Readme: Mary's guide to belatedly updating blogs

I have woefully neglected my blog. It’s been over a year since I last updated. And even that last update was sadly lacking. If I were at all conscientious, I would offer some plausible excuse or carefully and clearly retrace my steps for the last few months. Instead, you get this: a halfheartedly sneaky attempt to update chronologically and change the entry dates. For the next week or two I’ll be sporadically updating, but I’ll leave this at the top throughout the process.

So don’t stop when you get to the end of this entry; anything since April 2010 is new! (I think I may have just warped the time-space continuum, or something like that.)

EDIT: new entries as of 1 June

• 15 Feb 2011 (Mallorca)
• 1 Feb 2011 (more meanderings: Poland, windmills)
• 16 Jan 2011 (meanderings: Cuenca, Madrid, Lisbon)
• 1 Jan 2011 (flashback to fall/winter 2010)
• 11 May 2011 (current standings)

The current standings

Quick Update 1: Mary's flat is Grand Central Station.
I lost both my roommates to Barcelona this fall, and almost immediately lost one of the new ones to Australia. But after several whirlwind searches, I now have two new roommates who seem to be permanent, so all is well with the world in my corner of Madrid.

Quick Update 2: Mary’s new school is excellent.
I miss everybody at my last school, of course (I visited early this winter, and the little kids went nuts! Quite heartwarming, actually, and really great to see all the people I taught with last year). But my new school is a lot closer to my apartment and I am getting along very well there. The other auxiliar who teaches with me is also named Mary. She is also American, and also blonde. The kids still mix us up on occasion, and a few even call us Mary One and Mary Two (though which is which depends entirely on the class). This year I have mainly 1st and 2nd graders, with a smattering of 4th, 5th, and 6th, and I take small groups to read books in English and to teach Science. Except on holidays, like Halloween, where I dress up as a witch and cackle the full hour to the entire class as we make endless strings of pumpkins… but that’s another story.

Quick Update 3: Mary’s days are busy.
Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays I’m at school pretty much from 9-5, and then have one class apiece each afternoon/evening. Thursdays I come home earlier, with another private class in the evening, and Fridays I’m off! Except for private classes in the afternoon and evening, of course. (There seems to be a trend, here.) I’ve been doing some freelance translation work, and whatever time is leftover I try to spend walking around town, playing with my new camera (fruits of my labor on the right), and generally enjoying life in Madrid. Does that work as an excuse for not updating? No? Too bad, that’s the best I’ve got.

By the way, it’s distressingly hard to try to remember and condense the past year into a decently sized update (and by "decently sized” I mean “not novel-length”). I suppose chronologically is the best way to order things, but to really get this right I have to go back to November. Of last year.

Oops.


So... here's a pretty picture of Madrid to make it all better :-)

Flashback Winter 2010: island getaway

Mallorca

My luck was in for the long weekend in December: I escaped the fiasco caused by the air traffic controller strike and I arrived on time to sunny, warm Palma de Mallorca! Not to rub it in or anything, but while MN was getting a foot of snow, I was eating fresh dates and clementines just off the trees, with leaves still attached, shaded from the Mallorcan sunshine by a palm tree. Only an hour’s flight away from Madrid…!

I had three days of perfect weather, just me and my camera wandering around the island. The first day I spent in the city itself: the cathedral perched on the edge of the sea, the Maritime walkway past bobbing sailboats, fishnets strung down the length of the sidewalk, the Plaza Mayor with its endless stalls of Nativity scene figurines (which, in Spain, can go waaay beyond Jesus, Mary, and Joseph: you’ve got the houses and the palm trees and the animals and the woodcutters and the potters and the… well, you get the idea. You could set up the whole town of Bethlehem if you wanted! My school actually did.). And of course walking along the beach at sunset.

The next morning I got up ridiculously early (for vacation) to take a century-old train to the port town of Sóller. There were only about 10 people taking the train that early, so they only hooked up one coach, and it had lovely leather sofas! The ride out was beautiful, passing through lush valleys and past groves of orange and lemon trees. The town of Sóller was also quite pretty (and the tapas were delicious: dates wrapped in bacon, mmmm!), but the port itself was gorgeous. I spent probably an hour wandering up and down the docks, taking pictures of the blues and yellows and whites of the sailboats and skiffs reflecting in the water.

