Emily in Spain

I'm doing an internship here in Spain where my friend Evan and I work in the University of Alcala's press office. It's pretty laid back, we do interviews with other international students and simple stuff like that, but there are some big perks to it. For one, we work in a beautiful, old building called Colegio de San Illdefenso. It has a lot of history, the front facade has greek, religious, and royal symbolism engraved all over it, and there are three separate courtyards within the walls of the building. You walk through the archway to enter the first courtyard, which has a fountain and all the offices and classrooms surronding it, then you walk straight through the next archway and there is the second courtyard, which also has a little cafe and flowers, as well as a couple more offices.

first courtyard

second courtyard
The last courtyard is only open for very, very special events, usually only during important graduations or when the king comes to hand out awards.
This building is where students used to present their studies hundreds of years ago. If there professors passed them, they would exit through a door into the courtyard and the town would celebrate and cheer you on. If you failed, then you would walk out another door and people would throw food at you, and then you had to dress up like a donkey and walk around the city as punishment. Seriously.
Anyway, Evan and I are suuuppppeeerr lucky that we get to work in the building because we got to see the king and queen of Spain come and give out a human right's award. We even got to sit in on the ceremony, which was pretty cool because there weren't a lot of people there.

king in the middle, queen wearing black to his left
Then as the king was leaving we accidentally got in the way of the press filming him exiting, and the secret service told us to move. Whoops.

get out of the way, kids! grrr

people trying to get a glimpse at royalty as they leave

Here are some videos from Barcelona.

This is my favorite, this man isn't part of the street performance, he just loves the music

Narrowly avoiding the protest

I think a group of students, singing a very American song oddly enough. You can catch their accents if you listen closely

Drummers putting on a show near the water

I've been looking forward to going to Barcelona more than any other city in Spain, and I was going with my entire MD group, and it was my birthday weekend, so the weekend was set to be magical. And yea, it was amazing, but we had to to go with our professor from MD, and he made every effort to make a beautiful, lively, interesting city complete hell. I could rant and rant and rant but I'll spare you- just know that he made two people cry because he was belittling and stressing them out so much. We eventually made up a game in which we got points every time he was a terd to us. I got six points in less than a couple of hours.
Moving on, Barcelona is beautiful, even with bad weather it was a really cool city. We got to take the nice, high-speed trains there. It's the best way to travel- comfortable seats, movie, complimentary candy, no turbulence or traffic. Planes are fast but I seem to always choose flights with lots of turbulence. And bad music. Iberia airline always plays horrible elevator-music covers. One flight we got a constant stream of an odd version of "Over the Rainbow." On the way to Amsterdam it was an instrumental version of the Christmas song "Sleigh Ride." Yea, the song that goes "our cheeks are nice and rosy and comfy cozy are weeeee..." I don't know why.
Anywho, Barcelona. It definitely has a hippie vibe, even though it was very touristy.

We got there on Thursday night, and Surprise! a riot was awaiting us. The government here is trying to privatize the Spanish educational system, so it will be more like ours, and the students are just not having it. The girls in my group with TV's in their house said they were watching it on the news the night before, and that police officers were beating up students. And guess what?? Our hotel was literally right next to the University, so we got front row seats to that night's demonstration!!

view from the hotel room
How lucky, right? (Of course our professor had no idea about the violent unrest in the city, even though he yelled at us for not reading the newspapers more just weeks earlier. He also said it is better to not be informed at all than watch the news on tv, which is kind of insulting because -ahem- he has two broadcast journalism majors in his group. Sorry, sorry, glass half-full, glass half-full)
Friday and Saturday were jam-packed, we took a bus tour, saw parque guell, hit musuems, walked around, saw cathedrals, did a lot of Antoni Gaudi worship, deservedly.

apartment designed by Gaudi, supposed to be dragon-like

David, me at parque guell

Sagrada Familia, I hope they finish it in my lifetime
My birthday was great, too. The other 13 students in my group are all amazing, funny people so I coudn't not have fun. They even bought me some pastries, and candy, and beer, haha.
I'll be back in Barcelona this weekend actually for just a short while, because it is a stop on my ITALY TOUR (!!!) that I have planned for spring break. Can't wait to go see the city again. Also, more Barca pics in the gallery and some interesting news coming up...

Aight, then Friday the 20th my friends Kristen, David, and I went to Amsterdam for the weekend. It was the second time I've travelled outside of Spain, but if felt way different than Portugal. To be fair, everyone there speaks English, and pretty much all signs are in English as well, so it wasn't like we were completely culture-shocked but it was still cool.

part of the red light district
Amsterdam pretty much has no laws. We only saw two police officers the whole weekend, two guys in the red light district, standing literally feet from a girl in a window. The whole red light district was bizarre, but mostly sad.
Pretty much the whole city revolved around sex and drugs and tourists, so it was a little bit overwhelming at first. We were staying in a very touristy part of town, so once we walked down the beautiful canals a bit we hit more of the classy, cultural stuff. We saw the rijksmusuem and the Van Gogh musuem, both of which were my favorites since I've come to Europe. I have discovered that I really like art, but I still don't know a lot about it, and the musuems did a really good job explaining what is important about the paintings, the stories behind them, etc.
We also saw the Anne Frank house, some monuments, and my personal fave the Heineken brewery hehe. The place is like Disneyworld for beer lovers, they have holograms and rides and things like that, plus they give you 2 and a half glasses of free beer. At the end of the tour is bar where everyone stops to redeem there beers and hang for a sec, and we sat with these funny women from England. They had kids around our age and were there for the weekend with their husbands, and I think they were high when we were talking with them. They kept telling us to go to Moulin Rouge to watch a sex show, haha, but we skipped out on that.

