Spring has sprung

I just had a realization about my tendency, and that of others, to blog less and less frequently. We already know that we're busy and often too tired to want to write, but I just thought, at least for me, that as the novelty of a situation goes away there is less desire to describe your daily life to everyone else. Especially now that the bulk of my time here has passed, I think a lot about how what was so scary and exciting in the beginning is my life now. I go about my business just like any other student.

That said, I have been neglectful of posting about the trip the program took last weekend to the region Extremadura, to the west of Madrid. We went to three cities, Mérida-famous for preserved Roman ruins, Cáceres-for the maintenance of the medieval walled city and Trujillo-more really old things and the hometown of Francisco Pizarro (the leader of the conquest of the Inca empire). The scenery was beautiful in general, but especially so in Trujillo. The region was so uncharacteristically green because of the rainy winter and the hills and ruins around Trujillo remaided me of Ireland. Everyone was impressed by how well the trip went, especially given that there were around 85 of us going around. It was a very intensive adventure. Many of us had plans to go out in Cáceres on Saturday night but we were all beat after having to be at the bus at 8am and a full day of transit and sight seeing.

Last week I was feeling a little out of my element and I have come to the conclusion that I am sorely in need of a break. The weather got hot fast and the pollen started to rain down yesterday. I've probably saind this 10 times in the past few days, but I am not ready for it to be getting up to 75! Hello, still waiting for winter here! Thankfully, Semana Santa (Holy Week) vacation starts this Thursday! We leave that afternoon for a week long jaunt through Germany in which I will do my best to not worry about classes...at the very least for fear of castigation on the part of my travel companions.

Welcome spring!

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Tonight, we are going to be exploring the realm of scent-triggered memory, or at least the one that I just experienced. When I got back to my apartment after being gone literally all day, I resigned to my room for some chill time. Upon exiting with the purpose of making dinner, I encountered a smell that in a split second was familiar to me. For the back story, we're going to take a trip to the BLC, specifically Cool House 08-09. Two girls that shall remain nameless, mostly because I couldn't for the life of me come up with their names, often had a disagreeable odor emanating from their doorway. I also do not know words with which to describe the smell. Most likely food related, but the best descriptor I can manage is "nausea inducing". Now, I have know idea what anyone else thinks about this subject, but I feel I may be especially affected because I am a very scent oriented person. By that I mean a strong sense of smell, fear of the way other people think I smell, etc. There you go, traumatic scent recall.
Hmm, this doesn't have a whole lot to do with Madrid...I suppose I ought to tell you about my weekend!
This past Thursday, as you know, was St. Patrick's Day. El día de San Patircio. Madrid gets pretty into it, but I'm not all that surprised. There are quite a few Irish pubs aroud, the city as an entity knows that there are many Irish students studying here, and merchants know that people love en excuse to party. I didn't see this myself, but the Puerta de Alcala was illuminated green in celebration. I went with a group of friends to a pub called The Irish Rover near the football (soccer) staduim Santiago Bernabeu. We had to wait in quite a long line to get in, but it was worth the wait. There was band from Dublin there that playes traditional Irish songs and later on used U2 to transition in to some classic songs that we were all singing along to. All that and a pint of Guinness and I was set. Friday and Saturday I did a lot of walking around/exploring but this time with company. Areas included were Atocha, La plaza mayor, Ópera, El templo de Debod and El parque del buen retiro.
Midterms for my program classes are next week, so thinking about that, my final papers for those classes, and a 900 page book had me preiodically really stressed. I need a hug, and a closet that isn't worthless, and to be thankful for what I DO have, goodness!

Inglés

Hello there! This post is brought to you by a e-mail forward I got from Grammy (my mother's mother) this morning about the lunacy of the English language.

An Ode to English Plural We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes, But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes. One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese, Yet the plural of moose should never be meese. You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice, Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice. If the plural of man is always called men, Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen? If I speak of my foot and show you my feet, And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet? If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth, Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth? Then one may be that, and three would be those, Yet hat in the plural would never be hose, And the plural of cat is cats, not cose. We speak of a brother and also of brethren, But though we say mother, we never say methren. Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him, But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim! Let's face it - English is a crazy language! There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England. We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square, and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend. If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it? If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane! In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.. We have noses that run and feet that smell... We park in a driveway and drive on a parkway.

