, not nutritional value. My friend Beri and I tried to figure out the calorie to kilocalorie conversion (seems easy enough, right? Kilo = 1,000) …but let’s just say we’ve yet to be very successful. Here’s a video to give you an idea:

So I’ll let you know when I figure it out. In the mean time, by that scale I’m ingesting about 465,850,000 calories a day… so let’s just hope that Delta Airlines has a few extra seatbelt extenders for my trip home.

I finally found internet at McDonalds!!!

Hola! So before I post everything and confuse you with the order, let me explain.

Finding internet in Spain is way harder than I expected - that, and Spanish WiFi and American computers are not friends. In my house [don't worry, I'll tell you all about it soon] there IS one bar of slow internet, but my computer won't connect to it. Right now, I'm sitting on the second story of McDonalds, which is one of the few places that has internet this time of day. [It's 3pm, and most shops are closed from 2-5.] Very soon I will get my password for internet at school, but you'll have to forgive the order of my updates, as I've been writing them without internet, and a few times a week when I have access I'll post them all at once.

That also goes for pictures - I've taken so many already, and have lots to share, but slow internet = EXTREMELY slow download time.

I left the United States a week ago tomorrow, and already I could write novels about the rediculous cultural differences, the crazy food, the incredable architecture and people... everything. And I've been keeping record of it on here, but McDonalds only gives you 20 minutes of internet per purchase, and my yogurt parfait [which is WAY better than the ones in the US, by the way] and internet privledges are almost finnished :/

So expect updates all at once and very soon from the rest of Madrid, Toledo, and my first few days here in Salamanca. And in the mean time, here's a video I made this morning in the Plaza Mayor, the central meeting place here in Salamanca. Take note of some of the interesting people that walk by while I'm filming.

El Prado & El Museo de Reina Sofia

I've only been here three days, and already I've had so many eye-opening and culture-shock inducing experiences that I barely know where to start. In the last two days we visited El Prado and El Museo de Reina Sofia, two of Spain's most prominent art museums, which feature thousands of the most famous artistic masterpieces from the 15th-20th centuries. Among the most familiar names were pieces by El Greco, Velasquez, Dali, Monet, Picasso and Rembrant, [among many others] and just walking through the halls of these galleries was truly overwhelming.

What struck me most, was the difference between seeing a piece of art on a slide or in a textbook as I have in class, versus standing two feet from a 500 year old painting, and seeing the physical colors and brushstrokes layered onto a
canvas. This is especially true for the impressionist pieces, which we were able to literally stand a few inches from without any alarms going off, or spanish guards chasing us down. [I was a bit worried about that, after noticing the skeptical looks the museum ushers were giving us when they realized we were a herd of young American students.]

Throughout this post, you can see a few of my favorite paintings: the first and second are by Picasso, the third is by Dali, and the last one is by a 19th century impressionist artist named Joaquin Sorolla.

What's incredable about Picasso's second painting
[called El Guernica] is both its history, and the the fact that it literally fills an entire wall, from floor to cieling. It's hard to tell from the small picture I included, but look at it closer, and you'll start to see recognizable shapes and figures: a bull, a horse, a woman carrying a dead child, a bulb of electricity, an older woman holding a lamp, a fallen soldier with a broken sword. The painting represents the bombing of the city Guernica by German and Italian war planes (on behalf of the nationalist spanish government which was in power at the time)

during the gruesome Spanish Civil War in 1937.

Standing in front of this giant mural, it's impossible not to admire Picasso's brilliant artistic ability to show the suffering and pain of war, and the effect that it has on culture. People from virtually every major country were visiting El Museo de Reina Sofia alongside our group [Germans, Italians, Japaneese, and Swiss just to name a few I saw] and despite the difference in cultures, it was amazing to see that we all had a similar reaction.



The other paintings I'll spare you the historical detail, but they're equally as fascinating and brilliant in their own right. Dali's surrealism is something an art history teacher could spend years on - and the bottom impressionist painting when looked at up-close, is actually made of dozens of paint splotches, mixed in dots to create this viberant 3-D image of a beautiful garden.

