A few weeks in

To all my seven followers: I am so sorry that I haven’t posted in so long!! It’s been almost two weeks since my last post, yikes. I really should update this more often so that every time I update I don’t have to recount 2 weeks’ worth of activities.

Okay, so last week Laura was here!! I am actually going to direct you to her very complete blog entries detailing every aspect of her week here so that I don’t have to describe our adventures in my blog (because it would take foreva). Suffice it to say, we had a lot of fun (as per usual with Laura)!! We went tapas-ing and bar-ing and museum-ing among other activities. Sadly, last Monday I escorted her to the Atocha station to catch the direct bus to the airport for €2. She left later than she intended to because we got coffee at Mickey D’s before heading over, so I hope she made it to the airport on time!! I actually have no idea how she’s doing because I haven’t heard anything from her since then. I’m sure she’s fine but I worry! She had a flight to London first, a five hour layover in Heathrow, and then a flight to Delhi where she had to wait for 8 or 9 hours until the program came to pick students up. Laura, if you’re reading this, I hope everything went OK and that you’re having fun!! I miss you!

(4.2.11 update: I have heard from Laura, she is safe and well in India and already doing cool things like seeing elephants, which does not surprise me in the least!)

Okay so what else… One thing Laura couldn’t have told you about was the program’s trip to El Escorial last Saturday. El Escorial is a really old, really cool castle/monastery thing. Literally it is both a castle and a monastery (or it was, back in the day). Lots of Spanish kings and queens have lived there and are now entombed in the mausoleum there. It was very beautiful but unfortunately, as it is several centuries old, lacked a proper heating system. Saturday happened to be freezing so I spent a great majority of the tour shivering my ass off.  I was also starving and more than a little sleepy – my eyes kept closing during the first half of the tour which is why I can’t tell you more about El Escorial, as I missed most of what the guide said. Whoops! After the tour they let us loose in the little town to get lunch and I felt much better and more awake after getting something to eat. We explored the town for a little while afterward, which was fun, but I had worn completely the wrong shoes for icy/snowy cobblestone roads and so walked in constant fear of slipping (always a possibility for me no matter the road conditions). We took some nice pictures set against the mountainous backdrop and then in typical fashion made complete American fools of ourselves by taking ridiculous pictures of each other and starting a snowball fight in front of El Escorial. We definitely desecrated some sacred ground there, whoops.

Monday, after saying goodbye to Laura, I went to visit/explore la UAM (la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid) with Ariane and Dana, two of my friends from the program. Autónoma was designed by an architect who also designed prisons and believe me, you can tell. The campus is not the prettiest and the buildings are all kind of squat and ugly. But, for the next four months it’s my school, so I’ll try to love it anyway! Getting to Autónoma is also kind of annoying because it’s pretty far north of the city. You have to take the commuter rail (cercanías or RENFE), which can be confusing, and it takes a while to get there. I’m thinking of taking a class that meets at 9am on Wednesday mornings and if I do, I will have to get up sooo early to ensure that I’m not late for my class.

But so anyway, Dana and Ariane and I practiced taking the cercanías so we’ll be prepared for when classes start next week. When we got to Autónoma, we went with Dana to the gym/athletic center because she wanted to register for flamenco classes. Then we found the Filosofía y Letras building, where the three of us will take most of our classes. We had seen this building before on our little guided tour of the university a couple weeks earlier, but it was very confusing and I remembered feeling lost, so we wanted to see if we could navigate it on our own without the help of our tour guide Juan. Entering the building, I happened to glance to my right, and saw a man and woman in a passionate liplock. The man was seated on the bench with the woman straddling him, her knees on either side of him. I feel like I’m writing the intro to a porno! This kind of thing (extreme PDA) is commonplace in Spain, although what I’ve seen so far has not been quite so… HBO after midnight. Anyway, we were amused by the couple but didn’t really think anything of it. Forty-five minutes later, after getting a quick lunch, we walked down the same corridor again, and the couple was STILL THERE, making out in the exact same position, as if they were a modern art installation. After FORTY-FIVE minutes. I would have thought they’d have progressed in their activities (perhaps smoking a post-coital cigarette by the time we passed them again?) or found another space (i.e. more private) in which to continue their seminar on Anatomy 101. Or if nothing else, gotten bored and gone home. But nope, they were still at it… Anyway I have spent a long time detailing this and I did not mean to. Back to more important things, like lunch. So, pretty soon after entering the building and admiring the temporary Modern Lust exhibit, we realized we were starving and decided to check out the caf and get some lunch. We followed signs to “cafetería,” but the first room we walked into had microwaves and little else. Then we found the real cafetería, which had actual food for sale but no discernible way of getting said food. There was a long counter with a lot of food displayed, but no money being exchanged over the counter, and a couple of islands where cashiers sat looking bored. After watching other students navigate the caf, we finally figured out that we had to look at the food at the counter, decide what we wanted, go over to the cashier (who was very annoyed with us by the time we figured this confusing process out), tell her what we wanted, pay, receive a little ticket with our order on it, and take that to the counter to give to a guy who finally, finally served us food. It was a miracle I was able to obtain a ham and cheese sandwich and a glass of OJ. There was a legit “menú del día” with 2 courses and whatnot but I have no idea how to order that/ where you get it from. I should probs figure it out though, because though my ham and cheese sandwich was not too bad, it wasn’t filling enough. Later we went to a coffee-shop style café and Ariane and I split the hugest chocolate/croissant looking pastry I’ve ever seen.

