Another Paseo and Another Atleti Game

Posted on 8 April 2014 by Casey Brown

Wednesday, March 26, was a pretty busy day. Beyond registering that morning for the first semester of my senior year (ahh!), I had my normal three classes, a paseo, and a soccer game with my class — and we were leaving early the next morning for Valencia!

Luckily the meeting point for the paseo was pretty close to Argüelles where ICADE is: Plaza de España at the end of the Gran Vía. Although we had already visited the plaza and our first stop, the Templo de Debod, we learned a bit more about them from Kike. It turns out that the monument in the center of the plaza is actually dedicated to Cervantes and also features Don Quixote, his squire Sancho Panza, and his “true love” Dulcinea. We also learned that the buildings surrounding the square that we had seen before were actually Madrid’s first skyscrapers, the Torre de Madrid and Edificio España. They still remain some of the taller buildings in the city but have been overpassed as the tallest by the Torrespaña (or Pirulí) and the Four Towers in the north of the city.

Blurry view of the towers in Madrid's skyline on our train back from Cercedilla

View of the towers in Madrid’s skyline on our train back from Cercedilla

Unfortunately, because of the crisis and financial problems, most of those tall buildings and their office spaces remain empty. Ironically, we learned an interesting story about the origin of the Four Tower skyscrapers in our EU class earlier that week when discussing competition laws. They were actually built on Real Madrid’s former training fields, the Ciudad Deportiva, until a controversial deal between the team and the city government allowed for the area to be rezoned for commercial purposes and sold to four corporations to build Madrid’s first true skyscrapers. The deal helped get Real Madrid out of debt and let it focus on developing itself into the world class team it is today. It prompted an EU investigation, but they found no wrongdoing and the towers still stand tall today — though plagued with many empty offices just like the towers of Plaza de España. This situation definitely puts madrileños in a strange position by admiring the architectural beauty of these buildings, but having their emptiness remind them of the economic crisis.

Plaza de Cibeles from the rooftop

Plaza de Cibeles from the rooftop

After finishing up at the Plaza de España and Temple of Debod, we went to the Círculo de Bellas Artes. The Bellas Artes is a private cultural collection, but the main reason we went was because its rooftop bar offers some great views of the city due its pretty large height and good location right next to Plaza de Cibeles, allowing us to see the nearby City Hall and Bank of Spain, and many other sights around the city, including the tall skyscrapers and towers. We also learned that the well-known Metropolis Building at the start of the Gran Vía is actually one of the only buildings known by its name in everyday life.

As we were nearing the end of our paseo, we walked around a little more to get quick views of the Congress of Deputies and the Teatro de la Zarzuela. Zarzuela is the traditional musical theater genre that is basically Spain’s version of opera, but is definitely a genre of its own. We learned in our Literature and Cinema class with Pau that almost all of the initial Spanish films were zarzuelas, though Kike told us that with the internationalization of the city, Madrid’s zarzuela houses are mostly being replaced by other theaters and operas as the genre falls out of style.

I had just enough time after the paseo to grab a quick dinner of bocadillo de calamares, one of the typical foods of the Community of Madrid, before heading to the soccer game, Atlético de Madrid v. Granda CF. You could definitely tell that this game was near the end of the season, because the stadium was completely packed. We were in the nosebleeds since the school had to get all of us tickets close together, but we still had a good view of the game and the atmosphere was great. The fans were really excited because Atleti is currently in the lead of La Liga, beating the current league dominators of Barcelona and Real Madrid. The team hasn’t won a championship since 1995–96 season, so the fans are all really excited and hopeful for an Atlético victory. They actually kept showing the score of the Sevilla v. Real Madrid game and were very excited whenever Sevilla scored, shouting “¡Viva Sevilla!“, and even more excited when the score eventually reached 2-1 and Real Madrid lost. Though it took a while for Atleti to score, they eventually won 1-0! It’ll be really interesting to see how the rest of the season turns out, and I have to say I think I’m rooting for Atlético de Madrid — it’d definitely be really cool to see the top two teams upset and the underdog win.

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El Pardo: Franco, the monarchy, and the political situation in Spain

Posted on 1 April 2014 by Casey Brown

I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, but I’ve been slammed with work and traveling. (Yeah, occasionally we do experience the “study” in study abroad.) I’m gonna try to get as many blog posts in as a I can, but it’s gonna take some time!

Last Saturday, March 22, I went with one of my friends, Christy, and her señora to the El Pardo neighborhood. I was able to see Christy’s homestay, get to know a little bit about her commute, and meet her homestay mother, María. It was very interesting to see how different they are. While I live in a very tiny apartment with three other people in the middle of a pretty busy area (Goya in Salamanca), Christy’s room and apartment are huge even though only she and her señora live there. Her señora explained that she likes living away from the city center because it’s calmer, she can have a bigger house, and she’s more removed from everything and very close to the green areas outside the city. The thing that surprised me most was that she actually had a car! I couldn’t remember the last time I had been in a non-taxi car within the city, since my family doesn’t have one.

María took us to the Royal Palace of El Pardo, which was about a 10-15 minute drive from their house and very near the Palace of Zarzuela which is the main royal residence of the Spanish royal family today and is home to both Juan Carlos and Felipe. Beyond being located in a pretty area and began as a hunting lodge, the Palacio Real de El Pardo is important in that it was the palace used by Francisco Franco during his dictatorship after the end of the Spanish Civil War. He chose not to live in the Royal Palace in Madrid that we visited earlier because it was not as safe and he did not want to offend the monarchy, whom he had promised to let the come back to rule Spain eventually, though he ended up dying before the royal family regained power and began the transition to democracy. We received a tour around the complex and it was crazy to see the desk, clothing, and home that the former dictator lived in only a few decades ago. Because the palace is also used to host visiting heads of state, given its secure location and proximity to la Zarzuela, it was even cooler to see the modern TV and living room setup for those guests.

