Everyday Life in Spain: Part 1--Food and Daily Schedule (plus an update about Nicar!)

To me, the things that happen day to day are just that, things that I am used to and that are just part of a routine. I don’t think to write about them because they already seem pretty normal to me, but I’ve realized that those are the things that most people are probably most curious about. I’ll start by telling you about my daily schedule and the food we eat, as our daily schedule sort of revolves around meal times.

My class day begins usually at 9:30 each morning, and goes until 1:50 at the latest. Before school, we eat a small breakfast of ColaCao (like hot chocolate, it’s mixed with warm milk, and I love it) and either toast with butter and jam, galletas (cookies/crackers, but more like cookies), or muffins. The muffins, or “magdalenas,” are my favorite. It’s not common here to snack between meals, but I can’t make it to lunch without a snack (most of the American students have a hard time with that), so I typically take crackers or a mandarin orange with me to eat between classes. Our classes run for an hour each, and we could have up to 4 in one morning, although typically we have less than that.

At 1:50 my roommate and I walk back home (a 35 minute walk, it’s longer if you’re really hungry!) for lunch. Our host family eats at 1:30, and then our host mom sets the table for us and waits for us to get home. Lunch is the biggest meal of the day in Spain, consisting usually of 2 courses and then a dessert or fruit. In our house, we typically have a soup of some sort as our first course, and then some type of meat and red peppers as our second course. Then, for dessert, we have our choice of fruit (I prefer pears, but the oranges are extremely good, too). It was hard to get used to having fruit for dessert, but now I think I will eat fruit after my meals when I return to the states. Interesting how that works! We also have bread for every meal, just cut from a giant loaf that sits in the middle of the table. We always drink water, too, which was also hard to get used to. They drink milk usually only at breakfast, because they don’t drink fresh, cold milk like we do in Wisconsin! Their milk is processed so that it lasts for a long time and doesn’t need to be refrigerated before it’s opened, and I think that’s strange! It is packaged in boxes, so you can buy boxes of milk in bulk.

After lunch is “siesta,” which seems to be pretty well-known around the world. From the hours of 2ish until 5ish, all of the stores (with the exception of maybe a grocery store and the kiosks that are on the streets) close so that their employees can go home to eat lunch and rest. After siesta, most of the stores reopen until 8:00 or so. I usually take a little bit of a nap, and then around 5 venture back out to take a walk and window shop, or to explore a part of town I haven’t seen before. I return to my apartment by 7:30, as we eat dinner between 7:45 and 8.

Dinner is typically a smaller meal than lunch, but in our house it’s usually about the same size. Much like lunch, we have a soup as our first course, and our second plate consists of salad and another food, like fried ham and cheese sandwiches, tortilla española, croquetas, or empanadillas. I think that dinner is usually my favorite meal, because I have really come to like all of those foods!

After dinner is when most young people get ready and go out on the town for a drink or, in some cases, lots of drinks. I usually prefer to stay in on school nights and watch TV with my host parents and do homework. Even on the weekends, when it is typical to stay out literally all night (until 6:30 or so, as the discotecas here don’t even open until around 3), I am more commonly found sleeping safe and sound in my room. The night life here is probably the thing that, as of now, I will miss most. But the night life consists of more than partying---every night, people of all ages, all of your friends and neighbors, are out going for walks and gossiping and playing in parks. They think it is very silly that after work and school in the states, that we just go home. And now when I return I will think that it’s silly, too!

The doctors told Leo and Nicar today that the source of his pain is a herniated disk in his back, and that he will be having surgery. The date of surgery is yet to be known. This is good because instead of just taking pain medication for weeks and weeks, he will hopefully have a solution to the problem and be able to recover and get back to normal life. (That is, if the surgery is soon, and I'm not entirely sure how likely that is.) Leo hasn't mentioned anything yet about us leaving, so hopefully she is thinking that it won't be so bad having us there after all. Our host grandma is staying with us now but will leave on March 1st, and then my roommate and I will be traveling for our spring breaks, and things should calm down. Now it's tough because Grandma is very high maintenance, hehe. So yes, I am very glad to hear that hopefully things will get better from here on out, and that hopefully things will be back to normal (and healthy) soon. I really appreciate all your thoughts and prayers! He appreciates them, as well.

Until next time, hasta luego!

how time flies

I definitely planned to be updating this a little more often than I have, but time is going fast and access to the internet is a little more scarce than I had planned! But anyway, here I am with a little bit of an update.

Currently, times are a little tough because my host dad, Nicar, is in the hospital. He's had a really bad pain in his leg for about two weeks now, and went into the hospital on Saturday so that he's there for all the testing they want to do, so that they can give him strong medication, and so he'll be a lot more comfortable than he would be at home. Depending on what the results of his tests are, it is possible that my roommate and I will have to move to a new host family. This would be devastating for us both. We are hoping for Nicar's quick recovery so that he will no longer be in pain and so that we can stay with this family that we've grown to love so much in such a short period of time. Keep him in your thoughts and prayers!

We took a trip for school this past weekend to the ruins of two different castles and to a museum of Roman Villas, which includes the actual excavated remains of a Roman Villa that dates back to the later period of the Roman Empire (when the Romans lived in this region of Spain). The castles were cool, but not nearly as cool as the Roman Villa! The original mosaics are still on the floors of the villa that has been excavated--it was just incredible. I really enjoyed it. I have a few pictures from the trip but not many, so I will put them up when I get a good selection of pictures from random times and places. Our next school trip is to Salamanca, the weekend after this coming one.

We have two and a half weeks of school left before our week of midterm exams, and then we have two weeks of spring break. I will keep everyone updated about my host dad and about my living situation.

