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Postings from resident directors and students currently abroad, important announcements and useful infomation for planning your study abroad experience.
January 2008 Entries
Thanksgiving is an important holiday for Americans and students studying abroad want to celebrate it too! Tawna, our Paris Assistant Director sent these photos from Thanksgiving 2007. Enjoy!
Abroadco supplied the turkey and the students all brought something to share - it was quite a feast!
One of the nicest thing about Thanksgiving is to celebrate with friends!
Thanks to Tawna for sharing these photos!
Madrid. Ah, Madrid.
I didn’t realize it was possible to say “I left my heart in such-and-such city”, but I Madrid…wow. As in, Wow. (note: Capital W). My heart is palpitating as I speak. MADRID! I love it. And not with an easy-mac kind of love, either. This is a real cheese kind of love, a homemade maple syrup French toast and infused coffee on a foggy day kind of amore. If you ever find yourself in Spain in December, you MUST visit Madrid otherwise I’m afraid we would no longer be on emailing terms.
Anywho, my trip to Madrid began like most of my other trips: a six-hour long bus ride from Granada to Madrid, only, I’d actually be visiting the city instead of using it as a transit to somewhere else. (I met some other people from my school who were on the same bus, who said, “Where are you going?”
Me: Madrid.
Them: yeah, well, obviously, but where?
Me: um, I’m visiting Madrid.
Them: Oh.
Madrid doesn’t have a very good reputation in Granada. I’m not sure why.
When the bus ride came to a cheerful halt, I jumped off the bus, texted my friend in Madrid, and started heading for my hostel. This involved getting a 10-trip metro ticket, which are usually extremely useful in big cities (We ran out several times when we went to Barcelona.) Despite the “Big city” title that Madrid wears around its neck, one can quite pleasantly walk around from tourist attraction to tourist attraction without losing too much time—by the end of four days, I still had 2 trips left. (And that was after deciding to make one last tour of the city before the bus left, too.)
Youth hostel: a place that is usually shabby, crowded, a place to sleep in between touring the city. Imagine my surprise when I opened the doors and discovered that the place I had managed to book myself was a tourist attraction in itself: an old Arabic-style palace converted into a youth hostel. Intricate tilework played out over the walls, sofa chairs lounged on the floor; a sign pointed to the basement where free internet access, a bar, and a disco ball were located. The desk was indisposed to let people check in at that time, so I dropped my bags off in the locker room and headed out to explore the city.
I didn’t have a whole lot of time before I met up with Madridian chums, so I spent a euro and went at looked at the botanical gardens. It occurred to me as I was inside that perhaps the dead of winter was not the best time to go to the botanical gardens. (Oh look…more hibernating flowers….) Nonetheless, I stayed there for about 2 hours staring at trees. Robert Frost had the right idea when he said that he would never see anything quite as lovely. The botanical gardens offered a natural space away from the hubidy-bub of a new place, and I ended up writing a few philosophical pages about it in my journal. (excerpts: what would the main characters from Grapes of Wrath have thought to see colorful cauliflower in a zoo of plants? --cheated that the government gets money for showing off plants they could grow themselves? What does it mean that we are so detached from nature that we have to go to a zoo to see plants? Is it fair to take trees out of their natural habitat for the sake of fulfilling our curiousity even though, when displaced, they can’t grow and resemble their natural state for which they have been moved to a plant zoo? [I saw the scraggliest-looking sequoia tree. I didn’t know they existed that small.] )…
Afterwards, we met up, went out for churros with chocolate, went to this place called “the museum of ham” (apparently like the in-and-out of Madrid) and went walking around the illuminated nighttime city. There was a parade; trumpeters playing Christmas carols; people of all ages walking around wearing reindeer hats and Technicolor wigs; overall, festiveness in the crisply chilly December night air. I felt like this was a place I could fit in. (especially after seeing the reindeer hats and wild wigs.) That night I got lost going back to my hostel, but oddly enough I wasn’t worried at all. (2 hypotheses: I’m so used to getting lost in big cities at night that it doesn’t faze me anymore, especially since I even had a map this time, 2: Madrid doesn’t seem to have any dark creepy alleys, and was still hopping.)
