pictures - Ronda and soccer game

Thanksgiving, Ronda, Betis soccer game

On Thursday I took a nap after class, then showered, changed and went to a restaurant down the river. There was a big room where everyone socialized for half an hour with wine, beer, cheese and ham. Most of the students and some professors and guides and people who work for my study abroad program were there. It was about 200 people. We ate dinner in a huge room and had turkey, mashed potatoes, shrimp salad, apple pie and lots of wine. Some people toasted, I called home and talked to a few people eating Thanksgiving dinner in Oconomowoc – it sounded like everyone was having a great time at home. People slowly left and headed to a club about a mile away. Seven of us piled in someone’s little car, most people had to walk or take a taxi. We got more free drinks at the club, there was a little fashion show going on, and loud music. It was fun to have everyone together for a night. And it was a really late night.

On Friday I didn’t do much, slept, did homework, went for a run and went to see a movie at the big mall in Sevilla. On Saturday I went to Ronda, a town in the mountains two hours east of Sevilla. Almost everyone I know has already been there, and they all said it was one of the most beautiful places they have ever seen. Three of us who hadn’t gone there yet decided that we had to go. It’s a big town that has a deep gorge cutting through the middle and the town ends at a cliff. It’s in the middle of nowhere, and it was cold and windy but since it was sunny and we walked a lot we stayed warm most of the time. There are three stone bridges spanning the gorge, the oldest bullfight ring in Spain (it is the birthplace of modern bullfighting), and several small museums and gardens. We walked around the new and old parts of the town, crossed all three bridges, took some pictures at the cliff, went shopping (I got lots of little gifts for my family for Christmas - I have to get a lot!), walked to a farm to see the sheep and goats up close, and got coffee and pastries. I slept on the bus ride back, and then went out again.

On Sunday I did some homework, I’m writing papers on the Western Sahara, Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar and his first film Tesis, and the Andaluz dialect. After a paella lunch at 3:30 pm I went to the Betis soccer stadium to see a game against Cádiz, a local rival. It reminded me of football games at Madison, the streets were mobbed with people walking to the stadium, cars driving around and honking with flags, and people drinking everywhere. It was perfect fall weather for the game, and the sun set around halftime. Betis scored 7 minutes into the game and had some very close shots. Cádiz scored on a penalty kick in the second half and the game finished tied 1-1. The atmosphere was similar to a football game, a huge stadium full of people wearing the team colors and doing the songs and cheers, and I was used to all of vulgar language from the UW games. The fans were a bit more reckless than in the US. The section for the visiting fans is surrounded by a six-foot tall glass wall, to keep them separated and somewhat safe from the home team fans. People throw lots of stuff and shoot off fireworks and throw rolls of toilet paper on to the field. A group of little kids one row ahead of us were making paper airplanes and throwing trash the whole game, sometimes they tossed stuff over the balcony to the level 50 feet below us. A few rows behind us a bunch of teenagers were shooting off bottle rockets, every once in awhile one would zoom right over our heads. The rowdy fans behind the goals set off some really loud firecrackers. There were lots of Cádiz fans there, and since we sat next to their section, a lot of people nearby threw lots of trash at them. I need to learn the cheers and go back to another game. Later that night I watched some american football games at a bar nearby, it was weird to see football again, I hadn’t watched a football game since the Super Bowl last year. I hear the Packers stink this year.

So, four more days of class, and then the Canary Islands…

Trini's Birthday party (photos)

My host sister, Trini, turned 12 today. The twins, Bernardo and Esperanza, turn 14 on Sunday.
We made pizzas and had ice cream cake. There was lots of cheering and clapping, they went a little crazy as the gifts came out (I'll try to get some video of that online later). And then we took tons of photos with my camera and the family's old camera. Trini got a lot of toys and clothes, and a cell phone from her godfather. Click on the title above for a link to the pictures. Everyone was home tonight, a rare occurence.

Spain is commemorating (or celebrating) the 30th anniversary of the death of Franco and the start of King Juan Carlos I's reign. He is still the king today. Franco died on November 20, 1975, and Juan Carlos was reinstated as King on November 22 and helped lead Spain to a democratic government. So there is a lot of reflection and praise of Juan Carlos as Spain looks back at the first 30 years as a constitutional monarchy, and there is little mention of Franco in the news, just the fact that he died 30 years ago.

