My Weekend in Valencia

This past weekend, I went to Valencia! It was pretty wonderful, although I actually had a bit of a hiccup at the beginning of the trip because I lost my ticket. . . Despite that horribleness, the weekend was perfect. Taylor, Meghan, Cadence (girls from OU) and I ate helado, laid out at the beach, tramped around the historical center of the city, walked around and gazed at the incredible architecture of the ciudad de ciencias y arte museum, and met some of Taylor's spanish friends to eat and have drinks!

El museo del torre

the fountain directly outside of our hostel

The landscape on the way to Valencia from Madrid

A Beautiful tree in Valencia

 Within the Reina Sofia Museum of Art

 Picasso

 A touristy Square in Madrid

 Each painting is of a different mythological god

 The Invisible Man

 A Weird Street Performance

 On the way to el Rastro

A Spanish Pigeon!!

The Second Week

My second week has flown by. Everyday in Spain gets a little more fun and goes by a little bit more quickly. A lot of the people in my program talk about how they miss Dr. Pepper and the U.S. in general, but I don't miss anything (except the people). I think I am adapting very well since my room, my host family, and Alcalá all feel very homey already. Alcalá is a really great city. When I was looking up study abroad programs, I immediately thought I would prefer one of the big beach cities like Valencia or Barcelona, but I really love how safe and simple, yet historical and beautiful, Alcalá is.
In school, I am taking Comparison Between the U.S. and Spain and Advanced Spanish and they are both very rewarding classes. In the comparison class, I am learning a TON about the history of Spain and the U.S. (Meama will like that) and in advanced Spanish, I am with a lot of girls that I really like and we are reading a great spanish novel, Sabor a chocolate.
This week, I also finally found a great place to go climb. It took a lot of navigating maps, subways, and busses, but I now know of a small but awesome bouldering gym that has really nice locals. Hopefully now that I know some locals, I can go out and see how the outdoor climbing in Spain is!
This weekend, I had a really fun dinner with some girls from the group and then today, we went to the famous Madrid fleamarket, el rastro, and the Reina Sofia Museum of Art. At the rostro, I got a couple of gifts, and at the Reina Sofia Museum of Art, I saw some really beautiful Picasso and Salvador Dali pieces. I couldn't take any pictures of Picasso's Guernica, but it was really impressive. It is huge and much more detailed than I had previously thought. On the wall next to it, there were some photos of Guernica as it was being created, and one things that is so interesting is that Guernica actually went through multiple, radical transformations from Picasso's first drawings on the huge canvass. It was like the painting had its own life story and was the culmination of Picasso's different thoughts on the tragedy that it represents.
Next weekend, after midterms at school, hopefully, I will be able to go the Barcelona to enjoy the beach, the architecture of Gaudí, and the famous Las Ramblas Street.
More pictures are slowly but surely on their way. . .

El Escorial y El Palacio del Pardo

Our first field trip was this past Friday. We visited El Escorial  and El Palacio del Pardo. El escorial was amazing. It used to be a monastery, castle, fortress, and tomb. The location of Escorial is breathtaking. It is in a mountainous region of Spain not far from Madrid. Directly behind El Escorial are beautiful, tree-covered mountains. Below Escorial is a small town (all with orange roofs) nestled around a large church. Outside of the town, there is nothing but hills, a lake, and in the distance, you can see the four skyscrapers of Madrid. Photography was prohibited so I got these photos from the internet, but I made sure to pick things that I actually saw.

 This is a picture of the tombs, which are on the lower level of escorial and contain almost all of Spain's kings and his close relatives. There was even a room reserved for dead infants of the kings.

 

This is of the church inside escorial. It was breathtaking, especially the ceiling, which was the tallest in all of escorial and contained intricate paintings of angels on vaulted ceilings.

 This is of the library which had such old globes that one of them showed California as a gigantic island off of the coast of the U.S.

 This is an example of the paintings on vaulted ceilings that is so impressive.

 Los jardínes

This is a picture to give you an idea of the size of escorial.
 Muy bonito, no?


El Palacio del Pardo was the home of Francisco Franco Bahamonde, one of the most infamous kings of Spain. This palace was actually used mainly for hunting trips until Franco lived there. Because it was in a part of Spain that gets very cold and because it is much smaller than most palaces, it was not the "ideal palace" for Franco. But Franco did a lot of things differently than other kings and his is one of the only bodies not in the tomb of Escorial. Instead, he demanded that he be buried in a valley. But inside the palacio del pardo, everything is extremely opulent. Everything is covered in gold, tapestries designed to look like paintings line every wall (which is actually a trick to keep the palace warmer), and there were the most beautiful chandeliers I have ever seen.

 The ceiling here is actually a new addition.

 Many of the tapestries are related to hunting

A few other interesting facts I learned on my tour of the palacio del pardo:

1. They used to dress boys and girls in very feminine dresses until the boy reached the age of about 7. In paintings of the children, a red or a blue rose would signify the sex of the child.
2. Franco had one of the first televisions in Spain, quite a few years later than they were introduced in the U.S.
3. Franco and his wife slept on two twin beds separated from each other by a couple of inches.

El Sabado al Parque

This past Saturday, I went to the city's main park for an annual festival. Here are my pictures

el amor!

I actually think that flamenco dresses are rather clownish, but they do have their own charm