Day 2: I didn’t sleep so well that night, because there were some really noisy males getting ready for a night on the town to go drinking. (The disadvantage of staying in a renovated ancient palace: no soundproofing.) Morning: breakfast, internet checking, and off I go! (looks at cell phone that functions as a watch: oops. That took awhile.) Luckily, Spain time means there’s not much of a point in waking up early, because nothing’s open ‘till 9:30am. (even then, there are still a lot of things that don’t open ‘till 10.) That morning I spent walking around the “parque de buen retiro” which I believe means “good retirement park”. (or, a park where you can rest well.) Maybe the reason why I like Madrid so much is because I spent so much time among trees. Anywho, Once again within ent brethren, I felt very cozy. The park is hard to describe: ooh, trees! Hey look, there are some more trees, and they’re different than the other ones! O.M.G. LEAVES. You’d think I was starved for nature or something. (Oh wait..that’s right, there are no trees in Granada. Forgot about that.) Statues lined walkways; inlaid fountains bubbled. In the middle of the park, there was a man-made lake at which you could rent a paddleboat and amuse yourself cruising through the water. A full-out puppet show was settled by the shore, amusing children in a sesame street manner by having one puppet correct the others’ grammar. It was all too reminiscent of childhood. I found this building called “la casa de la vaca” (The cow house), and at first, I was scared to go inside. (A cow house? What’s that?) As I neared the place, I swore I could smell cow dung. I made a quick beeline in the opposite direction, then made some rationalizations (that’s way too small to be a house for cows, and what are those people doing sitting behind a desk?) I knew I was going to regret it if I didn’t at least take a quick peek inside, so inside I went. I think the smell I sensed the first time must have been part of my imagination, because the building was a showcase of local art. (Some of it was quite good, too.)
For lunch, my Madridian buds and I went to one of their madridian buds’ host family and we made REAL Mexican food. YUM. REAL GUAC. It’s amazing how, despite the fact that they speak the same language, it is impossible to find real Mexican food in Spain. (Oh please, a quesadilla with brie? A quesadilla with no cheese? It’s actually quite amusing to see the differences, but when one is craving a phatty enchilada, manicotti with marinara sauce just doesn’t do the trick. ) WE stayed for quite a long time chatting, munching, reminiscing about real food back in the states…good times. I’m not sure what I did after that. Maybe that was the day we went to the Doblod temple. (the only ancient Egyptian temple in all of spain, a gift from someone in some year. )….
Day three: hitting up museums big time. At 10am, I entered the Modern art Museum Reina Sofia. I finally escaped around 2pm because I was hungry. WOW. It’s just not possible to see that museum in less than five hours. Lunch: shwarma! Then—next museum. Museum thyssen-borson: approx 3pm-7pm. I was thoroughly tuckered out by that time. I never realized how much art culture Spain has. I suppose “Picasso,” “Salvador Dali,” and “El Greco” should have given me a clue. Those were huge museums. I don’t think I’m capable of describing them.
Sunday morning: I woke up slowly, packed my things, and got ready for today’s gem: Museo del Prado. I waited in line for about half an hour, and when I finally got in, I was greeted by a security team that would have put an airport to shame. When my bag went through, my cell phone aroused suspicion. (ah…that’s the metal object. Okay, no guns or knives, you’re clear.) I shook off the dregs of thorough security inspection, looked up, and saw a sign that made my heart skip a beat.
I attempted a calculation. If I spent one minute in each room, that would mean almost two hours. But of course, there was no way it would be possible to spend only one minute in each room. I think my estimate ended up being 9 hours. (I didn’t spend that much time though; it was necessary to get to the bus station and get my ticket back into Granada).
By the third room, I was already experiencing fatigue. (Bad planning on my part: try to fit 3 huge museums in two days? How was I to know—it worked in Italy and France, and even other cities in Spain too.) I can’t express how amazing that museum was. Best admission fee I didn’t spend. (on Sunday admission is free.) I think this was the only time I’ve really been defeated by a museum. I didn’t get to give all 110 rooms justice (though by the end I decided I had to at least walk through all of them—I’m stubborn.) I headed out, thoroughly exhausted, and made what I thought would be my final trip through the Madrid metro for the weekend.
The bus station was PACKED. (me: oh right…it’s a holiday. Dagnabbit.) I spent half an hour waiting in line to get my ticket, and though it was only about 3pm, the earliest bus back to Granada was 11pm.
Thoughts:
…more time in Madrid?
Score!
I called up my Madridians, and that night we walked around the nighttime city, admiring lights, investigating bookstores, sipping tea, commenting on certain parts of town, enjoying tapas, cracking jokes…it was a lot of fun. Eventually though, I did have to go back to the bus station.
Luckily for me, I am incapable of staying awake on ANY bus ride, so I slept exceedingly well. (Usually this really annoys me because I always bring books and writing material on the bus and never use them, but this time it came in handy.) I arrived back in Granada about 4am, and was back in my own bed by 5am. (And woke up about 9am to get to class. Ah, how useful youth and coffee are. )
France was Fantabulously splendiferous! Unfortunately I don’t have time to write a novel right now. You’ll just have to deal with reading about Rome, Morocco, and Sevilla instead.