Thanksgiving week

The flea market was huge. It rained lightly for a little bit and there were tons of people there. There was some fresh fruit and vegetables and nuts. Most of it was clothing of all kinds, scarves, bags, shoes and pirated DVDs and video games, including pirated copies of movies currently in theatres. I’d have to say Lisbon’s flea market had the coolest stuff -lots of old things and collectibles. Anyways, I bought two scarves and three pairs of colorful, striped socks, all as gifts for my family. I have to stockpile small gifts, the 11 year-old, Trini, turns 12 tomorrow and the twins turn 14 in one week. Then there are three more birthdays in December, plus Christmas. I’ll need a dozen gifts for Christmas alone. Plus some gifts for Martha and her family. Martha wanted a red Universidad de Sevilla shirt so I got one today.

I’ve been trying to explore some more. Besides the flea market, I’ve wandered around my neighborhood. There are lots of stores and every single one is really small. It’s interesting how there are so many specialized little stores that repeat themselves. It’s not uncommon to see two pharmacies or two barber shops on the same block. A few blocks from my house there is a supermarket and around the corner there are two more supermarkets across the street from each other. Instead of giant malls or department stores, there are necktie shops and leather shops and little shoe stores. So you have go to four different stores to a buy a tie, a shirt, shoes, and a belt.

On Saturday night Sevilla beat Betis 1-0 on a penalty kick. It was a very close game. I watched the first half at home and the second half at two different bars. As soon as the game ended, I could hear car horns and fireworks and people yelling all over the city. People sang the Sevilla FC song over and over everywhere. A lot of American students have friends or family visiting this week over their Thanksgiving vacation. My program has organized a Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant near the big park in Sevilla. We’ve heard there is free wine and everyone goes out together afterwards. So it sounds like the best of both worlds, an American feast and the Spanish nightlife. I’ll let you know how Thanksgiving in Spain goes and hopefully will have some pictures to post. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in the US.

photos from Cordoba

quick update

I spent the day in Córdoba last Saturday. I'll get pictures online soon. I've been really busy this week and the internet is not very reliable. As soon as the midterms ended we started working on final papers and projects. Today I had class starting at 10 am and I am finally sitting down in my room in front of my computer at 12 pm. Tonight I went to the other big University in Seville, the University of Pablo Olavide. its about 15 km outside the city. We went there to watch a movie and meet some spanish students. I got back home at 11:30. And now I have to finish some homework before class tomorrow.

Spain tied tonight in their soccer game, which was enough for them to officially advance to the World Cup in Germany this summer.

The euro is falling, its now worth 1.1679 US dollars. It used to be about 1.25 US dollars, everything is a little cheaper now.

We had a meeting on Tuesday for the year-long students. There are about 30-40 of us, including the other programs. We get to plan an overnight trip with a sizeable budget. We brainstormed a bunch of ideas and narrowed it down to three to be voted on later, Salamanca, Valencia, and Toledo. I'm hoping for Salamanca, the only of the three that I haven't been to. We were told that our program has more than twice as many students in the spring. I can't imagine that many students, there are a lot right now.

This weekend I may finally make it to Sevilla's flea market. Sevilla's two soccer teams play each other on Sunday, which is always a big game. Another big game will be this Saturday, Real Madrid versus Barcelona.

pictures from Copenhagen

Copenhagen

I haven’t had much to time to deal with pictures or the blog. I was working on getting everything organized on my computer and I had midterms.

Well, Copenhagen was fun. I took a taxi to the Sevilla airport at 6 am on Friday and flew to Madrid, it’s only a one hour flight. I had six hours before my flight to Copenhagen so I took the metro downtown and walked to the Palacio Real. I had not seen it yet, I didn’t have time when I was in Madrid last month. It was big and up on a hill with a good view of the suburbs. I took a panorama picture of the square in middle of the palace. There weren’t many people there that early. I saw an art exhibit and another exhibit on the history of the European Union. A display showing all of the euro coins was cool to see as each country has their own design. Italy’s one euro coin has Da Vinci’s geometric man on it and the Greek coins had some cool designs featuring Greek gods and goddesses.