I think about things like this all the time, even more so here in Spain. English is weird and I don't envy the people that learn it, but nonetheless it is becoming a worldwide language. Many of the Erasmus students (people studying abroad from other countries in Europe) speak English better than Spanish and speak it amongst each other. One of the biggest "moments" I've had is about eggplant. Where did that name even come from?

Some brief investigation has maybe proven my suspicion of German influence. However, Aubergine appears in the German page too, and aubergine is french and in Spanish it is berenjena, relatively similar. I thought to look in Italian, expecting a word similar its "Romantic" cousins but the word is melanzana! That really threw me for a loop, because it just looks like a hybrid of the words for apple in Italian (mela) and Spanish (manzana)! I'm seriously tempted to go on a linguistic scavenger hunt to discover how the deviations came to be but, as usual, I have more important things to attend to.

Speaking of important things, yesterday I got the CERF, course equivalency request form, submitted so soon I should be finding out the credits I'll be getting for my classes this semester. That process got me thinking that before too long, I'll be selcting my classes for the fall semester back in Madison! I really dislike having to think about things so far in advance, it's just unnecessary anxiety that I definitely don't need in my life. There has been productivity in my life, though. I read a short play for my siglo XVIII lit. class in periods of time from Tursday night to yesterday afternoon. La comedia nueva (The New Play), Leandro Fernández de Moratín.

On an unrelated note, I made French toast for breakfast this morning. It was delicious, but I've never wanted maple syrup more in my life!

Recap

Update! Still having charger problems, which is a problem. As I would prefer to be taking photos. However, photos have been uploaded to Facebook and should be put on Flickr before too long.

In the time between beginning this post and now I found my charger, oh happy day! I am chronically disorganized, at least in my room; I like to think I make up for it in my notes.

Things have been consistently going pretty well over here, except for a bout of salmonella that hit three of my friends and me, that was disruptive. Classes are in full swing and I'm enjoying them all so far!
Dialectología (Dialectics?)
Dialects of Spanish/Castellano in the peninsula and in America
Sintaxis comparada (Comparative Syntax)
The second semester of my syntax class last semester. Same professor, different topics.
Phonology and Phonetics
Outside of the program with Spanish students, there is a German girl so I'm not the only extranjera! The building blocks of linguistic studies.
20th Century Spanish Art
Just what it sounds like. We have been learning about Gaudi and Barcelona and now I want to go there even more than I did already!
18th Century Spanish Lit
The enlightenment! I had to think for a while to get that in English. Other class with Spaniards. Here I have three other WIPTers (Badgers!) in the same class which I'm glad about, we can stand together! Lots of reading for this one.

This past weekend was the "Carnaval" celebration and I went down to the parade with Lindsay and Caleb. There were a lot of cool groups, unfortunately no pictures though. Two popular places to go to celebrate Carnaval are Cádiz and the Canary Islands.

As of Sunday night, my friends and I have a trip set to go to Germany during our Holy Week break. Other homeland! But, a lot has to happen before we get to that.

Un abrazo muy fuerte!

Charger adventure and GRANADA

I don't know what the deal is with my camera battery charger. I really thought I bought it back, but either I didn't or its really good at hiding from me. My battery ran out of juice before I was done with it in Granada last weekend, which is what prompted the unsuccessful search. Today, I went to to find a photography supply store I saw online but it was closed. However, it was in a really neat area I had never seen before arond la Plaza de Olvide. On my walk home, I wandered towards the Araplies El Corte Ingles because I knew they would have a restroom and I found myself in the electronics area. Long story short, I have a charger and a plan for major photo uploading.

After that detour, so far I'm enjoying my classes and I FINALLY had the exam for my class with the university on Friday morning. The feeling is along the lines of "meh", but at least its done! On Monday we all get to start finding out what the deal is with the 2 courses with the university that we've selected this semester. I had such grand plans for celebrating but they won't quite come to fruition because I've been having some stomach troubles, ick. And because of that, I haven't been eating much which has left me kind of low-energy.