One of the strange enigmas about Franco is that he was truly nationalistic and believed in Spain. The only problem was that his way of doing that was to force one view of Spain, suppressing those against the Catholic Church, those who opposed him, and those who practiced traditions, languages, and cultures different from the mainstream castellano culture like the Catalans and Basque. This paradox of both supporting and oppressing Spain explain his very mixed and controversial legacy. There are still some who believe he was good for Spain and support what he did to try to develop Spain (desarrollismo) and maintain traditional values, and I actually came across a phrase in my book for literature, con Franco vivíamos mejor (“with Franco we lived better”), that was apparently a common refrain during the transition. He is actually buried in a national monument and Catholic basilica near San Lorezno de El Escorial (which we visited), Valle de los Caídos, and he is the only person who did not die in the Civil War to be buried there. There are many who oppose honoring a caudillo‘s legacy in such a way, but he still remains there. It’s very confusing for us to sit on the outside trying to understand how people really feel.

In terms of politics, the present represents a very tense time for Spain. Though you could argue every country always has fierce arguments around its politics, it really seems Spain is struggling with some important issues. On our way home from el Pardo, after stopping by a little church to see a famous sculpture of Jesus, we ended up talking about the royal family being in the news recently, something we learned about in my journalism class. The husband of Juan Carlos’s daughter, the infanta Cristina (only the person next in line is the príncipe or princesa), has been wrapped up in a corruption scandal for quite some time and he is accused of embezzling millions in public funds for himself by falsifying charity budgets. Though these accusations date back to November 2011, the story gained renewed interest when Cristina was actually charged and ordered to appear in court as well. Like court cases in the United States but worse, litigation in Spain takes even longer, so we’ll see how this will turn out, though you can bet that Spaniards will continue discussing it for weeks either way. María also mentioned that Juan Carlos himself stirs up controversy as well, with his going on an expensive elephant hunting trip and their being lots of rumors of possible affairs. The monarchy has been struggling to keep current in today’s world and developments are really not good during an economic crisis.

I really do think that Spanish people like their news and like to talk about politics, but it does seem like this is a pretty important time of change for the country. Obviously, political talk is to be expected in any country, especially one unhappy with the current state of the economy, but there has been more stuff in the news recently about the politics than just the monarchy. Adolfo Suárez, the first democratically-elected president after Franco who was integral to the transition to democracy, actually just died on Sunday, the day after we visited the Pardo. This caused national mourning, flags at half, and I’ve even heard from a lot of my friends that their señoras were very upset and in tears. On the actual day we went to the Prado there were also very large protests that, though peaceful and limited to a few areas in the center of Madrid, counted almost 35 separate groups as participants. Many of these groups started their participation in the “March of Dignity” by actually walking to Madrid from their own cities. Our journalism professor, Mario, also told us that many of the students at his university planned on going on strike for a day to show their opposition to these laws and protest more. Mariano Rajoy, the current prime minister, and his government are the main objects of these protests with many opposing his conservative efforts to restrict abortion, same-sex marriage, and many other freedoms.

Visiting el Pardo and meeting Christy’s señora was definitely a fun experience, but it certainly brought up a lot of the issue’s Spain has dealt with during its dictatorship and transition and continues to deal with today. With the drama surrounding the royal family, Rajoy’s desires to curtail to repeal many of the nation’s liberal laws passed by Zapatero, and Catalonia’s planned independence referendum, it’s certainly an interesting time to watching the political situation in Spain.

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Navigating Language Barriers

Posted on 26 March 2014 by Casey Brown

Ben, my homestay brother, had his parents visit him this weekend. It was cool to meet them and I’m sure they enjoyed meeting the people he’s been living with this semester. At the same time, the group dinner with me, Ben and his family, and our homestay parents certainly highlighted the challenges of navigating language barriers and finding ways to express yourself when you come from (linguistic) backgrounds, but in the end I was pretty impressed with how well we managed.

We went to a local restaurant for the meal where they only spoke Spanish, which you would think would be fine since we’d been living here for a few months, but it was a seafood restaurant so there were a lot of words there that we didn’t recognize at all and couldn’t really explain to his parents. The guests themselves all spoke different languages too — when it came to our homestay parents, it turns out they both speak three languages with Vlad knowing Serbian, Lili knowing English (though she avoids using it with us!), and them both knowing Romanian and Spanish. Ben’s mother is like him where he understands a lot but isn’t that comfortable speaking it, and Ben’s father didn’t speak any as far as I knew. There were six of us too, so that’s too many for their to be one conversation going on the entire time… somehow it all worked out though, with people speaking what they could in each language, asking each other for help when need be, and, of course, using gestures where they made sense. It turned out to be a pretty pleasant meal. 🙂

This little example really reminded me of how things work out in our Spanish classes and other times that we’re trying to express ourselves only in Spanish, either because we want to learn or because the other person doesn’t understand in English. Most cultures have some commonalities and universal concepts that we’ve learned to exploit to get our meanings across. For example, one of the easiest ways we’ve found to figure out hard words that come up during our literature class with Pau is through Disney or other popular culture references: when the word huso came up in a poem, we used Sleeping Beauty to learn that its really a thimble in English; Hunchback of Notre Dame helped us confirm that we were really talking about someone with a hunched back; and we asked if the man was like Superman to figure out if the passage said he was wearing a cape. I feel like we learn more when deducing the meanings through these references, and it’s more fun too!

Of course, these things can backfire though, because animals make different noises in different languages and even some characters are pronounced differently. One day my professor didn’t understand me when I referred to Harry Potter and I had to say it the Spanish way, Arrrrry Pottttter, for him to get it. He instantly knew what we were talking about it once we said it in the Spanish way, which made us all burst out laughing. It’s crazy how accents and the pronunciation of the words can really be that important to making what you’re saying click in another speaker’s mind!

