Eating Miss Piggy for Lunch...wait, is that a...no...NOO!!

Today, for la comida, for lunch, we had soup with white beans. Simple enough, right? I was excited to eat a nice, vegetarian, Spanish dish. That is, until my Spanish aunt (who is visiting for the holiday, Columbus Day/a religious day for la Virgen de Pilar), proceeded to take chunks of pig out of the soup that had been in the pot...its piggy juices soaking, flavoring the meal. Mi tía placed the chunks of pig into a bowl, which sat in front of me the entirety of the meal. As she removed the parts of the pig from the pot, I thought, "Gosh, the whole pig must be in there!" and thought back to one of my beloved childhood figures, Miss Piggy. Only, wait, what's that on my aunt's spoon? Is that a...no, I'm just being perverted. But really, that looks an awful lot like...could it REALLY be a...

Mi tia española's expression and my host father's snicker confirmed it for me. This little piggy was not a Miss Piggy.

That's right. I spent the entirety of lunch staring at the pig penis lying on the bowl in front of me. I could not tear my eyes from it. I had no idea what conversations were going on around me. Until my host father took the pig penis and put it into his soup on his plate. Oh no, no God, oh please... I couldn't bear to watch, but the next time I glanced over, the pig penis was gone.

My host father ate a pig penis for lunch today. MY host father ate a pig penis for lunch today. My HOST FATHER ate a pig penis for lunch today. My host father ATE a pig penis for lunch today. My host father ate a PIG PENIS for lunch today. My host father ate a pig penis FOR LUNCH today. My host father ate a pig penis for lunch TODAY. There's just no way of saying it that will EVER make that sentence sound OK.

¡No estoy tranquila! Hang Ups About Study Abroad

There’s a reason that I’ve heard, “¡Tranquila!” and “No te preocupes” about 50 times each in the two weeks I’ve been in Spain. Being the nervous, worried person that I am, I’m always thinking about how I’m in Spain only 10 weeks (eight weeks now, not that I’m keeping count or anything), and how I can best spend my time here on UChicago’s quarter system. After my program ends, I will visit my best friend in England, but until then, I’ve made the decision not to travel outside of Spain on my long, three-day weekends (that’s right, I don’t have classes Fridays, and never before 11:30 a.m.!). During my trip to Ávila and Salmanaca, I ended speaking English with a lot of other students, and when I returned to my house, my host father asked me, “You spoke in English a lot, no?” Busted. I don’t want to undo each week’s worth of progress in a weekend in another non Spanish-speaking country. But then I remember how much it costs to travel to Europe—what if, with my anthro degree and interest in working in community service, I never make it back, or at least not until I’m much, much older? Retired, even? Or what if something horribly tragic happens, and I choke on one of those little pretzels on my flight on the way back to the US and die before I see France or Italy or Germany (when they’re so close to me right now in this very moment!), or anywhere else in the world for that matter?

When I turn my thoughts to travel within Spain, things get equally complicated. Spain is like a small continent, with so many different languages (catalán, español, gallego, vasco) and geographical features (mountains, beach, sea, plains, desert) to see and explore! Where to go? How to travel? Alone? With loads of other classmates? I’ve made a tentative list of places to travel, and I plan to go through CouchSurfing. Unfortunately, despite the Spanish-only contact we signed, a lot of students in the program speak English…the vast majority of the time. As my goal is to learn Spanish, I would like to travel with only a few other people, or by myself, while I’m in Spain, so I’ll be forced to talk in Spanish and make Spanish friends.

I think I’ve been doing well so far with the no-English rule. I have a little notebook filled with random translations and phrases (the most interesting tidbit on my current page: “Marzo ventoso y abril lluvioso hacen a mayo florido y hermoso,” which is the Spanish “April showers bring May flowers”), and I’ve been able to carry on conversations (albeit choppy and terribly grammatically incorrect conversations) with people. Still, I feel guilty even typing in English in my blog, when I could be working on reading Roald Dahl’s Matilda (borrowed from Carmen, naturally!) in Spanish or doing any number of things in Spanish. Sometimes, I wish that I were abroad in the time my mother studied in Spain, without Facebook, without my laptop filled with music in English, but now English has infiltrated Spain to such a large extent that it would be impossible for me not to hear it.

My hang-ups aside, I’ve definitely felt my Spanish improve these past two weeks. Still, I can’t help but feel as though I’m mercilessly slaughtering the Spanish language every time I open my mouth to speak. To be honest, it’s a little freeing—it’s nice to know that there are very roundabout ways of saying things with my limited vocabulary, and that, to be understood, I don’t have to follow every single grammatical rule like in my Spanish classes in the US. Obviously, I want to have the rules (mostly) under my belt by the time I’ve completed my program, but until then, I suppose I should make like a Spaniard and be tranquila, and that I shouldn’t take anything for granted in the time I do have in this wonderful, beautiful country.