Hasta Luego, and GO BARACK! ;)

you ain't much if you ain't dutch :)

Whew! What a vacation! I have now returned from Brussels and Amsterdam and am feeling strangely glad to be back “home” in Valladolid.

The trip began in the wee hours of Thursday morning when Katie, Ashley, and I took a three hour bus ride to the Madrid Airport, waited in the airport for a few hours until our flight left at 7:20, and then took a bus from the Brussels airport (the tiny one which is about an hour out of town, not the convenient big international one) into the city to find our hostel. After almost 12 hours of traveling and not sleeping, we were very glad to see that our hostel was very clean and comfortable! The weather that night in Brussels was extremely gross—windy, cold, and rainy—but we braved it anyway in order to get our first taste of such a beautiful city. We had our first Belgian chocolates and hot chocolate (you should try this at home…put chunks of chocolate into the bottom of a mug, steam milk, pour it over the chocolate, and then mix it. Oh heavens, is it delicious.), and then returned to our hostel to get a good night of sleep. We roomed with two girls from Australia who had already been traveling for about three months, and they gave us good tips about staying in hostels.

The second day in Brussels was full of sightseeing, we saw a large Flea Market, the Manneken Pis statue, the Palace of Justice, Delirium (the bar that holds the world record for number of beers available, 2004 different kinds from all around the world), several comic walls (Brussels is the comic book capital of the world, and the home of the Smurfs), and the Atomium. We also didn’t have a problem finding more chocolate stores, and we ate delicious Lebanese pitas for lunch. That night we roomed with two guys from Brazil (who spoke Portuguese and thought it was funny that we couldn’t understand them). We never found out their names, but we decided that Raul and Javier sounded appropriate!

The next morning we got up mighty early and hopped on the metro in order to get to Belgium’s Royal Palace and to the headquarters of the European Union. We then took a bus with a tour group to Brugges, a little city about an hour away from Brussels. It was the most adorable city—we ate our first genuinely Belgian waffles, did some shopping, saw Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, and ordered hot chocolate to go at a restaurant that has a menu including 44 different kinds of hot chocolate. On the way back on the bus we chatted with a man from Chicago, and encouraged him to make his children study abroad. Back at the hostel we made frozen pizzas for dinner, and then fortunately had the opportunity to meet three hilarious guys, one from the States (Texas) and two from Holland. We went with them to Delirium for several hours and had a great time, and then they rode the train with us the next day to Amsterdam. We have no doubt that we will see them again in the future. That night, because Raul and Javier had left, we roomed with two (drunk) girls from Barcelona.

After about four hours of sleep we boarded our train to Amsterdam, and arrived there about three hours later. From there we took a tram to our hostel, and after we settled in (and napped) we headed to the Anne Frank House. It was a long walk from our hostel, but it was way more than worth it. The museum includes the warehouse in which Otto Frank worked, and then the secret annex in which the family hid. It was so emotional. The secret apartment is empty—the Nazis took all of their possessions when the annex was discovered, and when it came time to turn the house into the museum, Otto Frank requested that it not be reconstructed; that it stay as it looked when they lost everything they had. The museum includes letters that were written from the Frank family to relatives, orders that Meep sent out for food and other supplies for the family, and Anne’s original diary. The only things about the apartment that have remained from when they lived there are markings on the wall to show how tall the girls were, and pictures from magazines and newspapers that Anne cut out to decorate her room. There really aren’t words to describe how it felt to walk behind the bookshelf and into a place where a family lived in hiding—so afraid of the outside world and what would happen if they were to be discovered. I am very glad that I had the opportunity to visit it and to gain a new motivation to fight for what is right and what is fair in the world.

We also went to the Red Light District, which was definitely an experience and a half. While there are other places in which prostitution is legal, Amsterdam is truly proud of that fact and flaunts it at every possible opportunity. Surprisingly enough, we didn’t feel uncomfortable or unsafe walking down the main street in the Red Light District, and considered it a learning experience! It is definitely, DEFINTELY, something that you would never even dream of seeing in the United States.

On our last full day in Amsterdam we visited the Van Gogh Museum, in which more than 200 of Van Gogh’s works are displayed. Starry Night isn’t there, but The Potato Eaters is, as well as Sunflowers, The Bedroom, and most of his self portraits that are very recognizable. It is a very cool museum—it displays his art but also tells all the stories behind his works, what inspired him, and what his tragic flaws were. While I have studied Van Gogh before, I still learned a lot and thoroughly enjoyed it. For the rest of the day we just wandered the streets of Amsterdam, shopping and just enjoying ourselves. When we went back to the Anne Frank Museum to visit the gist shop again, we saw the boys from Brazil that we roomed with in Brussels. What a coincidence! That night in Amsterdam we roomed with three boys from Australia—one of whom, Nathaniel, went with us the next morning to the train station and waited with us until our train came. He taught us a lot about Australia, had an adorable accent, and was extremely cute! J

Tuesday was a long day of travel—we took a three hour train to Brussels, an hour bus to the airport, a two and a half hour flight to Madrid, and a two and a half hour bus ride back to Valladolid. Finally seeing my bed here at my house was such a nice feeling! While I am very glad to be back in Valladolid, I am very happy that the entire trip went smoothly and that we accomplished so much. We could have gone to a beach (like most of our classmates), but instead we took on two new countries, three new cities, two new languages (French and Dutch), rode on five different modes of transportation, had nine different roommates from three different countries, saw several incredible landmarks, made new friends, and became much more comfortable using a map and asking for directions! We encountered so many generous and nice people, as well as some people who didn’t hesitate to makes jokes about George Bush. All in all, we learned so much, had a ton of fun, and are ready for our next adventure!

The pictures are on Webshots! Hasta Luego!