When all else fails and there are no culture references to get our meaning across, before we turn to the dictionary apps we all installed on our phones we can try describing the definition in Spanish. My friend Sarah was trying to get nail polish remover and, naturally, we had no idea how to say that in Spanish, so we had to explain it: do you have anything to undo the paint on the nails? (¿tienes algo para deshacer la pinta de las uñas?), naturally complete with gestures to our fingernails. Luckily, she seemed to understand us and instantly responded with ¿quitaesmalte?, though we weren’t really sure she got what we were asking for until she brought the familiar product out to us. 🙂

All of this really forces us to think on our feet and try hard to figure things out instead of taking the easy way out and using a dictionary or Google Translate. Plus, it helps us regain the inquisitiveness that we had when we were children but slowly lost as we grew up. We’re now less afraid to stop class and ask what a key word means, because it’s very likely that a good number of other people in the class don’t know it either. Although technology makes learning easier, it’s still important that we use the basics like cultural similarities, simple explanations, and, when all else fails, direct questions to help us figure things out.

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Museo de América and Madrid’s Slaughterhouse

Posted on 20 March 2014 by Casey Brown

The busy Madrid-filled week continued with an adventure with Christy on Tuesday and a paseo with Kike on Wednesday.

Museo de América

Museo de América

Like most Tuesdays, Christy and I had a bit of free time that we wanted to take advantage of to explore the city a little bit more. We stuck around Moncloa again, because it’s near ICADE where she had a class earlier and I had one later that afternoon. The district of Moncloa is in the northwest part of the city and includes Casa de Campo, the campus of the Universidad Complutense in Ciudad Universitaria (University City), and the official residence of Spain’s prime minister at the Palacio de Moncloa. We met at the Arco de la Victoria, which was actually built by Franco to commemorate his winning the Civil War, and then headed to the Museo de América. We wanted to go the Faro de Moncloa as well, a large tower that apparently gives good views of the city and whose name means “lighthouse,” but it’s been closed for years due to construction. 🙁

The Museum of the Americas holds thousands of pieces from the Americas, ranging from artistic pieces to archaeological artifacts and from the prehistorical period to today. It was cool to see a bunch of examples of the history of Americas and it reminded us of home, and the best part was that it’s free for university students. There was a huge variety of collections, plus we were glad to get an escape from the sun and warm weather. However, with all those pieces on only two floors, we quickly got our fill after walking around and seeing the highlights, so we headed to local Tierra Burrito, Madrid’s Chipotle-like restaurant, to eat outside before I had to head to class.

Our adventure with Kike, the Paseos por Madrid teacher, on Wednesday evening would prove to be even more fun though. We met at the Legazpi Metro Station and headed to the Matadero, a former Neo-Mudéjar slaughterhouse that has since been turned into an art exhibition space. Located right on the Manzanares River that flows through Madrid, the slaughterhouse was used for 85 years until 1996 and provided a large amount of Madrid’s meat products, especially with the easy distribution given by its river location. It’s crazy to think that the with tons of cool exhibits there today, both temporary and permanent, the building complex was used to kill millions of animals over almost a century, especially since some of the rooms were kept in the style of a slaughterhouse with doorways covered by long plastic strips… but it was still cool, even if a little creepy.

Matadero Madrid

Matadero Madrid

This week’s paseo was definitely more like a traditional paseo in the true sense of the word though. A paseo is basically a promenade, or a leisurely stroll through town, and this definitely qualified as that. We followed the Manzanares river for at least 5 kilometers, passing by lots of beautiful parks and the Vicente Calderón Stadium, until we got to the Puente de Segovia near the Royal Palace and almost to Príncipe Pío. It turns out that the river used to be pretty ignored by the madrileños and became polluted by Madrid’s main circular highway, but then the M-30 road was moved underground and the nearby river area was restored. Many cool parks were built for children and there’s a great running and walking path, improvements which the Ayuntamiento hopes will turn Madrid into a city that identifies a little more with its river and utilizes it, even if not to the extreme of Paris’s Seine. Though its more of a laid-back and residential area towards the south of the city, we definitely want to go back there once it gets warmer just to enjoy it.

One of the coolest parts about this walking tour, other than the beautiful parks, nice warm weather, and cool Matadero space, was being able to explore a new part of Madrid we haven’t seen before. As I’m sure you can tell, we’re definitely trying to take advantage of the city we call home and get to know all of it, not just the areas we spend a lot of time in. But more than just visiting the different areas, we also like to get to know them and how they all connect. Although some might not realize it if they take the Metro everywhere, Madrid is an incredibly walkable city and most of the main spots are very close together. We try to walk places as much as we can to make sure that we realize how all the puzzle pieces fit together, but we hadn’t walked around the south edge of the city like this before. When we figured out how places we’d been too so often — Sol, La Latina, Pirámides (home to the Atleti stadium), Ópera/Royal Palace, and Príncipe Pío — all fit together, our minds were blown a little bit. We hadn’t really seen them from that angle, so we had missed out on those connections, but now our mental maps are that much more developed. This reminded us yet again how awesome these paseos are because they’re meant to do just that: get us to experience things we wouldn’t normally and see the city in a different way.

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Visit to AS, a daily sports newspaper

Posted on 19 March 2014 by Casey Brown

We went on another field trip with our soccer class this past Monday. This time we went to the headquarters of AS, a Spanish daily newspaper focused completely on sports.

As I’ve said before, Spain really loves their sports. The country has four daily newspapers focused solely on sports, with two based in Madrid and two in Barcelona. The number one sports newspaper, Marca, is actually the most read newspaper in all of Spain. Its readership numbers are even higher than El País, the highest circulated newspaper that is part of the same media group as AS, PRISA. Although officially based in Madrid, AS has satellite offices in a few different locations around Spain where it customizes its coverage a little for the different audience in Barcelona, Bilbao, A Coruña, Sevilla, Valencia, and Zaragoza. All of the versions, however, tend to focus on Real Madrid and fútbol as a whole, with only a few pages devoted to motor sports and basketball and even fewer to others.