My last day in Palma I took a bus to Portocristo to see the spectacular Cuevas del Drach (Caves of the Dragon). They’re, well, cavernous. Sadly, pictures weren't allowed, though that's probably a good thing as otherwise I might still be there. Chamber after chamber of soaring ceiling studded with thousands of pale stalactite needles, or supported by giant columns ridged like spiral staircases that plunge into a cool crystalline lake. Ribbons of striated bacon, inverted stone icicles jutting from the ground—those I’ve seen before, and in more colorful versions (in SD, for example). But Drach has, I think, forever captured the #1 spot in my list of caves, thanks to the tour’s finale. We arrived in a natural amphitheater, now equipped with benches to seat around a hundred people. Blue lights partially illuminated the underground lake that spread before us, casting odd shadows on the rocks beneath the water's surface—sometimes meters deep, sometimes only inches. The water was so clear and still you could hardly tell reflection apart from underwater object. Then suddenly all the lights went out. Two old men behind me, who had the voices of 50-year smokers and the manners of 12-year-old boys, joked that a crocodile was coming to get us all. The woman next to me asked if they could please be quiet; one answered “Well, yes, we could…!” Honestly. I had a momentary vision of how certain students of mine might be in sixty years—two prophetic images were cackling right behind me. But then even they fell silent.

One, two, three boats—illuminated only by the lights that edged their gunnels from bow to stern—floated slowly into view at the far end of the lake, a good half-football field away. The oars barely made a sound. Then, in the lead boat, a violin, a cello, and (of all things) an organ started playing a concerto as they crossed the lake. Live music, underground, on a boat. It was incredible! The volume rose and then faded as they crossed the lake towards us and then turned around the corner and out of sight, while the other two boats performed a slow, drifting dance around each other and weaving among the columns anchored in the middle of the lake. Their oars kept almost grazing a protruding rock or the other boat but, in the end, never made more noise than a gentle splash. Then the orchestra-boat reappeared and brought the musicians back the way they came, until they and the music faded away completely. We were then treated to a brief light show called “Dawn”, where the cavern grew slowly lighter at the far end, then spread rosy and then palely golden fingers towards us until all was illuminated. I figured that was the end, but the rowboats had silently lined up at the base of some stairs, and we were invited to cross the lake by boat. Each boat held, in the end, around 12 spellbound people. Necks craned up, down, and around, and bodies held unnaturally still so as not to upset the balance of the overladen craft propelled surprisingly swiftly by just one man and two oars. Splashes echoed. A few drips echoed the splashes as stalactites continued their agonizingly slow formation overhead. Just before we reached the other side, we saw a low corridor—or, rather, canal—branching off to one side. Some stalactites were sawed off so the boats could pass underneath without decapitating anybody—the musicians’ hiding spot, I suppose. Then we debarked, walked up lots of stairs past more ghostly white curtains and spires of calcifications, and emerged into bright sunshine and a warm sea breeze.

Why are they called the Dragon Caves? No one ever explained it, but my theory: either the person responsible for the name was unimaginably cursi (corny or cheesy) and thought they were simply magical… or the spelunker felt like he was standing inside a giant mouth with lots of sharp teeth closing in on him. Just a theory.

Minnesota

In sharp contrast to sunny, breezy, and mild Mallorca, I went home to snowy and chilly MN for Christmas. I had a wonderful time visiting family, eating out with friends, snowshoeing in my backyard, and shoveling. Okay, so “wonderful” doesn’t exactly apply to that last one, but the ludicrous amounts of snow made for some “wonderful” pictures to wow my students with. People here look at the picture I took of the thermometer (at only ten degrees or so below freezing) and say “But… you can’t actually go outside in that, can you?!” (Certain other people claim it's all Photoshop trickery. I invite them to come visit me in January sometime.)

Flashback 2010: more meanderings

Summer 2010: Homeward bound

After the fiesta del agua at school, I packed a few bags and left temporarily for home, family, and cabin. I was lucky enough to be able to spend a good chunk of the summer Up North with my dad, working, fishing, and watching the ospreys glide by. I know this is supposed to be my blog about my home in Spain, but there is truly nowhere on earth I feel more at ease and more at home than on Lake Vermilion.