I should have known, with my parents having met in an art class, that somewhere inside me was an artsy fart. But after spending a full day in Spanish art museums, it's absolutley official.

Lots more to update [up next: El Valle de los Callidos and la Basillica, two of the most exceptional cathedrals I've seen in my life] but it's almost 2am, and I'm still working off the jet lag. So I hope you enjoyed a small piece of my new fascination with Spanish art and history, and I promise I'll have more pictures and stories up soon.


Amor y Juevos Rotas [broken eggs - I'll explain next time]


Shell

Tapas y Jet Lag

Hola!

Well, I have exactly 30 minutes of internet and lots to say, so let's see how this goes :)

After getting in at 9:30am yesterday [12:30am California time] we had a very fun and full day that ended at 1:30am, which is still considered an early night here in Spain!! Needless to say, I'm exhausted and still jet lagged after 8 hours of sleep last night, but with only 2 nights in Madrid I had to pull it together and stay awake as long as I could. :)

So after a short siesta yesterday afternoon we went on a bus tour through the city, then trekked up the street to find dinner around 10pm. Of course everything was open, so several new friends and I ordered fresh squeezed orange juice and "tortilla Madridellena" [nothing like a Mexican tortilla - it's an omelette-like dish with potatoes, cheeze and bits of ham] then we all headed out to a tapas bar to meet up with John Oses, and other UC kids studying here in Madrid.

The bar was tiny and very crowded but buzzing with energy - the twelve in our group had to stand around tables for lack of space, and we all shared overflowing plates of tapas, which came free with every ordered drink.

[Tapas = "appetizers", anything from french fries and fried cheeze and ham balls to slices of french bread with slices of cheeze or potato salad smeared on top.]

By the time all the Spainards were ready to hit the Discotecas, I was very ready to head to bed [along with a few of my equally jet lagged new friends] so we took the Metro back to our hotel, and finally, after almost 2 days, were able to go to sleep.

Today was another whirlwind adventure, visiting El Prado and El Museo de Reina Sofia which house the works of nearly every famous artist from the last 6 centuries! But for lack of time, I'll have to update you with those stories and pictures tomorrow.

Hasta pronto, and here's a little preview:

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Pieces of Madrid

Life here is already amazing, but I am so full, and absolutley exhausted that I can barely type. It's 4:30 in the afternoon (siesta time!) and we just got back from a whirlwind afternoon of checking into the hotel, walking all through downtown Madrid, and eating "almuerzo" (a 3-course lunch consisting of bread and sangria, a giant plate of pallela, a full plate of calamari, and a bowl of ice cream, all for 8 euros) then enjoying the incredably grand Plaza Mayor, which was beautiful - but different than I expected.

For one, I thought I'd left Mickey Mouse and crew at Disneyland yesterday afternoon. Apparently not, because I found Mickey, Minnie, and Tigger the Tiger all hanging out in the Plaza, taking a little siesta from a hard day's work.

Spiderman also made an appearance, but he wasn't fitting very well into his spider suit. Too many tapas, not enough villians to fight was our guess.

Back here at the hotel, everyone is settling in and getting ready for our panoramic bus tour of the city tonight. The rooms we're staying in are gorgeous -they remind me alot of Greece, with two short queen sized beds that are pushed together to make a bigger one, and thin white sheets with no comforter.

To the left is a picture taken out my hotel window; none of the windows in Spain have screens, so it was easy to take!

Now it's time for a short nap before heading out, but I'll update you with more as soon as I can!

Amor y Besos~

Shell

Airplanes and Butterflies

You'll never believe where I'm blogging from: approximately 30,000 feet above Salt Lake City, sitting in the middle seat of an airplane, pretzles in hand. My Delta flight offers an hour of free trial in-flight internet, so I figured this would be a great time to check in. (And brag about being able to check my internet from an airplane!! Isn't it unbelievable how tech connected our world has become?)

