April

Hey everyone, so before I begin about this month I would like to give you all this website : http://picasaweb.google.es/esmc49/ViajeOutbound20092010?feat=directlink

This website of all the photos that my our Rotary leader, David, took on our trip to Andalusia and Portugal about a month ago. You can see all the other exchange students that are right now in Spain and you can see me in a couple of them as well. Some of the photos need to be flipped however so I hope you don´t mind turning your head every once and a while.

So April! Another great month and hard to believe that with it coming to a close means I will have soon have been in Spain for almost 8 months. I will have soon completed 4/5 of my time in Spain over all. Don´t know, just something crazy to think about and remind yourself as these months seem to keep flying by.

April began for me with the celebrations and good times of Semana Santa, or Holy Week, in Spain. My brother had just taken the plane from Madrid back to the States when I jumped on a train to get up to Palencia again. Due to a train accident, nothing fatal, on the train tracks to Palencia that morning, a trip that should of taken me 2 hours took me 6 in all. My train then had to go to a different town, put us all on buses, ship us to another town where they put us back on a train again, then after awhile up to Palencia. That night I quickly unpacked then repacked so that I could head out the next morning with my host family to Asturias for a week.

Asturias is a province in the north western part of Spain that we had an absolutely wonderful time explore all it had to offer for a week. It is a beautiful province of green tall mountains that lead right up to the sea and a culture revolving around cider, sea food, and a pride that the Moors never laid a foot in the area. Along with two other families, my host family had rented out a sort of rural cottage that all three families stayed in for the week. For the last 11 years these three families had always done Semana Santa together so it was really cool to have been apart of that. One family was from Melilla, a city in the north of Morocco that still belongs to Spain, and they took a ferry with their car and drove the entire length of Spain to be there. They were a family of 6 who couldn´t of been nicer people. They had a son who was my age and had done an exchange to Oregon last year so it was interesting to have been able to talk to someone who had just come out of the exchange experience. They other family was only a couple that came up from Madrid on Wednesday but didn´t end up staying long. Asturias is a very wet province so with 2 hours of their arrival the husband accidentally tripped and fell and broke his leg. After that it was a little hard for him to get around and see the sights so they ended up leaving that Friday. Really nice people though.

We spent the week in Asturias exploring the many cities and little towns that populate the area. We also went to a museum about dinosaurs and another about mining that was pretty cool being they took us on a tour of an old abandoned coal mine. However it was technically holidays so we also spent a great deal of time relaxing and enjoying the amazing huge portions of wonderful Asturian food along with their infamous cider. As I talked about when I visited Cantabria in an earlier post, their neighbor Asturias is even more so into the process of making and drinking cider. It has become an art form of sorts to be able to pour cider well and is really fun to watch those you have this ability. The idea is to put the bottle has high into the air as possible then with the cup in your other hand catch the cider with as much distance in between as possible. They had me try it once, turns out I´m terrible, they didn´t let me try it again.

(If you are a friend with me on Facebook you can look at all the pictures that my host mom posted of our time in Asturias. She had just gotten a new camera so she was super excited to then post them all.)

After that week we headed back to Palencia and the old way of things. Being it was still sort of Semana Santa no one had school so I spent the week hanging with my friends in Palencia and trying to recoup my Spanish which didn´t get a lot of practice in March. Another fun and very relaxed week where I was able get a lot done and prepare for my next adventures.