It was very cool to go to the headquarters of PRISA, where both AS and El País, two very famous Spanish newspapers, are published. We learned quite a bit about the paper, the writing process, and saw a lot of people working hard. I was actually surprised at how many people were still working when we got there at around 5:30pm, but it turns out that they come into work late and stay very early because they need to make sure they fit in everything newsworthy before the paper goes to print at around 12:30am. Most of the time they still have like 20 pages blank at around 9:00pm and need to fill them all very quickly after the game results come out later that night. That makes total sense when you think about it, but we didn’t realize it beforehand. It turns out that their print deadline can actual be pushed back an hour or so if need be, but like everything in life the consequence is higher costs due to the more delivery trucks needed on the road to get the papers out. They would only make that decision with very good reason.

It turns out AS is struggling with a lot of the same issues most newspapers in the United States are. The advent of the internet brings whole new challenges and questions, and they’re still not sure how to best handle it. Currently, they have a very well-developed website that includes the exact same content as their print edition, usually way earlier, and completely for free. They’re not sure how best to monetize the content, considering paywalls have not worked in Spain. Newspapers in general are struggling with generational differences like younger people not buying newspapers and they joked about the fact that once a reader dies he isn’t really replaced by a younger one because the newer generations get all of their information from the internet and social media.

Though there was a lot of overlap between newspapers in Spain and newspapers back home, it was very interesting to hear about the differences. For example, very few newspapers are actually delivered to homes in Madrid because most people live in apartment buildings. It’s not always easy to get the newspapers inside apartment buildings or to people’s doors because they don’t have individual houses like in the United States. That means that basically all of the circulation figures come from newsstand sales and that the distribution network is completely different. It’s crazy how something we take for granted like mail delivery can be completely different in another country!

Like all of our soccer trips, this one was definitely very eye-opening and interesting. It never ceases to amaze us how important sports are to Europeans — so much so that many of their readers buy both general newspapers and a separate sports paper. Getting an inside perspective on how those newspapers work was great, and we definitely geeked out when we saw the staff members editing videos for the web and the actual newspaper that would be published tomorrow on printing software!

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El Escorial and the Teleférico of Casa de Campo

Posted on 18 March 2014 by Casey Brown

As this was one of our last weekends in Madrid for the next month, we decided to take advantage of what the city and surrounding area had to offer, along with the great 23°C weather, with a short day trip to San Lorenzo de El Escorial and a visit to two of the main parks in Madrid, Casa de Campo and the Parque del Oeste.

El Escorial

El Escorial

We visited San Lorenzo de El Escorial as a program on Friday, reminding us again how awesome it is that we are able to go on these quick day trips because we don’t have classes. El Escorial is a town within the Comunidad de Madrid, though outside the capital city, and located near the Guadarrama Mountains that we hiked in January. Though it’s a cute town on its own, the main reason for our visit was the Monasterio de El Escorial that the town is named after, which is a royal residence, a monastery, school, and the main burial site for the Spanish royal family.

El Escorial is a huge complex that was very cool to visit. Felipe II, the Spanish king who ruled the empire when it was probably at its largest, built El Escorial in only 21 years. Fiercely trying to save Catholic Spain from the expansion of the Protestant Reformation, Felipe II worked hard to make his reign and palaces appear austere so they would be less controversial and people would support Catholicism more. He actually named the monastery after San Lorenzo, or Saint Lawrence, to celebrate a military victory at St. Quentin against the French on Lawrence’s feast day. The compound is shaped like a grill, or parrilla, in honor of San Lorenzo’s martyrdom by burning. Felipe included many other religious elements in the creation of his palace, basing many of the designs on Solomon’s Temple and including statues of many Jewish kings like David and Solomon. He actually put the church right in the middle of the building, connecting his private bedroom to the main altar with a window so he could hear mass even when his gout kept him bedridden.

Although we didn’t get to see any monks while at El Escorial, we did get to see the royal crypt underneath the palace and the church. Almost all of the Spanish kings and queens from Carlos V on are buried at El Escorial, including their infantes, the children of the current monarchs born after the prince or princess, and other royal family members. Beyond the graves themselves, we also saw the doors leading to the pudridero, or royal rotting room, where the most recently deceased members of the Spanish royal family, including Don Juan, are decomposing before they can be officially placed in their crypts. Though obviously a tiny bit creepy, it’s very cool to think that, between El Escorial and the Capilla Real in Granda, we’ve now seen the graves of almost all of the monarchs of Spain because Spain as we know it didn’t really exist until after the Catholic Monarchs.

The rest of that weekend was spent was pretty laid back, with a great deal of time spent outside enjoying the warm weather while walking along the streets, chilling in parks, and drinking in the outdoor cafés. Christy and I also finally made it out to Casa de Campo, which is the home to one of the world’s largest urban parks, with its area of 6.6 square miles making it five times larger than New York’s Central Park. The park reminds me a lot of a National Park than a city park, with its huge space and large amount of very tall trees and almost no paved roads. Then again, there aren’t many national parks in which you’d find a zoo and aquarium or a theme park.

The coolest part about the park for me is the teleférico, or aerial cable car, that brings you from the Parque del Oeste into Casa de Campo. This was the main reason we wanted to go to the park, but it was closed on Friday when we first tried to go, so we had to come back on Sunday. The views and different perspective we got of the city, in addition to the fun ride, were definitely worth the return trip though.  A few of our friends still want to check it out and if the weather continues to be as nice as it has been lately, we’ll definitely be willing to go back! 🙂

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A Week Full of Field Trips

Posted on 13 March 2014 by Casey Brown

This school week was full of field trips and experiential learning that took us outside of the classroom, including a class trip, a site visit with the program, and a paseo with Kike. After all the weekend trips we’ve been on and that are still to come, it’s good that we’re actually still taking advantage of all that we haven’t seen yet in Madrid.

You First Sports

You First Sports

Our first trip was on Monday during our soccer class. As I said earlier, a large number of our soccer sessions will be spent outside of the classroom for experiential learning. Next week we’ll be going to a basketball game and soon we’ll be visiting a newspaper, but this Monday we visited the offices of You First Sports, a sports agency that has a number of high-profile athletes as clients and also does a great deal of sports marketing. They are a pretty big agency in Spain and have offices all over the world, including the United States and China. Although they initially focused on fútbol, they have expanded to basketball and have signed a bunch of players in the NBA.