So, about Rome: I feel that it is entirely overrated. Or perhaps a weekend is not enough time to navigate through the train/bus system (which has a nasty habit of leaving people in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night and needing to take a 50 Euro taxi ride back into the city.) The Coliseum is big. The Ruins are niftiness embodied in old rocks. The gelato is mind-numbing. There are many good places for taking pictures. Since my fellow intrepid adventurers and I were tired of Rome, we took a day trip to Napoli, which in our opinion, had much prettier scenery and much tastier food anywho. However, we did discover that the stereotype about Italian men thinking any blonde girl who accidentally makes eye contact with them is looking for something. (Thank goodness for the “double-back” strategy and running shoes, otherwise I think we might have resorted to some boxing maneuvers.)
Onto Morocco! (Sorry Italy—I know you’re cooler than that, but Rome is just not your best city.)
Our program director suggested we should visit Morocco, since we’re so close, and gave us information about a program that takes tourists there every weekend. We got up early on Friday morning to take a bus to Málaga, the city from which our program departed. Then we got on another bus. Then a ferry. Then another bus…then….
I am an avid fan of Moroccan food. Its soo…good! I tried to explain this to my host mum when I got back, but she said that “none of the American students that go to morocco like the food there.” (me: Not me! I love it! Her: No americans like Moroccan food. Me: um…hello? Is your ear functioning? ) It is loaded with lots of vegetables and lots of spices. (Although I like some Spanish food, I do miss eating vegetables every day. And spicy food. Yum.) And they really like their tea in Morocco too. (YES!)
Morocco is a country best understood in images. When I think back about my trip, all I see are colors, people, markets, countryside. The culture is so different from our own: An essentially gift- exchange economy as opposed to an essentially market-exchange economy; a society in which loyalty, consanguinity, and community are more important than individuality and freedom; where the heart of the nation lies in the mountains, not the cities. Although I’m a writing major, and I’m supposed to be opposed to using clichés, I’m finding my brain is culturally not able to process Morocco in a way that I can describe it with a new skin. So here I am resorting to the same old maudlin metaphors.
Picture this:
You’re an eggshell, bobbed around by the bubbles boiling around you in a stew of activity. The steam thins out, and around you apparitions of loaded boxes congeal. The sunlight shatters through makeshift awnings, and the options of blindness and not being able to see the market around you are equally offensive. You shift your head away from the sunlight, and some vendors are settled in caves in the wall. In this cave a man is having difficulty weighing a sparsely-feathered chicken for his customer; in this cave several palm-sized kittens munch on fish; in that cave over there, vegetables, beans, an assortment of unrecognizable fruits gleam in the semi-shade. Powders for painting the walls sit in buckets, undistinguishable from the buckets of spices to paint their food.
Although you are amazed and the people are friendly, there is a sense that you do not belong. The people are not angry at your presence: it is not your fault that you were born belonging somewhere else. But you do not belong. It is good that you spend your tourist money here, but at the same time, they resent that they need your money to help their economy. And yet they resent your money, the store owners are pushy in demanding that you spend it. Our Norwegian friend, who is used to bargaining, had a lot of fun showing us how to do it: pretend you don’t want whatever they’re trying to sell you. As soon as they see that you want it, the price they offer shoots up. He  had a lot of fun pissing off the salesmen by bargaining down the prices and then still saying it was too expensive and not buying anything. One of the places we went to on our tour was a hand-woven carpet making place—it felt sort of like a tourist trap. (No…I’m not going to spend 300 euro on a rug, thanks….) I think of the whole group, only two people ended up buying something [after, of course, bargaining down the price].
It’s amazing the people you meet when you go traveling. One night at dinnertime, we sat with a woman who was on vacation from her job in Afghanistan. She was one of the people who had actually made a rug purchase, and after listening to her story, it made sense why.
“It’s amazing being here, where I can walk through the streets, go to a restaurant. I miss the freedom. In Afghanistan, I live and work in a military compound, which isn’t bad, but it isn’t particularly great, either. It’s cold, grey, without character. There are basically two American bases that I can go to in Afghanistan. In order to travel in between the two, I ride in an armoured car, or walk in a tunnel underground to get from here to there. It’s what’s safe, from the bombs. I mean, I wouldn’t want to walk through the city, not how it is with the danger level and all, but I miss the freedom to go where you want to, when you want to, without having to be afraid of getting shot.”
