Madrid

This past weekend, I went to Madrid with three girls from my program. Despite the cold and occasional rain, it was a good time and we saw pretty much everything we had planned to visit.

We took a bus from Barcelona at midnight on Friday and got to Madrid around 7:30am on Saturday. We went straight to our hostel, checked in, and then went out to do some sightseeing. Here are some pictures from Saturday, when we went to the Museo del Prado, el Parque del Retiro, and Plaza Mayor (among other things).


In front of El Prado. We weren't technically supposed to take pictures inside the museum, but I snuck a few . . .


. . . this one included. It's Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Sons." I was particularly interested in seeing this one because a friend from school (hi, Mer!) has a print of the picture and we learned about Goya in Spanish 4 in high school. It was smaller than I expected, but still really cool.


After El Prado, we went to El Parque del Buen Retiro. It was really, really beautiful, complete with a large pond and a "Palacio de Cristal" (a glass palace).


Palacio de Cristal

Later we went to Plaza Mayor. It was quieter than I expected it to be, but that's probably because we went in the afternoon on a chilly Saturday. I think it's supposed to come to life at night. It's pretty touristy, though, so there wasn't too much to see except souvenir shops and some restaurants.


Plaza Mayor


Plaza Mayor

It was kind of gross out on Sunday (rainy and too cold to walk very far without losing all sensation in my feet). The tour of Palacio Real, the main thing we did that day, was mercifully indoors. It's an enormous, old, decadent palace that housed several generations of Spanish kings. Like at El Prado, we were forbidden from taking pictures inside the building, but I snuck a few anyway.


In this huge courtyard thing.


Beautiful ceiling (almost all the rooms had painted ceilings).


The throne room. The image quality is kind of crappy, but whatever. It's the THRONE ROOM.


There is a room called the Stradivarius Room. I didn't realize it would be full of actual Stradivari until we got inside and I saw glass cases with beautiful violins and cellos inside.

(Like always, there are more pictures here.)

All in all, the trip to Madrid was a good one. The experience of eating in Madrid, however, emphasized just how hard it is to be a vegetarian in Spain. In 2 days, I ate 3 tortilla española (basically, an omelette with potatoes and onions inside) sandwiches as main meals. I'm really glad I decided to live in an apartment in Barcelona.

This weekend I'll be in Barcelona, probably going back to Parc Güell and walking around the city some more. There's still a lot I haven't explored, but which I really want to see.

a lot of things

Okay. So I've seen a lot of really interesting sights since I last updated: La Sagrada Familia, El Torre Agbar, the sea (!), and a whole lot of windy old streets lined with beautiful buildings.

I'll give brief summaries of each thing; there are tons of pictures here that I won't post, but which anyone can browse if they so desire.

Last Saturday (the 17th) I went to see La Sagrada Familia, Gaudí's last project which is STILL not finished (it's been under construction for over 110 years). A lot of the work on the Sagrada Familia since Gaudí's death has been designed by other artists/architects. So while it's not all Gaudí, it is still impressive. Here are a few pictures:


The nativity facade. The angle is all weird because the building is MASSIVE and I am short.


The passion facade. Like a good deal of the rest of the cathedral, it's still under construction. The sharp, linear figures in the scenes aren't of Gaudí's design, and the artist who created them has received a lot of criticism because they are so unlike true human forms, in a way.


In Spanish, "La Sagrada Familia" means "the Holy Family." On a bunch of the corners of the building are the names of the members of the family.

After circling the Sagrada Familia for a while (I didn't go inside that visit; I'm waiting until it's free) I decided to go on a walking tour of El Born. The route was planned out by a guidebook my dad gave me, and turned out to be really cool.

One of the coolest things I passed was the Santa María del Mar. Its doors were open, so the classmate I was with and I went inside to take a look.







* * *

On Sunday, I took another guided walk from the same guidebook but this time through El Poblenou. I saw El Torre Agbar up close, and in my wanderings I had some delicious lemon ice cream and eventually found a beautiful park next to the sea. Here are some pictures from that walk:


Torre Agbar.


La Rambla del Poblenou


Nom nom nom. Delicious lemon ice cream from El Tío Che, an apparently famous ice cream and turrón shop. It's pretty cool that it's warm enough here (sometimes) to eat ice cream.


A path in the pretty park I found near the sea.


View of the sea from the park.

That's it for now. More pictures can be found at the link above. This weekend I'm taking a bus to Madrid with some friends from the program. I'm excited to see some more of Spain, especially since the regional differences here are apparently quite clear.

a few reflections

I'm not trying to be all "AMERICA IS SO BETTER THAN SPAIN" or "SPAIN IS SO WEIRD," but here are some things I've noted about Barcelona in the last week and a half:

- About 96% of the women here wear skinny jeans and leather boots. Even little children dress fashionably. It makes me feel like a frumpy, sloppy American for wearing casual shoes and hoodies all the time.

- There is this cool thing called Bicing which allows Barcelonans to check out bikes and return them at various points throughout the city. Yay eco-friendliness + exercise!