We learned a good amount about the what they do there, the challenges of working as a sports agent, and the benefits of having a large agency instead of a smaller partnership or sole proprietorship. Apparently being a sports agent really is a lot like Jerry Maguire, considering the person who was nice enough to talk to our class kept referring to the movie many times and used it as an example of how tough the job can be. 🙂 I think what surprised me most during his talk was how many clients they had and how spread out they were: they had Americans, Europeans, Mexicans, etc., playing both basketball and soccer on tons of teams in leagues all over the world. It must be hard to manage all those different types of clients, but I guess at the end of the day sports are very similar around the world.

The next day, Tuesday, Paco took us all on a group tour of the Palacio Real (Royal Palace)! Because Christy and I had some time to kill after class ended and before the meeting time, we decided to visit the Temple of Debod. I had heard about it from a few friends who had visited it, but hadn’t been there yet, so we took advantage of the beautiful day and checked it out. The temple’s pretty centrally located between Plaza de España and the Royal Palace, and not too far from ICADE, which is good because I had a class right after the tour.

The Templo de Debod is an ancient Egyptian temple right in the middle of Madrid… something we found very strange at first considering the Egyptians didn’t make it all the way up to the Iberian peninsula during their time. The temple was actually originally in southern Egypt, like you would expect, and was only sent to Madrid and rebuilt there in 1968. In 1960, Egypt decided to build the Aswan Dam to control floods, gain water for irrigation, and make hydroelectric power, but doing so would have destroyed the ancient Egyptian artifacts in the surrounding area. As a result, they decided to donate the temple to Spain to save the history and also thank for the help they and a few other countries gave when UNESCO called for money to save the Abu Simbel temples. The situation made a little more sense after learning that explanation, but it was still a crazy experience to be walking around an Ancient Egyptian temple in the middle of downtown Madrid.

Palacio Real de Madrid

Palacio Real de Madrid

After exploring the temple for a little bit, we headed to the Ópera Metro Station so we could walk over to the palace as a group. Though the Palacio Real is the official residence of Spain’s royal family, they haven’t actually lived there since they were exiled by Franco during the Spanish Civil War. After the war, Juan Carlos I chose instead to live in the safer Palacio de la Zarzuela outside of the city of Madrid. Even still, the building is hundreds of years old and holds a great deal of history with its architecture, furniture, clocks, paintings, and other collectibles all on display. Plus, as the official royal residence, it’s still used for state functions like receptions for visiting heads of state or people like Michelle Obama when they visit Madrid. 🙂 Getting to visit the palace with Paco was also great because it gave us a built-in tour guide who taught us not only about the actual palace and artwork, but also the history of the royal family and building’s construction. We learned a ton on the tour, we did something I probably would not have done alone, and I made it to class five minutes early even though I walked there from the palace.

Our field trips continued on Wednesday, where we went with Kike on a paseo por Madrid to the Museo Sorolla, a museum dedicated to a the Valencian painter Joaquín Sorolla. The museum is in a part of Madrid I actually hadn’t been before, near the Iglesia Metro stop towards the north of the city. Even though I hadn’t been there, it was surprisingly easy to get there and only a 25 minutes from ICADE — yet another example of how walkable Madrid is as a city. The metro station sits right outside a beautiful church, which makes sense considering iglesia means church in Spanish.

Though we met at the church, we had to walk a bit down the street to reach the Sorolla Museum, which actually used to be the artist’s home, workshop, and studio before it was turned into a museum after his death. Other than the fact that it’s a two-story house with a yard surrounded by a bunch of taller apartment buildings in the middle of Madrid, one of the main things that stand out about the museum is the gardens. Many of the plants were actually added by the artists himself and he designed them after the Reales Alcázares we visited in Sevilla and La Alhambra in Granada. I liked quite a few of the works on display in the museum. Sorolla had a few different styles over his career, ranging from more realistic works to more impressionist ones, but almost all of them were pictures of Spanish people, life, and landscapes, as well as beach scenes. Because of this we were able to recognize many of the themes and items present in his paintings, and the ones we couldn’t were pretty enough on their own. Like all of the places we visited this week, this museum was another cool thing Madrid had to offer that got us outdoors exploring the city, enjoying the weather, and doing things we probably would not have done otherwise on our own.

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Barcelona and Catalonia through Picasso, Dalí, and Gaudí

Posted on 11 March 2014 by Casey Brown

As you can see from all of these travel blog posts, a lot of our time abroad is spent outside of Madrid. I actually only have two weekends left in the city with no trips at all! This past weekend had us visiting the autonomous community of Cataluña, where we saw the region’s capital Barcelona and two cities in its northeastern province, Figueres and Cadaqués. I had already visited Barcelona with my family twice before, including right before I came to Madrid, but only for a day or two each time. I got to see a few different things on this trip I hadn’t seen before, and this visit had more of a focus on the main artists of the region, Picasso, Dalí, and Gaudí, plus it’s always a different experience when you visit a city with a different group of people.

Estelada flag representing Catalan independentists that we saw waving a lot; it's distinct from the flag of Catalonia.

Estelada flag representing Catalan independentists that we saw waving a lot; it’s distinct from the flag of Catalonia.

Catalonia actually has a very distinct culture from the rest of Spain and Madrid, with its people showing a lot of regional pride and gaining a great deal of autonomy after Franco’s oppressive rule ended in 1975. During the dictatorship, any aspects of non-mainstream Spanish culture such as languages, dances, and traditions were forbidden, and one of the regions hit particularly hard by these restrictions was Catalonia. With the introduction of democracy, however, they have gained a lot of autonomy and have recovered by becoming one of the richest areas in Spain. They maintain a strong sense of local pride, speaking a different language, Catalan, that is only spoken in two other autonomous communities (Valencia and the Balearic Islands), and constantly talking about seceding from Spain. We have actually heard a lot of heated political discussion about the Catalan independence movement while here, because the Catalan government announced a referendum on secession to be held in 2014, something that is against the Spanish Constitution and that the Spanish Government refuses to allow. It will be interesting to see how the situation develops given the many issues at stake, especially considering that Catalonia would have to leave the European Union, including the eurozone and single market, if it secedes from Spain, something that would really hurt the economically-strong region.

