Yes, I am officially in Espana, and I have been here now for a week. The first few days were so jam-packed with traveling and adventures that I was unable to access the internet for more than a few minutes a day, but I am finally settled in Granada, and able to update this blog-thingymabober.
So….Spain is amazing! (As if you didn’t think I was going to say that.) The architecture, the style, the people, the language, the food – everything is different, and everything is wonderful.
I landed in Madrid last Sunday morning, and I was met at the airport by Christian, my academic advisor and tour guide for the duration of the trip. There were about 25 of us to begin with, but only four of us ended up in Granada – the rest are studying in Barcelona. Anyway, we went to the hotel – La Huba Princessa – and crashed pretty early the first night. My internal clock took a beating with the eight hour time change.
Madrid seems to be the Spanish equivalent of New York City – the taxis, buses, and people are running constantly, and the streets are always in motion, day or night. We went to La Reina Sophia, and I saw Guernica, which I have been fascinated with since learning about it in grade school. The size of it is overwhelming, and since an entire room is devoted to it, it just makes it that much more powerful. To see the sketch marks across it that Picasso made, and the newspaper print he pasted onto it, was just mind-blowing. Apparently the peeps that commissioned the piece, just a few days after the bombing of Guernica, didn’t like the work initially. Just goes to show you shouldn’t listen to art critics, since the piece has basically become the anti-war statement of the last century.
Our tour guide pointed out things that I had never known about it, like the fact that the horse’s nose is also a human skull, and there is another skull superimposed over the rest of the horse as well. The lines that look like they are painted on the horse are actually strips of newspaper that Picasso pasted on, since he initially learned of the attack while reading the newspaper. There are also marks of the stigmata on some of the hands and feet of the people in the painting, signifying the suffering they went through that day.
There was also a room dedicated to Salvador Dali in the museum, and his paintings are absolutely full of secret meanings and double entendres. My favorite one, entitled Enigma Sin Fin, or “The Endless Enigma,” was fasincating.
You can see the face within it pretty easily, but then it was pointed out that the mountain to the left looks like a giant person, and a greyhound, and a horse, depending on which way you look at it. I had to stand in front of it for like 20 minutes before I saw the horse. I have always been bad at those eye-trick painting things.
Later that night I went out to a taparia with my roommate Anna, and our friends Katasha and Mikayla. We ordered a bottle of wine to start with, which, of course, came with free tapas! One was a plate of home-fried potatoes that was covered in a ketchup-like sauce, and another plate full of beans and other vegetables that had been roasted with some delicious herbs or something on it. I rarely know exactly what I am eating here, but it is all so delicious, I could care less! (Plus I can tell if it is octopus or squid, which are really the only things that I absolutely will not eat, haha.) I even tried blood sausage, although it was really not to my liking.
Well, I have to go comida la cena con mi familia. More later, I promise!
Loves to all!! -katie
That's a big bridge
The view of granada from the Alhambra.
Patio de Los Leones
Anna, Maggie and I in the Alhambra
Isabelle, Mikayla and I at our favorite bar in Granada, where they have sangria on tap! (But so does everywhere else....)