Our hostel was one of the coolest parts of the trip, it was the most laid-back environments I've ever experienced. The reception desk was also a bar, to give you an idea of how relaxing the place was, and they had a separate room for smoking where everyone just chilled haha. And lots of students from all different countries were there, so I got to talk with a lot of random people, which was fun.
Overall good trip, I don't know how the city functions with all those baked people walking around, but kudos to Amsterdam for getting it done.

Yo, I've been doing a lot of travelling so I'm behind, here is what I've been doing...

I forgot to mention that I went to a bullfight two weekends ago, Sunday the 14th to be exact. It is something I knew I wanted to do, even though I was nervous about it. Going into it I thought I could handle it, but it was really sad. I went with my roommate and her boyfriend who was visiting (yea no worries I could write a novel on third-wheeling) and we didn't really enjoy it. Yes, it is a huge part of Spanish tradition and culture, but when it comes down to it, it is just inhumane.

bullfighting arena in Madrid

The bulls never really have a chance, I didn't know this but it's not just one bullfighter who has to kill the bull by himself, but rather there is a whole killing ritual and around 7 or 8 of them team up on the poor thing. The main guy does the final blows at the end, but they have three separate people run up and stab it in the back, and a guy on horseback who stabs it, it's very depressing. Plus they kill six of them, not just one like I thought.
I can't decide if I'm glad I went or not, it was stresssful more than it was fun, but like I said it is part of the culture. Poor little toros.

run away! run away!

This week is Maryland's spring break, so a bunch of people have visitors here, hence it is boyfriend week (semana de novios). It is also our first full week without classes in Alcalingua, and I haven't started my intership yet, so we've had a lot of downtime. It's great because I have been able to go into Madrid more often. Last week I went to the Prado for the second time, it's free after 6 oclock so it's great to go every once in a while for an hour or two, it's huge huge huge so I will need a couple trips to see it all.
Saturday Sarah, Navid, and I went to Retiro, which is like central park in Madrid, and we had a little picnic, took a nap, tossed a football (it was very obvious we were American.)
And then GRADUATION!

a couple of us marylanders, plus a swede and an australian
Yea, they actually give us diplomas for all of our "hard work." It's nice that now we only have one class twice a week, but I am actually going to miss it. Our teachers are great, they were so fun to joke around with and they helped us adjust to living in Spain. One day we got sidetracked in conversation class and ended up talking about ordering drinks and getting hit on at the bar the whole time. That's a pretty good indicator of how serious our classes were, but in case it is still not clear let me explain what we had to do for finals- two take-home tests, a 5 minute converstaion, and two tests that took less than half an hour to complete. And all you need to get is a 5 out of 10 in the Spanish grading system to get credit. Basically, it was the easiest 9 credits I've ever learned, but I have also learned more than in all my other Spanish classes combined. Love Spain, but I'm going to get my butt kicked when I go back and have to um, do actual work and, what is that thing called again? Oh right, studying. Yea can't wait.

It's been awhile since I've written, a lot has been going on. Here are the highlights...
Thursday the 26th we left Plaza Cervantes at midnight for Cadiz, which is a city in southern Spain. It was an erasmus trip, erasmus being the organization that students from Europe join to study in other countries. So erasmus trips are really cool because there are students from a bajillion different countries, on the trip I talked to people from Sweden, Germany, England, Ireland, Poland, France and a bunch of others I forget.
The trip was organized so we could experience Carnival, which is like Mardi Gras in the U.S., but it puts Mardi Gras to shame. It's a week long celebration (in Cadiz it is even longer because it extends past Fat Tuesday) and it is really intense. Everyone dresses up in costumes, and they don't play around. The costumes are amazing, and a lot of them are hysterical, there is a lot of drag going on haha. All of the bars close their doors and just set up tables outside on the street, so everyone just walks around and drinks all night long. And it's all ages, too, I saw some kids that had to be 5 or 6 running around at three in the morning, and the adults are very serious about their costumes. One of the best/strangest parts of the trip was our fairy god tranny. We were wondering around the streets looking for the beach, and we saw this guy with giant wings on dressed up as a fairy, like a 7 or 8 foot wingspan. Anyways he started walking in front of us and he literally led us to the beach, and stood there for a second, and then turned around and walked away, without saying a word.

the chicken got in the way of our fairy god tranny

The next weekend we went to Sevilla with erasmus, and I loved the city. It's probably the most beautiful and the most relaxing place I've ever been to. There is a ton of stuff do there, and we got a really good tour of the city. My favorite part was seeing Flamenco. My friend Evan has friends studying in Sevilla and they gave us directions to this under the radar place, it didn't even have a sign on the door. The woman dancing was so passionate, it felt very authentic.


plaza de espana

had to walk up 37 ramps to the top of a tower to get this view of the ciudad

Evan's friends took us to an American-themed bar, they have a shot for each state
I think that Madrid is tied with Sevilla for best city ever now.
We finished our finals for Alcalingua on Wednesday, which means now we only have our Don Quijote class on Mondays and Wednesdays, and fellow journalism major Evan and I will be doing an internship with the university's press office. We get to interview other foriegn students and write up a little blurb for the website, so I think it will be really fun. It's great how much time I will have now to enjoy Spanish life, bueno.

Here is a video of the flamenco, I think the older woman is her mom. I also have some more pictures of Sevilla in the gallery.