The Spanish Constitution and a Saint´s Birthday makes a long weekend

So I would like to begin with wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving and coming into a Happy Holidays. I hope you all had a lovely Turkey Day and one that you will remember for years to come. Sadly Thanksgiving is not celebrated in Spain so I had to go without this year. My mother here did make me a dish with bits of turkey in it which was a nice gesture and one that I greatly appreciated. Turns out turkey is a less the easy meat to find in Spain and the task of finding a whole one near impossible. If only Thanksgiving were celebrated with pig instead.

I am now a couple days past my three month anniversary here in Spain and doing well. Learning more everyday and doing my best to stay in an a completely English free environment. School is just fine and I have a great time with my classmates and teachers. Being able to listen to non-stop spanish for a 8 hours straight almost everyday is extremely helpful although mind numbing when it comes time to go home. I still have a great group of friends that I go out with every weekend and with them have started practice sessions in the week where we practice English and Spanish. Practice, Listen, Learn; my life.

This last Friday afternoon my family and I packed up and headed off on a six hour drive through the Basque Country and up into France where we spent 4 nights and 3 days in a ski resort. As my title explains I had another four day weekend this last week; something that was extremely appreciated after missing out on my normally scheduled Thanksgiving Break. My family thought it might be nice to get out of town for a bit and do some skiing so the French Pyrenees were decided upon. The weekend as a whole was a wonderful time and an amazing expierence that I won´t soon forget.

I don´t believe anyone I know would call me a ´ski bum´ nor one to often ´shred the knar´ like many of my fellow Bozemanites however I do take a certain pleasure out of skiing. My mother grew me up with the belief  that "if you can walk, you can ski," through which has left me with many fond memorizes of many a winter on the slopes of Bridger and Big Sky alike. Even though I lack the true intensity for the sport, a winter without skiing at least once would feel some how sacrilegious with the deeper fabric of me. For this I am extremely grateful that I was granted three days to indulge that need and even have an absolutely amazing time at it.

The resort itself was quite snug being placed high up in the Pyrenees so as to try and get some snow fall. It was filled to bursting with Spaniards for the long weekend and French coming up for the day. Turns out after listening to Spanish for 3 months then listening to continuous French for 3 days you get rather confused; don´t even know what your trying to understand anymore. The snow itself wasn´t quite as deep nor heavy as that in Montana but being that it is likely the only of it´s kind that I´m going to be seeing for the year, it made me very happy to be cold again.

So now after a wonderful long weekend I am back to Palencia and the good old same old. With the Holiday Season upon us I will be sure to fill you all in at a later date of the many customs and differences that seem to come with it in Spain. With that said I hope you all have an absolutely amazing holidays and as always I wish you all the best.

One last thing is that the world finals of Jai alai were oddly enough held in Palencia a little while ago. I will post a picture of the sport below if the name doesn´t look familiar (the pictures aren´t mine however), although I´m quite sure many of you have seen it on tv or somewhere else. It is a sport that came out of the Basque Country and involves slings a ball at a large wall at roughly 180 mph which then the opposing team has to catch. Its a crazy sport and one that I was lucky enough to be able to watch. If your not familiar with it I would advice copy and pasting the name into YouTube and watching for a bit; its wild.

Also will be putting in a couple of pictures from the Cathedral in Burgos and somethings Valladolid, the capital of Castilla y Leon. The cathedral is huge and completely full of old and very expensive catholic artifacts. The painting of the man all in white with the white horse is "El Cid", a hero in that he started the driving of the Moors out of Spain. Thought it was funny in how it portrays how well life must of been like in the 11th century.

Anyway that's all. I again hope you are all well and hope to hear from you soon.

Cody

A painting of Leonardo da Vinci´s

Weekend up North

Hey there everyone! So I´ve been in Spain a little over two months now. You´ll be happy to know that I am still alive and learning. Coming along on the language and learning a lot. They say it all doesn´t come together until the third month so we´ll see if that holds true.

