Un Poema

I had a shower thought the other day, that dioses and mitosis almost rhyme in Spanish. So then I wrote a poem. It is in Spanish, mostly. I cheated with a few Galician/Portuguese contractions.

Acerca del mar

La casa que busco na costa sería,

Con fines de nada más que alegría.

Las olas olean y barcos pesqueros

Van yendo por mares escasos, ligeros,

Con bajos profundos dos que procedían 

Las bestias antiguas que barcos comían.

Hoy día tranquilas descansan en paz.

Los buceadores olviden, quizás.

Aquél horizonte lo miro pensando,

Los alrededores estoy observando.

Cielo nublado, hogar de dioses,

Los bichos abajo haciendo mitosis.

La suave arena que venga de lejos

De grandes montañas y ríos reflejos.

Todo adjunta al lado del mar

Por eso aquí yo quiero estar.

on being back

Well, I flaked on my plan to document my final lap around Europe. Maybe I'll come back to it some day when I need to do some serious procrastinating, but for now I'll call it a lost cause.

it's the space needle

One thing I do want to write about however is my experience with reverse-culture shock. I've been back for a little over a month now and as an added shocking bonus, spent most of that time in the Big City (Seattle). 

Number one on my list of shocks is customer service and the friendliness of strangers. Customer service in restaurants of course, where they give you free ice water with a big smile and seem genuinely happy to see you. Maybe it comes from the fact that a big part of their salary comes from tips, but the same goes even for non-tipping situations. Like when I went down to the UW Spanish department to ask about the DELE in November and chatted with the woman there for half an hour about the test and Spain and Spanish. Or when I went to the bank to sort out transferring money from my la Caixa account to my American one and the employee was all smiles and help. Or making small talk with the other folks waiting for the bus, smiling at fellow cyclists and getting blessed/excused when sneezing in public. 

Not that Spanish people or Europeans in general are not friendly, just that Americans, in public interactions, seem to go out of their way to be kind and accommodating. They also seem to be more culturally aware/understanding, which goes hand in hand with being more ethnically diverse. 

the master of fruits and veggies guards his stall in pike place

Next on my list is schedules. Here jet lag was a big help and gave me a head start in getting back into the rhythm of being up before 8am and going to bed before midnight. Back in Spain I'm pretty sure I moaned and groaned about having to madrugar (literally, to dawn/to sunrise) and it still strikes me as strange that an adult might go to bed before 10pm. 

Food of course is another one--tomato sauce is just not the same as tomate frito! There is so much more variety here in the states, especially if you want to eat out ("Where do you want to go?" "Oh, I dunno." "Well, let's narrow it down and pick a continent.") but it is way, way more expensive. Gone are the days of pulpo, wine and pimientas for under ten euros. 


And a few other little odds and ends: 

• electric stoves (no fire involved!)
• saying thank you to bus drivers
• cars everwhere (and they go so fast!)
• confusing medical system
• never paying with cash and coins being almost worthless
• being expected to know how things work because I'm "from here"

I suppose that's it. Thanks for reading! If I ever go abroad again, expect more of the same.

Aprovechando I: Warsaw

So, this blogging thing has become something of a habit, and even though I'm back in the states it may continue for a while yet,at least as long as I have some somewhat interesting things to talk about. And a camera, because mine doesn't really turn on anymore.

The title of this post is Spanish for "taking advantage of" and is something everyone in Spain has been telling me to do. Mainly in regards to speaking Spanish/Galician and going outside whenever it's not raining, but also about traveling. (travelling?) So, in an effort to take advantage of my last few weeks in Europe, I booked a flight east to Poland. This took an unprecedented amount of planning from me for two reasons: 

1. I would be traveling solo to a country where I don't speak the language (though I did pick up a few useful words)
2. Coordinating with the various people--my ex-roommate Anna in Łódż (pronounced wootch), her friend Asia (pronounced asha) in Krakow and my mother in Madrid (pronounced ma-DREETH)

More than a month ago now I hopped on a good ol' Ryanair plane with my little red travel notebook in hand. Arguably the most valuable object in my possession besides my passport, it is full of pages with titles like: Warsaw --> Łódż: how to get there and Hostel address, door key code etc. Seriously. I have traveled by smartphone before, but little red notebook is far more reliable. It doesn't need charging or internet and won't shatter to pieces if you drop it, and with a little forethought can contain all the information you might need.

reconstructed royal palace in Warsaw

After a brief stop in Barcelona where I said goodbye to my sunblock (curse you, airport security!) I found myself in the Warsaw Modlin airport and making friends with a confused elderly British gentleman. I was a little confused myself, because getting from the airport to the hostel was something of a challenge. I had to take three busses and two trains (Bus, train, train, bus, bus) to get to the neighborhood the hostel was in, but my little red notebook guided me there in the end. 