I went back to the airport and flew to Copenhagen. I saw a beautiful sunset from above the clouds somewhere over France. I started looking for the metro at the Copenhagen airport to take it to the hostel where Mom and Dad were. I asked, there is no metro, but there is a train that takes you to a metro station a few miles away. So I bought a train ticket, luckily they took euros and not just Danish kroner, and followed the directions of the guy who sold me the ticket. One train came that was almost empty, a few people got off but no one who was waiting got on this train so I decided not to get on either. A few minutes later another train came and everyone got on that one, so I followed the crowd. I was waiting for the stop with the metro station, it was only a few minutes away. The train didn’t stop for 10…15…20 minutes. I started to wonder if this was the wrong train. I looked at the map of the train’s route on the wall and realized that the stops scrolling along on a screen in the train were names of towns in southern Sweden. I looked at my cell phone to check the time. It said I was roaming on Sweden’s network (I was on Denmark’s network earlier). I got a text message from my cell phone provider, it said “Welcome to Sweden, you can call Spain for the same rates…” in Spanish. This was not a good sign. I thought that everyone at the Copenhagen airport was going to Copenhagen. How could all these people be going to Sweden? I got off at the first stop. I was in Malmö Sweden. Oops, I went mistakenly went to the wrong country. I waited in the cold rain for the next train going the other direction. I didn’t have a ticket but the ticket lady just laughed at me when I told her that I went the wrong way.

So I got to the metro station, the right one, in Denmark. I had a hard time figuring out the machine that sells metro tickets. Then when I got to the metro stop near the hostel, all I could see was empty parking lots and dark buildings. I was in the middle of nowhere and there were no street signs or people around. I was going to just sit down and wait for someone to walk by, but then Mom and Dad showed up. Por fin!

They showed me the giant hostel and our big room, I dropped my stuff off, and I drooled at the new red Saab parked outside. We took the metro downtown and walked through the main plaza, sort of a Danish Times Square. We went to a wide cobblestone street that had a canal full of boats running down the middle of the street. We looked at every single restaurant before finally picking one. It was busy so we had a Carlsberg in the bar while waiting for a table. The food was really good. Herring prepared four different ways, lemon sole, a huge pile of mussels, and pepper steak (elk?). Tons of young people were out having a good time. People were drinking in the streets too, it felt just like Spain, except a lot colder.

On Saturday we walked all around Copenhagen after driving through the suburbs for half an hour. We saw all the shops, ate some falafels and shawarma, had coffee. It was cold all day long. We looked for restaurants in the University neighborhood. On Sunday we drove to Roskilde, a town that was an important city when the Vikings ruled 1000 years ago. There were a few old Viking ships recovered from the seafloor and some replicas of ships. We had more good food and chocolate in Roskilde. And then I went home. Scandinavia is really cool, I’ll have to go back in the summer sometime and take advantage of the warm weather and all the lakes and forests and old towns.

And then I had midterms this week. Spain plays Slovakia tonight to qualify for the World Cup. The Spanish prince and his wife had their first child last week, a baby girl that they named Leonor. Pictures of the baby are all over the news. An amendment to the Constitution is being discussed to allow females to inherit the throne. Right now the oldest male inherits the throne, a woman only does if she has no brothers.

pictures from Portugal

more pictures from Portugal

Portugal

I can’t believe that it’s November already.

Last Friday morning we left for Lisbon. We rented a little four-door car - it was cozy with five people and our backpacks. We drove through the countryside, lots of green rolling hills and farms, old stonewalls, cows and bulls. It rained for an hour or so. It was fun to go on a little road trip and see Portugal. We parked our car in a parking garage when we got to Lisbon. The bridge going across the Rio Tejo was cool, its big and red and looks like the Golden Gate bridge. The first hostel we looked at was nice and only 10 euros a person per night so we decided to stay there.

We wandered around the city and took a street elevator and planned out what we wanted to see and do at the patio at the top of the elevator. We saw the downtown, some plazas and a church. Lisbon is full of really colorful old buildings and the sidewalks and plazas are all little white tiles with designs painted all over the tiles. The streetcars are cool too. It was rainy and a little cold. We went to our first pastry shop, they are really good.

On Saturday we went to the old Arab quarter, Alfama, which is a bunch of narrow old streets in a hilly part of the city. We got lost looking for the weekly flea market there. We eventually found it and shopped around for a while. I got an old Telepizza pin, a red shirt that says “Bombeiros” (firefighters), and some old postcards. It was a good flea market.