Schools been great and the people in it are very nice and helpful with my Spanish. My teachers enjoy asking me questions to try and get the American view on different topics. I have to try and stay relatively caught up on the news back home because more often then naught the questions have to do with current events in America that I haven´t even heard about. Makes you feel kind of silly when foreigners know more about the happenings in your own country then you do. I guess foreigners is the right word here being that well I´m the foreigner. Um okay well you get what I mean.

This past weekend was Halloween in Spain for me which was actually quite different then that in the US. For one they don´t really celebrate it. They don´t really understand the whole ´trick or treat´thing nor accepting candy from strangers. What they do instead is they take a four day weekend. Many people in Spain found it very weird that in the US we don´t actually get school off for Halloween being that we actually celebrate it and all. I would have to agree with them on this point but then I in turn asked them why they take two days off of school when they don´t even celebrate it. Asking this question however is like in part asking them why they must breath. Its a holiday somewhere and that's all there is to it. If it says something in the corner of your planner that is other then a full or new moon then school and work must be taken off. I must say that the Spanish way of living is really starting to grow on me. I can´t wait for the Chinese New Year, I sure it will be one crazy time.

So for the long weekend we took a little vacation and went up into the province of Cantabria which is just north of my province of Castilla y Leon. We spent the weekend relaxing and living in a rented out cottage in a beach community. During the days we would travel to the surrounding areas and towns with some family friends that live in Cantabria for part of the year. All the towns we visited were very old and dating back to the mid 1700´s. It was also my host mother´s birthday so we celebrated that on Saturday which was a lot of fun.

Got to go on some hikes and walks on the beach which were very peaceful and relaxing. Well it was most of the time any way. Growing up in Montana we don´t have a lot of beaches and I would say I am not highly versed in beach etiquette and even more so to that of Europe. Turns out when your walking along daydreaming then look down and suddenly see a naked man right there next to you the polite thing to do is to not jump in surprise and awkwardly shuffle away. It isn´t exactly warm this time of year on the north coast so I didn´t have a lot of forewarning before this one experience to remember the ¨clothing optional¨ part to European beaches. The temperature seemed to keep the clothing on of all people on the beach except for the one man who I some how managed to get right next to with out noticing. No one else seemed to give this man any mind however so my reaction was seen as a little peculiar and odd. My mother in Montana would tell me to live in the present which turns out is easier said then down until you have a naked stranger next to you. That seems to bring one flying back to the present quite abruptly indeed.

Lets see, some new food and drink I got to try this weekend. I got to try a sort of stew made up solely of sheep entrails and feet. That was interesting and a sort of thing you can say you tried once. I would say it requires a very select taste. Along the same lines is cow intestines which I would have to say taste like if you were to bottle the smell of a pasture. The Spanish seem to enjoy both these dishes however which I give them full props for utilizing all parts of the animal. Reduce Reuse Recycle and all that. Also I got to try a drink that Cantabria is well know for and takes great pride in and that is their cider. They have a very special way of servicing the cider which involves holding the poring device way up high in one hand and pouring it into a glass which you hold as low as you can. Its actually a sort of profession to be a person who can pour a very long stream of cider while getting it in the glass. The theory is that this some how makes the cider better when you drink it which to tell you the truth makes no sense. I think its just more for fun. Below is a picture of a little robot man that you can put on the top of your cider bottle that actually pours the cider from his little bottle into your cup. It isn´t a great distance in between but it causes the same effect.

There are also some picture below of some people playing a game that is solely to this region of Spain. It´s a kind of bowling which I won´t be able to explain very well with out you going and looking at the pictures first. So go now and look at the pictures. Ya? Good? Okay so there are two teams to a game with there being two people on each team. Each person has three wooded balls which are ruffly the size of a large grape fruit which I think you can see in the photos. There are also nine wooded pins set up (which can also be seen in the pictures) and are set up in the middle of pitch a little smaller then a tennis court. Now I´m going to try and explain how to play but its kind of complicated and I don´t think I even fully understand it. So they stand on one side of the field with one foot touching a certain decided upon stop. In the pictures this is the side with the red strip. So from there they throw their ball up in the air in a special way that when it lands it will spin and hit down as many pins as possible. In front of the pins there is a line which the ball has to go over and close enough to the pins to hit them. After each ball is thrown they reset the pins. Each person throws three balls and they count all the pins you hit it down and add that to the number hit down from your partner. But then from there you go to the other side of the pitch and from where your balls landed you have to put one foot then try again to knock down as many pins. They again reset the pins after each ball is thrown and all your teams point get put together for that round. Then the other team goes. They people who win are the ones who win the most rounds by knocking down the most pins. That's the basic lay out of it. There is also much more confusing parts of it that in later rounds they have areas where your ball can´t land and lines your ball has to get across or behind but ya that's the basic idea. Throw your ball with enough spin and force to hit down a lot of pins but with just enough that it stops rolling very close to the pins on the other side. Sort of get it? It was very funny to watch anyway because the entire time the teams had running banter against each other that was all very friendly. They even had a trophy that was made and which they play for. Very fun to watch.