I arrived late in the day (because of that whole bus, plane, plane, bus, train, train, bus, bus business) so after checking in I dropped my things off and went to the little convenience store around the corner to buy a frozen pizza and a beer for dinner. This turned out to be a mistake however because the hostel didn't have much of a kitchen and I ended up cooking my pizza piece by piece on a hotplate. 

reconstructed main square

Warsaw was nice. I went on a free walking tour (love those!), saw the sights and made two travel friends: a Warsaw native who was going on the tour because he wanted to become a tour guide, and a British guy who was heading home after his Erasmus year in Budapest. 

About eighty-five percent of the city was leveled in WWII and later rebuilt by the communists. The tour guide told us a nice story about how after the war the city government went out and collected all the old photographs and paintings done by the pre-war art students in an effort to accurately reconstruct the old town, which was nice, but had a ring of sadness to it. We learned about Marie Curie and Frederic Chopin, who were both Warsaw natives and who both died lingering deaths in France. There are "Chopin benches" littered throughout the city, which will play a cheery (or not so cheery) Chopin tune when you press a button. 

After the tour I went with my new travel friends to a bar mleczny or "milk bar"--a nostalgic remnant of the communist era. The place was all done up in linoleum and cement, with metal-and-plastic chairs not unlike the ones I owned in my off-campus university years. Our aspiring tour guide ordered us some dumplings and beet soup and told us about how in the real milk bars, back in the bad old days, had the silverware chained to the tables so no one would steal it.

presidential palace (you can't go inside)

We wished our Polish friend good luck on his job interview and me and my British friend caught a trolley down to the Warsaw Uprising museum. The museum was huge and had an incredible amount of detail, on everything from daily life in occupied Warsaw, to the kinds of weapons and aid the fighters got and the fates of city officials, soldiers, members of the media and little girls. It was yet another reminder that these things you read about in the history book were not so long ago, and these places really do exist and are permanently scarred from them.

I also learned that Obama was in Warsaw on the day I arrived (which happened to be the 25th anniversary of free elections in Poland) and gave a speech about how free elections are great and if Russia invades Ukraine and Poland would like some troops we can probably lend some. The Polish people I asked about this thought this was a good idea.

Things I like about Spain

I tend to complain a lot about some things in Spain (and I just tend to complain in general), so today I'm going to make a list of things I like about Spain.

1. Tapas

Una caña at Amoa bar

Tapas are number one on this list because whenever I get asked this question by Spaniards it is the thing that pops out of my mouth. It's the easy, lighthearted answer. Tapas are nice. Go to essentially any bar in Galicia and order any cheap little drink (between 1 and 2 euros for a beer or a fanta or a fanta-beer) and you get given some tasty morsel to go with it. A bit of bread with meat or cheese, a chunk of tortilla de patatas, maybe a little bitty bowl of something calentita. 

2. Things are Cheap

At least some things are. If I shop smart, I can get away with spending about 10 euros (13 bucks) a week on groceries. If I go to a coffeeshop, I'm not going to break the bank on a five-dollar fancy coffee drink. Partly because bathtub size soy-mocha-frappa-dappa-chino is not normally an option on the menu while tiny-cute café con leche is. 

Other things that are cheap: rent and utilities, train tickets, seats to the local philharmonic, new clothes at the mall. Healthcare too and university tuition, though I haven't taken advantage of those things personally.

3. Walkable, Lived-in Cities

enjoying the atmosphere at the Barrio de San Pedro festival

I walk a lot in Santiago, much more than I did in Bellingham and it shows on the wear and tear in my shoes and jeans. All the Spanish cities I've seen (perhaps with the exception of Vigo) have a huge, pedestrian-only old town, jam-packed with churches and shops and terraced cafés. Even newer neighborhoods (like Santiago's zona nueva) boast narrow streets and sprawling squares that the locals treat like backyards. I'm not the only one who walks either, and it's not unusual to run into someone I know on my way to the library or a private class. And then we simply say "goodbye" as an easy way to acknowledge each other's existence without having to stop and make awkward small talk.



4. The Presence of History

This hit me harder more towards the start of my European adventure than it does now, but I still have to stop every so often and think wow, this thing, this thing that I'm looking at right now has been here for a hundred, five hundred, a thousand years or more. In school the kids learn from a young age how to distinguish between romanesque, gothic, baroque, rococo and other architectural epochs that I don't even know the names for because these are everyday features in their lives.