Anyway, after our confusing lunch we realized that it would be more helpful to tour the Filo y Letras building with some idea of where our classes might be, so we headed to la biblioteca to find the room numbers of some of the classes we were considering. We could not for the lives of us (what a weird construction…) figure out how to log-on to the computers (should probs figure that out) so we waited until someone vacated one without logging off and jumped on it. Room numbers in hand, we set off back towards the Filo y Letras building where we wandered around the hallways for a while, orienting ourselves. The building is divided into six or seven “módulos” or pod-like things which each span three floors. So, a class could be in Módulo VI, Aula (classroom) 203. It’s not too hard once you get the hang of it but it can be tricky because if you take a wrong turn you can end up in a completely different building, as the Filo y Letras building is connected to the Facultad de (School of) Formación de Profesorado y Educación (all cognates but I don’t really know what it means), which is a completely different department. I don’t feel 100% confident about finding my classes next week but I definitely feel a lot better about it (except for a couple classes I’m considering which didn’t have room numbers posted online… that’s cool…). Anyway, then we headed back to da city for our grammar class at Recoletos (the program center) with Miguel, one of the program coordinators slash just a generally awesome dude. Miguel speaks extremely clearly and slowly and enunciates really well so he’s one of the people I understand best at the program center. All of the program coordinators are super neat people.

Okay so this blog post has been in a lot of detail… That was just Monday of last week. Tuesday I had my Imaginando las Américas (Imagining the Americas) class at the program center, which basically looks at the colonization of the Americas by Spain in terms of how Latin America has influenced Spain. It’s been very interesting so far but reading and writing for this class (and for the grammar class) have been a rude awakening that yes, this is school. I hope starting real classes next week (gah, the horror) will jolt me into a more academic mindset… yeah, probably not. I have no idea how to manage time here and have ended up doing all my assignments (well, the few I’ve had so far) at the last minute even though I have plenty of time to complete them earlier. Whoops! On Wednesday, Dana, Carlos, and I went to see “También la Lluvia” at a theatre on Gran Vía. It was an assignment for the Imaginando class I just described. The movie starred Gael García Bernal (from Motorcycle Diaries, among many others) as a director filming a movie about Columbus’s arrival in the Americas from the indigenous people’s point-of-view. However, they are filming the movie in Bolivia (where they can hire movie extras on the cheap) during the water shortage in 2000. Bolivia had begun to privatize many of its once public systems, including the distribution of water, and water costs had skyrocketed while people’s meager wages remained the same. So, the movie presents an interesting parallel – namely, the white/rich man’s subjugation of indigenous people – between the colonization of the early 1500s and the globalization & privatization occurring hoy en día (today). It was an excellent movie and I was pleased to be able to understand the vast majority of it. It helped that the movie wasn’t super dialogue heavy and a lot of it was conveyed through action (like the protests led by one of the Bolivian actors hired for the movie).

From Friday to Saturday the program took us on the first excursion of the semester, to Toledo. I believe Toledo merits its own blog entry which you will probably see here in another two weeks (just kidding, I’ll try to update sooner than that). Until then, ¡chao!