So I think that´s all there is for now. Things are going great here and I´m really enjoying myself. I hope you all are well and you know where to find me.

Cody

A Wonderful Weekend

I would like to begin this blog with an apology for the utter mess my last posting was. I thank those you tried to understand it and its utter disarray for their patience and something like the 5 hours it would take to try and make either hide or hair of what was written there. At this point I’m just glad that when I promised to post pictures I hadn’t as well promised to do so in an orderly fashion. I have given up on trying to fix it being that any attempt only leads to greater calamity. Being this my first blog to date my tech 'savvyness’ is less then adequate and I hope you will all bear with me as I attempt to learn it all as I go. Thank you all again and in the future I will attempt to be more constructive with the organization of my thoughts and image.

With that said I would love to tell you all about the amazing weekend I had and how life is going thus far. I am now in my sixth week of life in Spain and am doing what only could be described as ´trudging along.’ The language is still fairly difficult and frustrating to say the least but its getting better each day. I have to continue to remind myself of how fair I’ve already come when I get discouraged by looking at how far I have to go. A prime example of just one of the many things that I learn and grow from each day. I believe now that it’s a very good thing that I completed high school before taking my year in Spain being that I am learning far far more each day then just a language and the addition of further academic material atop of it all would most likely be the straw that broke the camel’s back that I call a brain. When you’re in the nest they all can tell you how to fly on your own but turns out when you jump that first part of frantic plummeting downwards is where you do a good majority of your learning.

This weekend for example was a wonderful time for me to do and learn new things through experiences I’d never been around before. It was a very busy weekend but one that I can again add to my list of ones I will remember forever. On Saturday my family and I all went back to the town of Aranda de Duero and I got to learn how to harvest grapes from a vineyard and bring them all too where they get turned into wine. Then on Sunday we went south to the city of Valladolid and the wedding of some family friends there. Monday was a national holiday for the day that Christopher Columbus first landed on the Americas and is also a day for one of the Saints of the Catholic Church. All of which were so much fun but, as you could imagine, have now left me a tid bit exhausted.

Aranda de Duero is the town that I went to a couple of weeks ago for the bullfights and festivals that were held there. It is a wonderful town about an hour drive away from Palencia of roughly the population and size of Bozeman. Both my parents grew up in Aranda and they are the only ones of their extended family that does not still live in the town. So by this point I have found that I’m not actually living in Palencia but am only vacationing here every once and awhile from my true home of lovely Aranda de Duero.

Raquel’s father is wonderful man of 73 and as active as a man half his age. He actually built every last piece of the house that his family lived in from the underground wine cellar to every piece of furniture. A very talented man and not one to believe in idle hands. One of his many projects is a small vineyard of about two acres situated a little bit out of town. This is the vineyard that I worked on for about 4 hours on Saturday.

When it comes time to harvest the grapes the entire extended family is called with the promise of a large lunch after in return. In all there were about ten of us working on the vineyard but it still took us all awhile to cut all the grapes and get them all packed up. We made two runs to the winery at about 30 boxes a trip. In the pictures below you can see the size of the boxes and the type of grapes we were harvesting. The weather was nice so the actual work wasn’t that bad and you got to eat fresh grapes all day so I was happy.