- McDonald's and Starbucks are everywhere. There are also Dunkin' Donuts and Burger Kings. I expected far less of a fast food presence, but clearly I was wrong.

- All the stores play American music. I think I've heard "Disturbia" by Rihanna and the Temptations' "My Girl" more than 100 times in metro stations by this point.

- Lined paper is very hard to come by. Apparently people here really like blank or grid paper. Also, they do not seem to have two-pocket folders anywhere!

- Mullets are really popular.

- It's really hard to find a place that will sell you chocolate chip cookies. There are wonderful little bakeries everywhere, though.

That's all for now. I have a lot of pictures to post, but I'll get to those sometime when I'm less sleepy and hungry.

Casa Batlló

On Tuesday I went with a friend from class to see Casa Batlló, one of Antoni Gaudí's most famous creations. It's located close to the IES centers in a really upscale neighborhood, and stands out as one of the most interesting buildings I've ever seen (granted, I haven't seen the Sagrada Familia yet).

We took a tour of the building with audioguides.


Casa Batlló from the outside.


Close-up on the windows.


Close-up of a really beautiful chandelier on the second floor.


Awesome window in the main room.


Beautifully tiled floor on the first roof (there are two!)/patio thing.


The uppermost hallway looks like the inside of a whale. The blinds that are built into the windows are designed to let in a lot of natural light without letting people outside the building see in.


On the spiral staircase going up to the roof!


The top roof is awesome. It has a great view, and some amazing mosaic chimneys. There's also that curvy-spiny thing that looks like the spine of a reptile, and for that reason a lot of people think the building is meant to represent St. George fighting the dragon.

Besalú and Vic

On Saturday, 450-some IES students went to Besalù and Vic, two medieval towns near Barcelona in Catalonia. It was pretty much the most yuppie-touristy thing I've ever done. Here you can see the crowd from just two of 9 or 10 busloads of people that traipsed through the cities:



Besalú is an important historical site because of its Jewish quarter and how well the buildings have been preserved. The river that runs near the town is water that comes from the Pyrenees, and apparently over time it filled up some of the buildings and preserved them. One of those buildings contained a water purification bath. Here's a kind of crappy picture of it:



Apparently men and women had different schedules for purification; that is, women had to enter the bath more frequently than men to rid themselves of sin. There was some interesting numerology behind the number of steps, but I forget the details.

Later in Besalú we saw a church that survived not only time but also fire during the Spanish Civil War. It was pretty impressive inside. There were some restored pillars near the alter, and you could tell which ones were restored and which were original: the originals were scorched black by fires and chipped by gunfire during the Guerra Civil. Unfortunately, none of my pictures from inside the church turned out too well.

We got some free time to go walk around Besalú after the tour, and there were a lot of really pretty, old buildings. Outside of a shop on our way out of the city, a man was offering samples of cookies sold there. I asked him what they were like, and after he described them to me he asked where I was from. When I told him "los Estados Unidos," he immediately lit up and said, "Ah! Do you prefer Bush or Obama?" I told him Obama, and he seemed pretty pleased.

Vic wasn't quite as pleasant an experience as Besalú. While it was pretty chilly in Besalú, it was even worse in Vic because it rained pretty much the whole time we were there. The tour was fairly interesting, in spite of the cold. Here are some pictures from Vic:


Main plaza in Vic. The arches on the buildings date back to medieval times when they were constructed for the markets that were held in the plaza.


Roman temple, or the reconstruction of a Roman temple that used to be on this site.


Inside of a beautiful church.

The trip was interesting overall, but the weather was pretty much the worst weather ever for tourism in Spain. On the way home, we had to be let off the bus away from our point of origin because there was a huge protest against the Israeli strikes in Gaza. Streets were blocked off, police were everywhere, and there was a helicopter circling the plaza where the protest was held. Powerful stuff.

bienvenidos

Greetings from Spain! Here's a brief synopsis of my current state: I'm exhausted, probably a little smelly, and a little overwhelmed with the awesomeness that is Barcelona's public transit system.

Today I had a Spanish placement test at the university where I'm taking classes. We were supposed to meet at 9:15am at the IES Center, and I woke up at 9. I had planned to take the Metro over there, which is about a 30-minute commute . . . But clearly that wasn't going to happen. So I took a taxi. The taxista asked me if I was Chinese, or what. That was fun.

The placement test itself was pretty easy. After that, I went to El Corte Ingles, a huge department store type thing that has everything under the sun, pretty much. I got what I needed, but I'm already a little scared of the exchange rate. I took the Metro back to my apartment, which was a really good experience--it's all very clear and easy to use--except for the part where I got lost in my neighborhood after leaving the train. But hurrah for public transit!

Now I want to take a shower, but I can't because something is clogging the drain and my roommate's shower this morning filled the bottom of the shower with about 3 inches of water. Grossssss.

Hopefully soon I'll have some time to post pictures of my apartment and everything.

For now, I think I might take a nap.