Weekend Excursion to Ávila and Salamanca, or “Don’t be that girl who threw up on the bus, don’t be that girl who threw up on the bus…”

(Sorry for posting a week late!)

…yepp, you guessed correctly. I was That Girl Who Threw Up On the Bus.

Let me tell you, it was a windy road in the mountains from Toledo to Ávila Friday morning. I could just feel my breakfast, toast with marmalade, swimming around in café con leche in my stomach, which, quivering and lurching with every slight movement, felt as though it were suspended from strings in the tour bus. Toward the end of the ride, we rounded an especially sharp corner, and my strong desire NOT to be That Girl Who Threw Up On the Bus lost out to my biological need to puke. One of the coordinators of the program, Yuki, is an angel; she took my bag of upchucked breakfast and told me not to worry, just to sleep the rest of the way. I swear, in that moment, I would have given her one of my kidneys. (I maintain that the real reason I vomited was not motion sickness but the movie we were watching: Top Gun with Tom Cruise, dubbed in Spanish.)

Anyway.

Ávila was beautiful! We took a tour of the old castle/fort (that is also where the bishop lives? So much got lost in translation with my tour guide who spoke Spanish quickly and with a French accent…). Apparently bears are important in Ávila…or else just present in Ávila…at any rate, there was a statue of a bear. (Cut me some slack, I’ve had a terrible cold the past week, and I’d just vomited in front of a busload of other students.) Here are some photos I took of Ávila:

Me, post-puke.

Santa Teresa de Ávila, patron saint

I loved the contrast of the red roofs and the cool blue of the sky and mountains.

The beautiful colors of Ávila!

After eating a lunch of salad, chicken with patatas fritas, and ice cream (served in square pieces and on plates, not in bowls), we made our way to Salamanca. Paige and I shared a room in the hotel, and we were very confused by the way electricity works in Europe; we had to put our hotel key into a slot to turn on the electricity in our room...and if we took it out, the lights would go off.

Note Paige's confused expression.

Saturday, we went on a tour that lasted hours…upon hours…upon hours—six hours in total, to be precise. Of course, everything we saw was breathtakingly beautiful—the paintings in the cathedral, the flickering candles in front of images of Mary and other saints—but after a while, it felt like I had been banging my head against all those beautiful stone buildings for six hours, my head hurt so much from trying to understand all that Spanish! Our guide was andaluza, which is Spanish for “difficult to understand.” Actually, it’s an adjective that describes people from Andelucía, but I stand by my first definition, as people from the South of Spain (such as my host father) tend to talk very quickly. I loved the cathedral in Salamanca, as well as the ancient library of the University of Salamanca. In the cathedral, I found it especially interesting that there were many images of decomposing bodies, a reminder of death and mortality. Also, we got to see the convent where the nuns (called monjas, a false cognate!).

The Plaza Mayor in Salamanca...filled with SO many people, including this group of adorable old people.

There's an astronaut on the front of the cathedral—very unexpected!

Inside the cathedral

There's a frog on the skull in the dead center of this photo at the University of Salamanca...I read on a website after our tour that, if you find the frog on your own without any help, you'll have good luck. As my last name means "bad luck" in German, I of course needed a lot of help finding the frog.

University of Salamanca library? Or Beauty and the Beast library?

View of the cathedral from the courtyard in the nunnery

The University of Salamanca is one of the oldest in Europe, and Salamanca is a very fun place to be with lots of young people. Unfortunately, as I literally could not speak with my cold, I did not make any Spanish friends in some wild night out on the town. Still, Paige and I had ice cream, wine, and dinner (but not in that order) with two very lovely and intelligent girls from the University of Notre Dame. We saw some odd night life; for example, a group of men walked down the street in Elvis costumes and wigs. We also watched a street performer who can best be described as a Gothic, Spanish Charlie Chaplin.

The beautiful streets of Salamanca, with beautiful young people running about!

Sunday, Paige and I got up early just to realize that there’s nothing to do besides go to church Sunday mornings in Spain. We walked by the river in Salamanca, along which there was much graffiti and empty wine boxes (you stay classy, Salamanca!). We stumbled into a Catholic service in the cathedral and stayed until communion (as neither of us is Catholic and thus could not take communion). Also, I joined the UN and flew in a helicopter in the park:

Just kidding about that last part. I’m happy to report that my bus ride home to Toledo went much more smoothly, and I could actually keep my eyes open during the ride (as I took Dramamine beforehand). Spain is SUCH a beautiful country. I saw an old man walking across the plains with his shepherd dog, and the clouds filled with rain made the landscape all the more beautiful.

I promise to be a bit more consistent with my blog updates; my house finally has Internet, so you should hear from me more regularly. Adios for now.