The work wasn’t too complicated but still required a little bit of skill with clippers and kneeling in the dirty for long periods of time. The objective is to clip the good grapes off the plant and have the cluster drop into the box without getting leaves or grapes that can’t be used in there as well. Also turns out your going to want to do this at a fairly decent speed because the family turns it into a sort of competition each year and less then rapid pace gets some comments about how they thought Americans were good at working. Every once and awhile you hear ¨Another Box! ¨ from somewhere on the vineyard to tell everyone else how fast they clip. Didn’t take long to get the hang of however and by the end I had filled more boxes then some. It’s a little confusing at the beginning because it is a vine and sometimes the grapes all wrap around things in every which way so the tracking of the stem to the plant can be tricky. In time you know what to look for and would now consider myself a right out Dionysus.

The winery or ¨Bodega¨ is a large building where they buy all the grapes from the local famers and turn it into a community wine. You get paid depending on the quality and quantity of your grapes and how much you want in money and how much you want in the finished product. The pictures below show the bodega and its large white room where all the grapes are fermented and kept in giant container above and below ground. A couple of very large machines separate all the pieces of the grapes and leave the unneeded bits outside in a hug mountain. The picture of the large purple piles is all that’s left over after the grapes are separated. You can also see pictures of our grapes being originally processed in a large squisher device before they drop into one of the large machines. Don’t really know how best to describe it all so I hope that kind of makes sense.

Aranda the town was actually founded on top of a large number old bodegas that are now all connected by old tunnels under the very center of the town. Back during the festivals I was taken down into an old bodega from hundreds of years ago and shown all the different parts of making wine back then. You descend a long way into the earth so that it’s cold enough to make the wine. It was really cool and I was fine but I could see someone with any kind of fear of small spaces not being a big fan.

After we got all the grapes squared away we went back to my new family’s house in Aranda and had a very large meal. It was actually my new aunt’s birthday as well so it was an extra special occasion. We actually stayed all day in Aranda after not only spending a great deal of time with Raquel’s side of the family but then Juan’s side as well. They are all amazing people and they love to tell me things about Aranda and joke with me.

The wedding on Sunday held a lot of similarities and a lot of differences to that of the weddings I’ve been to in the United States. I’ve never actually been to a Catholic wedding before, let alone a Spanish Catholic wedding, so that aspect was a quite an experience in itself. A lot of standing up then sitting down then standing up again. I didn’t even try to do all the different phrases you’re supposed to say to different things the priest says but it seems there are a lot of them. I think I tried to cross myself once but wasn’t very good at it so didn’t try that again. It was held in a very old giant church dating back to the 1500´s. There is a picture below of the church itself and the inside.

The wedding itself was very formal and structured but what came after was absolute craziness. So my family and about 200 other people all headed into Valladolid for the reception. The reception was made up of drinks and appetizers as everyone stood around socializing for a good two hours before dinner started. Then dinner was made up of four courses and dessert which took a few more hours as well. Then it was a discotech dance party for the rest of the night. We didn’t get back to Palencia until five the next morning. Truly one of the most wild/fun nights I’ve had here in Spain.

You must excuse me because I have to take a second and talk about the food at the wedding. Before the dinner the waiters would walk around and give you appetizers that were so good that you couldn’t stop from eating them when they came by. Then dinner came around and blew those out of the water. I wasn’t technically hungry after eating so many appetizer things but I managed to amaze everyone at the table by finishing every piece of all the courses and dessert. It was that good. I could go into every one of the four courses for you but it pains me to think I won’t be eating it again. My parents said that at weddings it’s very common to have lots of courses and they have been to some that had five to six. They gave everyone their own take home menu of the meal so I can remember each dish for ever.

Then Monday was a National Holiday so we luckily didn’t have school. Got to sleep in for a bit but eventually had to get up to go have lunch with all of Raquel’s family who stayed in Palencia after the wedding. So we spent the day together again and watched the Spanish army on the television march through the streets of Madrid as a show of their might. A good day and a little more relaxed then the two preceding it which was nice.

So that was my weekend and one I will sorely miss. I hope this post makes more sense the last and when I push the publish button the photos won’t go all crazy. Hopefully. I hope you all are well and be sure to stay in a touch. I’d love to hear from you and am now lively in a much improved internet situation so will be able to respond more readily. Stay in touch and god bless.



Cody Combs