What I can be glad about is that this didn't hit me in Granada (especially considering the 5hr bus ride!). The scenery on the road down from Madrid into Andalucía is amazing. You go through hills, mountains, and more olive groves than you could ever imagine! Not to be outshone by the trip there, Granada is a BEAUTIFUL city. It has the similar feeling of old mixed with new that I find in Madrid, but there is something much older in the air. What I was must excited to experience was the Alhambra, a palace and fortress built under the Nasrid dynasty of Muslim rule in the 14th century. As you can imagine, time has taken its toll on many parts, but there is also a lot of restoration going on. The intricacy of the decorations is absolutely incredible, as are the views from different areas of the compound. An absolute MUST if/when you travel to Spain. Patio de Los Arrayanes

Something that really impressed me was the quantity and quality of tapas that came with our cañas as opposed to the usual olives and potato chips or potatoes ali-oli or jamón up here. This greatness of the experience was only increased by a bar that we went to being named La Bella y la Bestia, "Beauty and the Beast" :) We also went to an amazing tetería (restaurant-type place that specializes in tea) that was decorated in a very "Arabic" feeling way with lots of curtains, sofas, and cushions. I can't believe I was about to forget to tell you about the Flamenco!!! We saw a legit Flamenco show at the same venue where Michelle Obama saw a show. Its all about soul. The singers, the dancers, the guitarists, they all put so much passion into their art. New realization, passionate people are one of my favorite things about lif; this is probably how I ended up being friends with so many of them.

The time I lost to sinusitis

It was just as I had feared. Oh well, I know I couldn't avoid a sinus infection for much longer. I'll spare you the mucousy details, but I was just feeling, for lack of a better word, icky. On Wednesday I was very low energy and the same on Thursday with the addition of feeling lightheaded. Amy (the program coordinator) heard me saying I wasn't feeling well and she got me a doctors appointment for the very next day! Since we first arrived, they've been telling us to be extra cautious when we don't feel well because Madrid is so contaminated. This doctor, unlike the doctors at UHS, understood me saying that I have a history of sinus infections ans this is always how they start. I got a prescription for 24 doses of Augmentin and some fizzy tablet that he said had properties of Mucinex and acetaminophen. I went to the "farmacia" on the end of my block not sure how long I was going to have to wait or how much I was going to have to pay. To my great surprise, I didn't have to wait at all! And they charged me €9.58/$13! I know its payed for somewhere else, but theres socialized medicine for you (I think...).

I am feeling much better now, but I had all these grand plans for studying that has not gotten done. However my body was telling me I needed to rest as much as possible. I'll get back on the study train tomorrow, my exam isn't until the 11th.
Classes start tomorrow for Reunidas, so there will be an update about that. Wish me luck for getting up on time for my 8:30 class. ¡qué asco!

Besos!

A much needed day off

Yesterday, I finished with all of my Reunidas classes for the semester by taking two exams and tuening in a final paper! Feeling quite satisfied with myself, and with some convincing from my Mom, I decided to have a day without schoolwork. Outrageous, I know.

This morning I got up, ate breakfast, and took myself to the Museo del Prado. Using my "in the middle-ish of 5 metro stations" location to my advantage, I wakled to Quevedo and hopped right on the 2 to Banco de España and the Paseo del Prado. On the walk towards the museum, there was a man playing the saxophone for money and his dog was howling along; it was a really sad sight. I wandered the museum, plano in hand for probably about two hours. I did the usual round through the most famous works, being surprised by the size of Las meninas (Diego Velazquez) and El 2 de mayo and El 3 de mayo (Francisco de Goya). I was plesaently surprised by all the paintings I recognized and was able to identify. While looking around the museum shop, an image in a book in the childrens seciton caught my eye. The book? La pequeña oruga glotona. In english: The very hungry caterpillar. !!! It is very likely that I will end up purchasing it at a later date :)

After walking arouns so much, I was getting really warm so the cool outsode air was very welcoming. Sort of looking for la Calle de las Huertas, I went up the first street I would and ended up up by the metro station Anton Martín and not exactly knowing where I was. All that I had to do though, was find a street map and pull out my trusty compass to find I could find my way up to La puerta del sol quite easily. When I got back to my apartment, it was definitely time for a siesta that ended up being two hours! I probably needed it. I have been feeling a little iffy all day but hot water with lemon and honey have helpes with that *knock on wood*.

Tomorrow after the práctica section of my Spanish Lit class, it will be back to studying for my exam for that class. It isn't until the 11th of February, but the new semester of Reunidas courses starts on Monday and I'd like to have some work done before then.