We bought rolls, turkey, cheese and yoghurt at a grocery store and had a picnic in a park on top of a hill. It was chilly and really windy. Then we went to the São Jorge castle, which overlooks the city. There are some cannons and an old castle that we wandered around. Great views of the city and the river too. We then took a streetcar to a neighborhood called Belém that is a ways down the river. There’s a huge monastery there, Monesterio de São Jerónimo, an old tower on the river and a famous pastry shop we had heard about. The pastry shop was huge, it probably sat at least 200 people and we still had to wait for a table. Everyone gets the pudding cakes there so we tried those, with some powdered sugar and cinnamon on top, so delicious. It rained on us pretty hard as we walked back to the streetcar.

We went back to the hostel and then went downtown to shop and eat at a restaurant that had tanks full of huge crabs and lobsters that we saw the first day. The seafood in Lisbon is cheap and really good. We feasted on bread with tuna and sardine pâté, a plate of grilled salmon with steamed vegetables, and some rice dishes with salmon, crab legs, prawns, lobster tail, mussels, oysters and a couple bottles of wine. It tasted as good as it sounds. We were given bibs and tools to crack the crab legs and pluck out the meat. We also split two desserts, black forest cake and vanilla ice cream with berries. It was a ton of fresh seafood and ended up costing only 15 euros a person (including drinks and dessert!). We were at the restaurant for almost three hours, we closed it down.

On Sunday we went to Sintra in the mountains nearby. It was a nice short drive. The mountains were really foggy, we were up in the clouds. It was chilly and very wet. We parked our car in the town and hiked up the mountain to the national palace and gardens at the top. The hike was longer than we expected (over an hour), but it was worth it. At the top we ran into three other students from Sevilla who also went to Lisbon for the weekend. We saw the palace that the royal family used; it’s a big museum now. There is probably an awesome view from the palace but all we could see was dense clouds.

We took the bus down the mountain which was a crazy ride. The road is really windy and narrow and everyone got tossed around. We had a picnic lunch in town and drove west towards the beach to catch the sunset near Cabo de Roca. The waves were huge and there was a guy trying, unsuccessfully, to surf. It was a cloudy orange sunset.

We drove back to Lisbon, hung out in the hostel for a bit and then went to Bairro Alto, the neighborhood on a hillside in the city that is full of bars and clubs. We went to a jazz club, ate, had some wine and then went to a Mexican bar for nachos and margaritas. We had to climb a lot of stairs to get there.

On Monday we got into our car and drove to the Oceanario (aquarium) on the river. It was built for the World Expo that was held in Lisbon in 1998. It’s the largest aquarium in Europe and it’s inside a very strange-looking building on the water. It looks like an oil station out in the ocean. There was one huge tank full of all kinds of fish and sharks and one giant manta ray that had about a six-foot wingspan and was really fast. I got some pictures of it but they are a little blurry because the thing was swimming so fast. There was a scuba diver in there too feeding some of the fish. There were other areas recreating the Indian, Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic Oceans. The coolest things we saw were the penguins, some sea otters, fluorescent coral, a fish that looked like a leafy seaweed plant, sand-colored flat fish (really weird looking fish with very effective camouflage), and bioluminescent fish (even though I couldn’t actually see them – it was just a dark tank with green lights flashing all around).

When we left the aquarium we drove across a really long bridge and headed south on a little highway along the coast. It was a long, windy drive. We got to Lagos, a beach town on the southern coast of Portugal around 8 pm. We got some food for dinner at a little grocery store and cooked in the kitchen of our hostel. It was a great place that a bunch of people stayed at for a few days in September. We walked around Lagos on Tuesday morning and saw the harbor and some of the beaches. There are tons of rocks and cliffs that form little coves and grottoes along the coast. Then we drove west to Sagres, a town in the southwestern corner of Portugal. It’s the westernmost point of Europe and was the edge of the known world until Columbus discovered the Americas. There’s a huge fortress on the coast and some very impressive cliffs. The waves were big too, it was cool to watch them pound the rocks over and over and create lots of foam.

We got back to Sevilla around 6 pm. There was a big soccer match in Sevilla, Betis beat Chelsea 1-0. Betis hadn’t won in a while and Chelsea is one of the best teams in Europe so it was exciting. We had no class on Monday and Tuesday was All Saints Day so we had a really long weekend. It’s nice to be back in Sevilla, its familiar and its nice to hear Spanish again.

So just two days of class this week and then I’m off to Copenhagen on Friday.