5. A Feeling of Place

There are two parts to this bullet point: the idea that every little town or village has its thing (usually a food thing) that makes it different and special, and that even if people move away from their ancestral village, or if their parents/grandparents/great-grandparents moved away, they still remember and consider themselves to be from there. They go back and visit the distant relatives who stayed behind and sample the local tarta or cheese or whatever that is special from that place. 

This isn't to say that we don't have a sense of place back home--I for one am still pretty attached to my hometown, even if I don't want to live there and haven't kept in touch with anyone there except my parents. I'd rather not leave the region if I don't have to, and I've met a lot of Galicians who feel the same way about their comunidad autonomo.

*****************

There are a bunch of other little small things I like about Spain (such as rolled Rs and shutter curtain things that actually keep the light out) but I think I'll end my list here. I actually wrote this post out weeks ago, but took forever in taking and uploading photos. So here's one more photo I've taken since the last post.

It's the noria or ferris wheel that the city put in the park for Ascension Festival! It cost three euros to ride and went really fast (which you can't see from the photo because the photo is a static image so you're just going to have to take my word)

In final news, I'm going to Poland tomorrow! Do widzenia!

Going Home

I apologize ahead of time for the ambiguity of this post's title. I'm not talking about going home-home, just about how I get back to my apartment after school here in Santiago. I took a bunch of pictures and added captions to all of them, but there are way too many for Blogger to be a viable format so I put them all on Imgur. 

Here is the link for the album.

A lot of people gave me funny looks for taking pictures of boring things, but I had a lot of fun doing this. If you notice a drop in quality from my usual pictures, it's probably for two reasons: One, I didn't edit any of these before putting them up, and Two, the screen on my camera broke so I have to use the viewfinder and can't really use any of the camera's built-in features beyond point and shoot.

I won't post an obligatory photo today, because I posted a whole bunch on the Imgur site already. Enjoy!

Pazo de Oca

Continuing my spring break car adventures, Noé, Chelsea and I went on a little morning adventure to Pazo de Oca and Pico Sacro just outside Santiago. The Pazo (Galician for palace) is about a half hour drive outside Santiago, or maybe less since we had some difficulty finding and staying on the right highway. 

In the past, pazos were something of a noble's house and local government center combined. It was where the local lord lived and from where he ruled over his villages. There are some pazos that are still private residences to this day, but many have opened their doors to the public. Or at least the gardens, as is the case at Pazo de Oca.

These Camelias were all over the gardens

On the way back to Santiago we stopped for a mini-hike at Pico Sacro--the highest point for miles around, as far as I can tell. You can drive almost to the top, where there is a parking lot and a little church. (Sacro means "sacred")

path up the hill

All the little towns carved out of the woods

Galicia Profunda: part III

Monday was our third and last day in the Ribeira Sacra, and we left the casa with one final map from Manolo showing us the way out of the Mencía-growing Ribeira Sacra region to the Albariño-growing Ribeiro region. Our first stop (after a couple more miradoiros overlooking the Río Sil) was the Monastery of San Estevo--a huge old monastery that has since been converted into a high-end hotel. They also had a pretty cool art exposition going on, commemorating the time when the monastery had been a sanitarium.

Cheap beer and caldo gallego for lunch in Luintra

The next stop on our journey was a very unique church/monastery---the aptly named San Pedro de la Roca. The original building was carved from a single huge rock set into the hillside, and was at its height home to thirteen monks. The tour brochure played it up as an ancient lost wonder, but according to the lovely museum next door it was really only lost and "rediscovered" within about twenty years in the early part of the 1900s. 

That night, moved perhaps by the spirituality gained by visiting all these places, or perhaps because we found a really good deal online, we spent the night at another monastery-cum-hotel. We killed what was left of the afternoon poking around Carballiño, a biggish small town nearby, close to the smallish small town (that was actually really gross) where the monastery was located. It turns out the Carballiño is one of a very few unbanalities in northern Spain to have a Jewish quarter, so we had a good time wandering around and getting as lost as you can get in the old part of a small town.

By the next day we apparently still hadn't gotten enough of old churches and went a little out of the way to check out the Mosteiro de Santa María de Oseira. The 13th century monastery was abandoned in the 1800s, only to be restored and rebuilt in the early part of the 20th century. Today it is a functioning monastery, complete with monks, a tour guide, albergue for Camino de Santiago pilgrims, and a shop where you can buy cookies and alcohol made by the monks. Inside you aren't allowed to take photos, but if you do go in (or google image search) you can see some pretty impressive works of architectural technology for the time. 

From there, we headed west to the Rías Baixas for an afternoon on the beach before heading home to Santiago.