Aerial view of the city - Panorama

Aerial view of the city – Panorama

After leaving Madrid really in the morning on Friday, our first stop was Barcelona, the capital of Catalonia, second largest city in Spain, one of the most important ports in all of the Mediterranean with a huge amount of tourism, and of course the setting of The Cheetah Girls 2, which naturally became the soundtrack for the weekend. The city is located between the sea and the Tibidabo Mountain, giving it beautiful beaches, some of the best in the world, but it has also restricting how the city grew over time. Our first order of business was bus tour to see the main sights that we wouldn’t have a chance to visit in depth during the weekend. Among the things we saw from our bus were: the Plaça d’Espanya, another beautiful plaza like the one in Sevilla built for the 1929 World Fair; the Montjuïc, where we saw an aerial view of the city, the Palau Nacional, the 1992 Olympic Stadium, and the Joan Miró art museum; and a former plaza de toros that was converted into a shopping mall after bullfighting was banned in Catalonia.

(As an aside: It’s hard to consider the Catalans better than the rest of Spain because of their ban on bullfighting — the traditions they still have are worse: they harass and pull the bulls through the streets in correbous instead of just letting them run freely in the more traditional encierro and instead of having a fight that the bull can possibly win, they light the bulls horns on fire in toro embolado and dodge it until it burns itself.)

One of the most popular items in La Boqueria market is the large variety of fresh squeezed juices.

One of the most popular items in La Boqueria market is the large variety of fresh squeezed juices.

The bus let us off in the Plaça de Catalunya, the main square in Barcelona, and we walked down Las Ramblas, a large pedestrian street that is a popular tourist destination full of flower shops, performers, and places to eat. Of course we stopped by the famous La Boqueria, a huge public market with tons of fresh fruit, fish, and meat to cook at home, as well as prepared food to eat right in the market. Unfortunately we didn’t have the chance to drink from the Font de Canaletes, but I’m sure we’ll be back to Barcelona someday regardless. 😉 We followed La Rambla all the way down passed the Columbus Monument until the beach, where we were able to eat lunch and relax beside the harbor.

Though we were pretty tired from soaking up the rays on the beach nearby, we still had one more stop before we could call it a day and head to the hotel: the Museu Picasso in the middle of the Barri Gòtic. The museum has the most works by Pablo Picasso of any other museum in the world and is devoted to showing his evolution as a painter over time. It is very ironic that one of the most important contemporary artists has a museum in the middle of the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona with buildings dating back to the Middle Ages and is actually housed in five medieval palaces, showing visitors an intriguing juxtaposition.

Most people only know Picasso as the founder of Cubism, but it turns out he had been a master painter since he was a child. Because his father was an art teacher, he learned from a young age how to paint and paint well. We saw some of his earlier works and it’s truly amazing to see how great an artist he was when he was only an adolescent in his early teens. I know we all fall victim at some point to thinking he was a bad artist and turned to cubism and weird shapes only because he couldn’t paint, but that’s not at all true: he turned to cubism because he already mastered every other movement at such a young age that he needed a challenge. Something we learned was that a lot of the paintings looks so weird not because he thinks things actually look like that but because he included a fourth dimension in his paintings: time and movement. The reason eyes are in weird positions is because the heads are turning and the subjects are moving. We can totally appreciate Picasso more now that we’ve seen where he’s come from, why he did the things he did, and that he had so many distinct styles that he tried throughout his life.

You can really spend hours and hours in any museum, but we were all tired so Paco let us see some of the highlights, including The First Communion, which Picasso did when he was only around 14 years old, and Science and Charity, which has an interesting use of perspective in which the bed moves and changes shape as you walk. (As you know from our visit to the Prado, we really like these kinds of paintings.) After we left the museum, we headed to straight to our hotel for some much needed rest before dinner. Our hotel was actually very close to Camp Nou, the largest stadium in Europe and home to FC Barcelona. We reconvened for dinner that night at a restaurant inside the Maremagnum, a big shopping mall in the water at the end of Las Ramblas. After eating some seafood paella, we checked out a cool bar, the Dow Jones, whose prices are determined by supply and demand. It was a very cool concept, though it was a little expensive and got crazy crowded, so we turned in at a pretty reasonable hour.

We had an early wake-up call on Saturday at 7:00 in the morning, but we had a long journey ahead of us: it’s about an hour and a half’s drive north to Figueres, the birthplace of Salvador Dalí and the home of the theater and museum devoted to him. Known all around the world for his surrealist works, Dalí was definitely a very interesting character. Surrealist works do not always have a point on their own; they use strange combinations of unexpected things to provoke thought and evoke things from the subconscious. It was very interesting to walk around a museum with nothing but surrealist works, including traditional paintings, an upside-down bathroom, sculptures made out of spoons, a taxi that rains on the inside, and paintings you could only see when reflected in a bottles. We even had a chance to see Dalí’s crypt, as he’s buried on the bottom floor of the museum. It was definitely an interesting experience, though I’m still not really a fan of surrealism.

Panoramic view of the water and city -- so blue

Panoramic view of the water and city of Cadaqués — so blue

From Figueres we took a scenic drive through the mountains towards the beach town of Cadaqués. We saw many grape vines along the way, beautiful views of the water, and terraces to grow crops on the mountains. It was interesting to see how the regions of Catalonia become more and more Catalan, rather than Spanish, as you move further up north and get closer to the border with France. Although we took a walking tour around Cadaqués, the main point of our stop was for lunch and to enjoy the beaches that it and Catalonia are famous for. We had a great meal of cava, the famous Catalan sparkling wine, and tapas, including one of our favorites, patatas bravas, which are little cut potatoes served with mayonnaise and “spicy” tomato sauce. Despite getting a little color on us from so much sun, we all definitely had a good time on our little excursion outside of Barcelona.