Semana Santa has a very interesting tradition in Spain revolving around what is called Processions. The week leading up to Easter in marked by a sort of parades in all the towns and cities in Spain. Each day has a different theme on the passing and then resurrection of Christ. The people in these processions wear different colored robes and capes each day but the general costume is the same. It´s a tradition that goes way back to the 16th century and is to be a sign of penance. Although it is a less then pleasant comparison to make, the dress is the exact same of the old KKK. Now just about all Spanish people are aware of this likeness and made sure to make it very clear to me right off that this tradition is very old and one that was in place way before the KKK ever came along. In their dress, the members carry large statues and platforms on their shoulders to show the different parts of Jesus´s death and which one is being represented that day. They carry these platforms in a sort of march that makes each one sway back in forth in a sort of dance which they actually do on purpose and have a special name for. Now these platforms can get very huge and there are some in Sevilla that take over 200 people to carry them on their shoulders. They also have very powerful and compelling music that marches along with the procession and makes the whole experience actually very awe inspiring. They have an entire band but they really emphasize the drums as there are even some towns in Spain that get hundreds of people in a plaza and spend a whole day where all they do is beat on their drums. Kind of cool to be a part of actually. In the North processions are more watched in silence and my host mom told me not to make sure not to laugh at anything. In the South, such as in Sevilla, everyone is yelling and crying and people are screaming to the statue of Mary as see passes ¨Oh how beautiful you are!¨ It´s supposed to get quite crazy. So in all I watched two processions, one in Asturias and another in Palencia. Both were very interesting to be a part of and definitely one of the more important traditions about Semana Santa.

After my week back home I headed down to Madrid to meet up with my grandparents that had come over to visit me. I had spent the week in Palencia and then the weekend in Aranda de Duero so I had to take a bus from Aranda instead and then the metro so as to meet up with my grandparents at the train station.

It was so awesome to see my grandparents again after over seven months apart. Deborah (MeiMei) and Craig (D) are my mother's parents and nothing could of made me happier then having those two over here in Spain to do some traveling. All the time we were together people kept asking if they were my parents being that they have the traveling vigor of a 20 year old and even I had trouble keeping up with them at times. For this and many many other things, the ten days we had together in Spain were absolutely amazing and made some wakey, wild, but above else wonderful memories with my grandparents that I'm soon to forget.

From Madrid we took a train together down into Andalucia and through Cordoba to a town called Palma de Rio. Now not only did these two just get off the plane this morning, were quite jetlagged, and haven't really slept, but both of them jumped on a bike that afternoon to do the first day of a bike tour that they had signed us up in that would take us through Andalucia. The bike tour lasted about 6 days and took us through the largest olive oil processing area in the world. With 8 other Americans in our group, we had a great time and were able to not only do some amazing biking up were also able to meet some pretty interesting people. We spent one day biking around Palma de Rio, another biking from there to Cordoba, a free day in Cordoba and another biking around there, then two days biking to and around a town called Zuheros. We were able to do such cool activities as: a professional olive oil tasting session, a flamengo show, tour of a olive oil factory, tour the Mosque in Cordoba, tour the Alhambra in Granda, get an Arabic bath experience and massage, search through some old castles, among many others. Despite being in a flat out down pour on the last day, that bike tour was soooooooooo much fun and doing it with my grandparents made it a million times better.

From Granada we said goodbye to our bike friends and took a plane to Barcelona. We were very lucky being the volcanic ash would close down that airport the next day. The rest of our bike tour friends were a little grumpy at the Icelandic volcano and that they are now stranded in Europe and have to figure out some sort of means of getting home. Never really found out if they did find that means.

Being this was my first time being in Barcelona I was truly excited and we had a whole slue of things we needed to go see. Sadly my grandparent's thought that I would be the means of communication in Spain with the general public, wasn't quite as true in Barcelona when the people of Cataluna are not as easy to talk to if you don't know their preferred language of Catalan. We managed to make it work however. On our three days in Barcelona we saw : as many tours of Gaudi buildings and house as humanly possible, the Picasso and Miro museum, up the towers of the Sagrada Familia, the castle/fort over looking the city, the Guell Park, and many many self made walking tours over basically every street in the city, among many other fun packed things. It made me so happy I was able to see Barcelona for the first time with my grandparents and could of imagined a better pair of people to explore the city with.

From there we took a train back to Madrid where we only had one day together filled with exploring the whole of the Prado and having the best suckling pig in town. I was so sad to have to say goodbye to my grandparents after such an amazing time together but know that I'll see them again very soon.

Hope you all are now having a wonderful spring and will see you all soon!

Cody