For me, visiting Morocco was a compromise on my freedom. I generally hate guided tours of countries: EVERYTHING is already pre-determined, you get carted around from place to place in a bus, you have to stay with the group. However, for a complete foreigner, the controlled atmosphere was to guarantee my safety. For someone who is more familiar with Morocco, it would be perfectly safe: plenty of people visit there and have no problem. However, there are dangers: Our tour guide pointed out to us some paler-skinned children, and said, “Notice the white kids? They are probably the children or grandchildren of tourist women who ended up staying in Morocco longer than they were planning.” On the plane to Rome, I sat next to a professional basketball player for a Spanish team (who’s originally from Texas) and she told me that her brother, his wife, and his wife’s sister had gone to morocco a few months ago, and they came back from their trip without their sister—and still, they had no idea how she had disappeared, or what had happened to her. So the guided tour was a way of staying safe, though a compromise on freedom. (And yet, for the woman from Afghanistan, it was an expansion of freedom. It’s interesting to note what counts as freedom for different people. )
My favourite city in Morocco was really not a city, but a tiny town, and consequently, not very touristy. It was literally located at the foot of a mountain, and walking around was difficult because walkways were so steep and so narrow. The walls were painted the same hue as the sky, and in that sense, they seemed less like artificial man-made structures, but like extensions of nature.
Sevilla:
This weekend we went to Sevilla! I love it. Oddly enough, it reminds me of Main Street in Disneyland, only, much less touristy, bigger, and overall, way cooler. Our first stop was the Plaza de España. The Plaza de España was built for the world fair’s exhibition in 1912 (You know, the one in which all the nations participated, showing off their nifty technology and pronouncing that they  would never ever go to war again? That one.) Built into the smaller walls of the Plaza, there are tiled historical representations of important events for every city in Spain. (The tiled representation of Granada shows the conquest of the Alhambra by Isabel and Ferdinand). The plaza of España is also where a part of the “Attack of the Clones” movie was filmed. (They digitally altered the colors, though. Red brick and blue tile, I think, are too gorgeous to adequately convey the “creepy clone” feel that Lucas was going for.)
We also went to (surprise!) another cathedral! This one was special though, because it’s the biggest cathedral in the world. Well, according to Adalucians. There are some people in Barcelona who think their cathedral is bigger. I think that since Barcelona has the best soccer team though, that its only fair that Sevillans get to call their cathedral the biggest. Anywho. Christopher columbus’ grave is there, and so is a huge tower called “la Giralda.” (pronounced, “hee-RAL-da!” It was built so that horses could get to the top; as such, there are no stairs, but ramps. (Apparently that’s STILL not easy enough to climb though; on our way down, we encountered a lady who wanted to know where the elevator was. Tsk tsk; young people these days...) Oh! I forgot. I also saw the biggest pearl in the world. It was made into the body of a cherub on an overly ornate gold crown. (I recognized it from a special on the history channel.) Although all the gold and diamonds look cool, the more I visit palaces and cathedrals, the more I wonder what the world would be like if artwork and luxury had always been defined not by the material used, but by the skill of the artist, or the usefulness of the art to the community. Maybe then we could melt it all down and use it to buy people homes in Bangladesh. (Just a thought. Feel free to send me an angry email with a counter-opinion.)
 After chillaxin’ in the hotel for our siesta, playing cards and the like, we went out for a walk by the river. The sunset was amazing, playing over the water and spilling out into the sky. Granada, although it is nifty in other respects, has neither rivers nor viewable sunsets. (All the buildings are too tall for that.) Adding in all the trees, the green things, the wide open streets, the green things, the trees, the more green things, the sky, it is easy to understand why locals of Sevilla believe their city to be the center of Andalucía.
After a long and desperate search for dinner, some of us went out to check out Sevilla at night. Unfortunately, things close, so there wasn’t a whole lot to do. (Not that we were looking for a nightclub, but it was a little odd that it was a Saturday night and we had difficulties finding an open bar.) Eventually, SUCCESS! And first teacup of Irish coffee. (Them Irish knew what they were doing.) We had a ton of fun just chatting, sipping our coffee, and telling stories. I think it was extra fun for me because I got an important phone call from home, too! (yay!!)
The next day, We went to the “Real Alcazar,” the palace of Isabel and Ferdinand after they’d conquered Granada. Although the architecture was nifty, the Alhambra would most definitely destroy it in an arm-wrestling competition.
Most of the rest of our trip to Sevilla was fairly American-ized: TEX-MEX for lunch! score! In Granada, there is very little idea of what “Mexican food” really is. One time when I went to a Mexican restaurant, I ordered a “quesadilla” (a word that seems to be a derivative of the word “queso,” meaning “cheese,”), and when I got it, it had about everything in it BUT a tortilla and cheese. ) Very pleasing. Plus we visited a Starbucks. (Personally, I like Spanish coffee better—but they had REAL English breakfast tea! That was exciting.)
Photos submitted by Karly, Granada, Fall 2007
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