That night, we had dinner at a restaurant in the Plaça Reial, right in the Barrio Gótico and off of Las Ramblas. Though we had another early day tomorrow, we decided to go out and explore the bars in the Gothic Quarter. We walked around that area for a while before deciding to go to L’Ovella Negra, a bar off of Las Ramblas that one of our friends studying abroad in Barcelona told us about. It was a really interesting place that looked like an old tavern, but was actually pretty built up and touristy. We ended up sharing a huge 5L cubo, or bucket, of sangria that they placed on our table for us to serve ourselves. It was definitely a cool place that we’d like to go back to again next time, along with some of the clubs along the beach that we heard are pretty cool as well. 🙂

Ceiling. You can see how the tops of the columns resemble trees.

Ceiling. You can see how the tops of the columns resemble trees.

While Friday was devoted to Picasso and Saturday was devoted to Dalí, Sunday’s sights were all about Antoni Gaudí, the famous Catalan Modernism well-known for his neo-Gothic and Art Nouveau-style architecture scattered all across the city of Barcelona. Our first stop was the centerpiece of his collection: the Sagrada Família. Now one of the most well-known symbols of Barcelona, the Sagrada Familía is a large Catholic church still under construction, despite Gaudí starting it in 1882, 132 years ago, and working on until his death in 1926. Part of the reason for such slow process is that the cathedral is paid for entirely by donations, both through private gifts and visitor ticket sales, with no official government or church sponsorship.

Stained glass installation is a work in progress.

Stained glass installation is a work in progress.

I had just visited the church with my family in January, but every visit is breathtaking; because of the interesting combination of modernism, art nouveau, and neo-Gothic styles, the basilica is unlike any other building in the world. Natural elements and nonlinear structures make up huge parts of the design, giving the church a very different feeling from any of the others we have seen. Right now they’re slowly putting in stained glass windows, which are beautiful on their own, but it’s even cooler to see that only around half of the windows have them. The architects have currently scheduled the Sagrada Família’s construction for 2026, so we’ll have to have a reunion then (when we’re 33, ahh!) to see what it’ll look like when it’s finally complete. It will definitely be a very different sight, considering there are only 8 towers now and the plans have 18 in the end, 12 for the apostles, 4 for the evangelists, 1 for Mary, and 1 for Jesus. The final tower, dedicated to Jesus, will also be almost double the height of the existing towers, giving the church a very different look. Like Paco said though, when we finally come back to see the Sagrada Família finished, we’ll be able to say that we helped finance the construction of it. 🙂

After our quick tour of the Sagrada Família, we headed outside the main center of Barcelona to see Park Güell, a large garden and park originally designed by Gaudí as a housing site, though in the end no one wanted to live there. Park Güell has many examples of Gaudí’s characteristic style, including a large reliance on nature and an avoidance of straight lines, even in support columns and the benches. The benches themselves, for example, are in the shape of a sea serpent, rather than more traditional straight lines. Paco also told us that these benches were modeled after real people, making them very comfortable. Most of the materials he used were also recycled ceramics from other architectural creations, supporting nature even more. Because the park was designed to be a living community, the sand on the floor is actually used to filter rain water, which then gets stored in the support columns holding the structure up. It’s crazy that Gaudí thought about and designed such things at the beginning of the 20th century and we’re still grappling with them today.

Group of young people dancing sardana. They were really good and were probably a semi-professional group as part of a club.

Group of young people dancing sardana. They were really good and were probably a semi-professional group as part of a club.

Though we could have hung out in the park for forever, we finished up and went on our last walking tour of the trip, seeing a few more examples of Gaudí’s architecture along one of the main shopping and business streets, the Passeig de Gràcia, and Las Ramblas, such as Casa Milà and Casa Batlló. Because it was Sunday, we were also lucky enough to see a bunch of people dancing sardana outside of the Barcelona Cathedral. Sardana is the traditional Catalan dance that, like all examples of “minority cultures,” was forbidden during the Franco era and was danced in front of the cathedral after services as a form of protest and way to protect their culture. Despite Franco’s death and the return of democracy to Spain, the tradition continues today, as either a form of regional pride or way to support separatist movements, and it was very cool to see so many people, young and old, performing the dance in a big circle with a lot of jumps and kicks, wearing the traditional espardenya shoes, and putting all their belongings in the middle.

Our busy weekend trip ended with some free time for lunch, where we saw a protest supporting Ukraine, and some lounging in the Plaça de Catalunya until we headed back to the airport for our flight to Madrid.

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Lisbon and the Ancient Roman City of Mérida

Posted on 4 March 2014 by Casey Brown

If we thought we had spent a lot of time traveling by bus on our trip through southern Spain, we were definitely in for a surprise. It took us around four hours to get from our previous stop, Sevilla, to our home for the next few days, Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. Portugal represented a new country for almost all of us on the trip, so it was definitely exciting when we crossed the border… even if our only indication that we were in a new country was that we woke up from our naps to a text saying our phones no longer worked.

Tagus River from the Torre de Belém

Tagus River from the Torre de Belém

We didn’t arrive to Lisboa until it was dark, so all we really got to see of the city that first day was through the bus window on our way to the hotel, starting with a quick glimpse of the Christ the King statue that overlooks the city (inspired by the one in Rio de Janeiro) as we crossed the Tagus River, or Tajo/Tejo, into the city. Interestingly enough, this river was actually the same one that we saw when we visited Toledo a few months ago. At almost 650 miles long (more than 1,000 kilometers), the river is the longest one in the Iberian Peninsula, so we shouldn’t really have been surprised that we’d seen it multiple times. After making our way into the city, we saw a few key areas from the bus, like the Marquis of Pombal Square, which was dedicated to a famous Portuguese statesman who helped develop early seismology and happened to be near our hotel. Luckily our time in Lisbon would be pretty laid back. Because we would be exploring on a Monday, not much was open, so most of our tourist activities were very chill and outside. After traveling so much and doing a lot earlier in our trip, we definitely welcomed this break.

