day-trippin

I’m not gonna lie to you—it’s absolutely pouring out.  And lightning even occasionally lights up the entire neighborhood outside my floor-to-ceiling living room window, with the thunder claps following so far behind that every single one of our Wyoming thunderstorms this summer would scoff at this pathetic attempt to fit into the same category.

I bring this up not with the purpose of informing you about the most boring topic possible in my life, but to admit that I’d really rather be lying in bed right now, falling asleep to the steady bouncing of raindrops on the rooftops outside... but, since I’ve noticed it’s been a good while since I’ve written anything, I wanted to give you a quick taste of my life these days.  But I’m overwhelmed by the task of updating about everything from the past so-many-weeks, so I’m just going to post random clumps of similarly-themed information whenever I find the time, and hopefully that will suffice to catch you all up on my life.  Vale?  Vale.

So Cathy and I really did go to Cuenca with Guilherme, my Brasilian almost-flatmate, and a bunch of international randoms he somehow brought together: besides me, Cathy and Gui, one girl was from Singapore, two girls were from different eastern European countries, and then we had with us two actual Spaniards. 

The only information I knew about Cuenca before jumping on (after almost missing) the (not-even-THAT-early) train was what I’d gleaned from Wikipedia: Cuenca has a really cool “old part” in the middle of the city up on a hill, and they tout their casas colgadas (“hanging houses”) as a point of interest.  I’ll admit it—I was interested.  I wanted to see the hanging houses.

And so did the rest of the group.  I don’t know where they heard about them, but Gui was carrying around a more larger Spain guidebook (in English, for some reason) than even my family owns, so maybe he had passed on fascinating tidbits of info, but unfortunately, what none of us were anticipating was the fact that approximately 1.5 hanging houses actually exist in Cuenca.  After hiking past the top of the old city, I pointed it (them?) out from afar, and we purposefully marched back down the hill to take a closer look.  Yup, even upon close inspection, said hanging houses were nowhere near as cool as promised.  It was essentially one house that had a few balconies attached to the side of the building (I guess “hanging,” if one were to use a generous adjective), overlooking a deep canyon with the river below, and then another house set farther back into the street, so its “hanging” balconies weren’t even out as far as the others’.

Naturally, being the positive, young and idealistic explorers that we are, we didn’t let a silly little misrepresentation ruin our day.  The sun was out, the gray skies had disappeared, and there just happened to be a festival for San Mateo (which none of us had known about), culminating in a modified running of the bulls in their Plaza Mayor (not as cool as Madrid’s). 

Overall, the day was hilarious and absolutely ridiculous, starting with the bizarre group of strangers (not only our funny mixture of personalities, but also incredibly varied levels of Spanish); to our lunch at a café where every single person’s order was incorrect in some way; to the fake running of the fake bulls (literally, men wheeling plastic, painted bull heads/torsos into crowds of laughing children); to the fake running of the “bulls” (actually female cows attached to ropes [held by probably the same men as at the earlier event], running through more contained, yet more frightened, crowds); and every thing in between.

Cathy and I ended up taking an earlier bus back than the rest of the group to try to be in Madrid for the start of La Noche en Blanco, a 9pm-7am city-wide street festival celebrating arts and bein’ artsy.  Though we missed the kick-off, which was supposed to be hundreds of white balloons with poems on them set into the air from Plaza Mayor, we still managed to participate in other incredible events throughout the night. 

Near the Prado Museum around 1am, I was in love with the public ballet lessons given by a man on a giant projection screen, but even more in love with the dozens of people lined up at the makeshift barres (long metal barriers set up for exactly this purpose), actually following along and not even laughing at each other as they pliè’d and arabesque’d. 

Around 2am, Cathy, Lily and I joined a large crowd of people to dance to a live DJ’s strange musical selections in Plaza de Cibeles (where, a week later, I joined a far larger crowd in support of Madrid’s candidacy to host the 2016 Olympics—check out this photo [I'm the one in yellow: http://bit.ly/sQNaV ] and click the link at the bottom to read the short article).  The three of us attempted to start a train throughout the crowd, but only got ~2 strangers to join... regardless, we continued to be generally the most dance-tastic people for a solid half hour until the rest of the crowd realized that really was what they wanted to be doing, too.

After grabbing some tortilla española and wandering around for a few more hours, I crawled into bed sometime after 5am and slept until 3 (as much as that was my strategy all through college, it’s DEFINITELY how I’m surviving weekends here).

Speaking of weekends, this coming weekend is long (not that they’re ever short—we don’t have to go into school on Fridays), as Monday is National Day in Spain.  Some Fulbright friends and I are hopping on over to Costa Brava via RyanAir, staying in a beach town called Lloret de Mar, so stayed tuned for an update on that.... ha, in the next month or so. 

Otherwise, I haven’t done too much traveling... Lily, Cathy and I went to Toledo this past Saturday, and although my parents claim I went there at age 9, I certainly did not recognize anything.  We mostly wandered around in search of sites of historical and cultural significance which we knew to be somewhere in the old, walled part of the city, but we ended up FINALLY stumbling across the Sinagoga del Tránsito about 20 minutes before it closed.  The synagogue was built by Muslims, for Jews, and used by Christians for hundreds of years, and is now part of a museum about Sephardic Jews in Spain.  It was actually really interesting, and I wish we’d had more time to spend actually *in* the museum.  Luckily, Toledo is only about a 45-minute, €9.70 (roundtrip) bus ride south of Madrid, so I think I should be able to make it back there (possibly tagging along with one of my classes, as I think the third-year students are going on a field trip in April!).