So as expected, the butterflies in my stomache have officially taken me hostage. I'm sitting here listening to "fireflies" (a fitting song) on my ipod, and am beaming from ear to ear, realizing that I'm finally, actually on my way. The people on either side of me (one is sleeping, the other has a "don't-bother-me-I'm-really-into-my-magazine" thing going on) probably think I'm crazy for being this excited to be on an airplane - but I have good reason. I'll be in Madrid tomorrow. :)

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A couple hours later, and now I'm in the Atlanta airport, drinking Sweet Tea and eating the last green, leafy vegetables I'm going to have for awhile, from what I hear. :/ The rest of the flight should be a breeze since I leave at 7pm Atlanta time, and get in at 9:35am in Madrid. Assuming my body cooperates with the time change, I'm just a good night's sleep away!

Note: This morning at LAX I attempted to record my first videoblog. Apparently, I need to step a bit further away from the camera next time... haha. But here's a little preview!

Why This Trip is Different.

Leaving is a funny experience. In the last couple days, I've been balancing a fine line between the present and the future; spending time alone with my family, catching back up with old friends, and really falling back in love with the place I grew up. But at the same time, here I am putting all my earthly possessions into a suitcase, and mentally preparing myself to let go of my language. My creature comforts. Everything about home that I've finally gotten used to again.

The "change" and "reality" vibes seem to be buzzing through everyone these days - those of us approaching the end of college, and realizing that after June 11th our lives become one big question mark of uncertainty. Like my childhood home this summer, in the last three years my college home has become that comfortable spot for me - a place that I've gotten used to, where bicycling, sweatpants, and organic vegetables are all standard routine. Now, I'm sitting here reading Lonely Planet and Budget Guide to Spain, and am seeing cobblestone streets, giant three course meals (with indistinguishable ingredients) and hints of a fast approaching lifestyle that is nothing like my usual routine.

And that is why this trip is going to be different for me. Different than anything I've ever experienced. This isn't just a trip - for the first time ever I'll be living in another place, with people who I've never met, in a country whose customs and traditions I barely know. For the first time, I'm jumping headfirst into the uncertain - and to be honest, I think that's exactly what I need.

There's a whole world out there to see, and I'm starting to get excited. ...Really excited. :)

Counting Down...

Holy crap. I'm leaving for Spain in twelve days.

You'd think that after five months of knowing this was coming I'd be a little less surprised. Sure, I've been talking about it. I've been brushing up on my Spanish, and memorizing a few key phrases like "tengo monos en la cara?" ("Why are you staring at me?" or literally - "do I have monkeys on my face?) and "contigo ni a China me voy" ("your a pain in the ass" or literally, "I wouldn't even go to China with you") - but I still feel completely unprepared.

In less than two weeks from now, all I know about my life is that I'll be living in a "large, nicely decorated house" with my house mother Mari Carmen and her son Agapito. [He's 32 and a bus driver.] I'll be an official student at la Universidad de Salamanca. [A regal 13th century university where conquistador Hernan Cortes and Miguel de Cervantes - author of Don Quixote - studied back in the day.] And I will likely be eating lots of pork, learning quite a bit more spanish, and and if all goes as planned, adventuring my way around Spain and Europe for a three month exploration that I'll be talking about and remembering for the rest of my life.

That being said, I think the only real way to prepare for something like this is just to trust. My abroad experiences in Greece and Australia the last two summers were unbelievable... and even after thinking I knew what to expect, both trips proved to be entirely unpredictable. The friends that became family, the places I stumbled upon by hiking down a windy dirt road - none of it could have been anticipated. And really, that's half the fun.

So consider this very first blog entry my introduction: an open invitation to you, my friends, family, and new acquaintances, to join me as I set aside my UC Davis sweatshirt, and become a viajera, [traveler] y una estudiante a la Universidad de Salamanca.