Torre de Belém

Torre de Belém

We got up Monday morning and headed to the Belém district of Lisbon, near the shore of the Tagus river and home to a few popular attractions. Our first stop, the Torre de Belém, functions as a common symbol of the city due to its history of both a customs house and a defense tower from which Lisbon’s river port could be protected, but apart from that it’s a pretty cool looking building that you now have to reach with a bridge because of the widening river. (And I’m sure the fact that two dogs were playing in the water nearby didn’t hurt our appreciation of the building either.) Next, we walked next door to the Padrão dos Descobrimentos, which is a monument dedicated to the Portuguese discoveries during the 15th and 16th centuries, located on the same river that those explorers must have left from. From our short time in Portugal it definitely seems like they still really value these early discoveries and maritime history as a culture; we saw many references to it and it seems part of their national pride and identity.

Doesn't that look delicious?

Doesn’t that look delicious?

Across the street from these two sites along the river is the large Hieronymites Monastery (Jerónimos). The monastery is another beautiful tourist attraction that represents Portugal’s history of exploration, and happens to also be the location of the signing of the European Union’s most recent treaties, the Treaty of Lisbon signed in 2007 that we learned about in my EU class. We got a chance to see some cool architecture from the outside, but it was also closed so we did not see much else. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise though, because we instead went next door to try the famous pastéis de Belém, yummy egg tarts that have since become very common Portuguese desserts. Apparently they were created by the monks from the Monsteiro dos Jerónimos with left-over egg yolks. The egg whites were commonly used to starch clothes or clear wines, but they did not have much use for the egg yolks, so they used them to make cream desserts.

After leaving the Belém area, we checked out the Lisbon Cathedral, the city’s oldest church which features many different architectural styles due to its being damaged and rebuilt after many earthquakes, before heading to the nearby beach town of Cascais for dinner. The city is one of the richest areas in Portugal, attracting many tourists and even royal families, many of whom actually used it as their home when many royal families were exiled from countries like Spain and Italy during World War II. With its beautiful beaches and cute town, we can definitely see why the area is so popular.  Almost all of us got seafood for dinner (mostly bacalhau, or cod), and we weren’t disappointed. We shopped for a little bit after lunch and actually ran into the taping of a Portuguese game show, Sabe ou Não Sabe, where random citizens are asked questions on the street in order to win €1.500, either by knowing the answers themselves or by finding someone else who does. Unfortunately, only Portuguese citizens could participate, but the producers were really nice and filmed us talking a little and saying the show’s name. 🙂

Beautiful water and blue sky in Cascais

Beautiful water and blue sky in Cascais

We made the half hour drive back to Lisbon after hanging out on the beach to see a performance of Fado, the Portuguese music genre that, like Spain’s flamenco, has been recognized as part of an important intangible part of our world’s cultural heritage in need of preserving. It took a while for us to appreciate it considering we do not speak Portuguese — flamenco is easier — but the music and singing were very beautiful. Though we could not understand most of the lyrics, they explained a little about the music genre and showed some multilingual poems explaining the content as the artists performed. Fado features mournful, almost melancholy, songs, lyrics, and guitar playing that express the Portuguese word of saudade. The word does not have a direct translation in English or even Spanish, but refers to the nostalgia or longing felt for someone or something that one loves. One of the poems described it as what remains after everything else is gone. I’m very glad we got to experience the fado and hope next time we’ll be able to understand it a little better, because the whole concept seems very intriguing and beautiful.

The fado performance was our last item on the itinerary for that day, so we rode the Metro back to our hotel (I have to say I prefer Madrid’s), and prepared ourselves for the almost six hour ride back home to Madrid. We saw our last attraction in Lisbon just as we were leaving the city: in order to officially leave, we had to cross the Tagus River on the Vasco da Gama Bridge, which, at 10.7 miles (17.2 kilometers), is the longest bridge in Europe. It was crazy how wide the river was at that point and how long the bridge was, and of course the bridge is named after a famous Portuguese discoverer, Vasco da Gama, the first European to reach India by sea. 🙂

Along the way we back to Madrid, we stopped roughly halfway at Mérida, in the Spanish autonomous community of Extremadura. Though the capital of Extremadura today, Mérida was once of the most important cities in the Roman Empire. After being founded by retired Roman soldiers in 25 BC, it was eventually one of the capitals of Roman Hispania and today has some of the most preserved Roman artifacts and monuments than anywhere else in Spain. While there, we visited the ancient amphitheater and Roman theater that are still sometimes used to this day, and we also random other parts of ancient Roman architecture spread throughout the city. The theater in Roman times was basically today’s sports, like soccer, and other cultural performance that represent such a large part of some people’s lives and allow them an escape. The Latin phrase panem et circenses, as Paco explained, shows all people really need in order to be get by are basic needs like food and entertainment. After grabbing some migas, calamari, and lamb caldereta for lunch, we hopped back on the bus and were happy to be back home in Madrid by around 7:30pm.

Overall it was a great trip and we had a lot of fun, but as you can see by how long it’s taken me to finish blogging about it, we did a ton and it definitely takes some time to catch up with everything! With midterms this week and another trip to Barcelona next week though, there really isn’t a ton of room for downtime, but I’m definitely happier busy than bored. Plus, I’d rather we be exhausted from spending 6 days traveling 2.000 kilometers around 2 countries, visiting 7 new cities in 3 autonomous communities, walking countless miles to see many sights, and making the most of cultural experiences than bored from having spent all that time at home partying or wasting time on the internet in Madrid. 🙂

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Sevilla

Posted on 28 February 2014 by Casey Brown

We had lots of fun in Granada, but by this point our trip was not even halfway over yet, so we left Granada at 9:30 to make the three and a half our trek to Sevilla, the capital of the autonomous community of Andalucía, where we would be spending the next night.

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