The other highlight of the summer, aside from catching up with friends and family, was a college friend’s wedding—I was thrilled to be able to stay home long enough to celebrate with Katie and Blake!

Fall 2010

A glimpse of Poland

It took 24 hours and three separate planes to get me back to Madrid. On the way, I had a seven hour layover in (of all places) Warsaw, Poland. Being the good Polish descendent that I am, I took full advantage of the time and spent most of it in the historic city center. I was told that it is not the most beautiful city, but I was very pleasantly surprised. The old center, at least, is gorgeous! And colorful! I suppose in a country with a colder climate and grayer skies, it helps to gild and paint the buildings. Wonder why we’ve never thought of that in MN…

I had four hours to wander around Market Square, Castle Square, and lots of streets with (for me) utterly unpronounceable names. People kept coming up to me and asking me things in Polish. Most likely directions or the time, but they could have been asking me the derivative formula for calculating the exact landing spot of the Mayflower in an adjacent parallel universe, for all I know. All I could say was “Prosze” (please) and “uhhh”, accompanied by a helpless look. It was actually an odd feeling: it’s the first time I’ve been mistaken for a native and not actually known the language. Until then, all of my traveling has been in Spain, English-speaking countries, or Portugal (where Spanish works well enough, and absolutely no one mistakes me for Portuguese. Spanish, yes, oddly enough.).

Windmills

Continuing the theme of random trips, I hopped on a nearly-empty bus for a two-hour journey to a small town in the middle of La Macha (de cuyo nombre sí que me acuerdo!): Consuegra. The only other people on the bus were a pair of Japanese girls and several little old ladies. Once in the town, I immediately started up an endless series of stairs until I came to the main (and, really, only) attraction: windmills. A dozen honest-to-goodness, quixotic (in the original meaning of the word: Quixote-esque!) windmills are strung across the crest of a hill. They march around an old castle and reign over the patchwork vista of russet, sage green, and goldenrod that is La Mancha. I spent a marvelous few hours trying to photographically capture the shadow of windmill arms curving across the rough white surface of windmill towers, wandering around each and every one, and even climbing up inside one of them (it doubled as a tourist shop, and the owner told me to say hi to my grandma for him, so here it is: Hi, Grandma!). Each windmill had its own name. My favorite: Chispas, with its sky blue door. A little girl seated atop her daddy’s shoulders grabbed one of the arms and started to shake it until the father told her to stop “or we’ll see on the news tonight: Little Girl Breaks Famous ‘Chispas’ Windmill!". The old giant somehow withstood the onslaught.

Mary plays dress-up, and Other Adventures

Other Fall highlights: a flamenco show at Casa Patas which was possibly even better than the one I had previously seen in Sevilla (you know it’s a good place to be when someone in the audience is also a flamenco dancer and gets up at the end, in jeans and boots, to join in). A Halloween party at Tasha’s, complete with pumpkin carving, witch wigs, and a “guess-the-body-part” game. Thanksgiving dinner, also at Tasha’s, complete with pumpkin pie! Related to the pumpkin carving? We may never know… ;-)

And, also in November, the U.S. Marine Corps Birthday Ball, hosted by the U.S. Embassy at the Hilton. Long story, but basically an Embassy official invited a whole bunch of auxiliares to the Ball, and all of two of us went. I bought myself a fancy dress, was seated at a table full of Marines, and felt more than a little like Cinderella. I schmoozed and danced and met the ambassador (very briefly) and, well, had a ball!

Flashback Spring 2010: Meanderings

Meanderings: Cuenca
Along came a puente weekend, but I failed to plan some exotic, three-day getaway in time. Instead, I got up (relatively) early on Saturday and took a two-hour bus ride into Cuenca, in La Mancha. The main attraction there: the hanging houses, which sprawl down the side of a gorge and cling there for dear life. Rock and building meld together with a few old wood beams for support. To get there, you must climb a “little hill” (!) and cross a very high bridge. It was a blustery day, and my old fear of heights reared its head and kept me right in the middle of the bridge as people with their dogs and little kids shoved their way around me.

Cuenca is a vertical city. Houses are often very tall and quite skinny, and to navigate your way around the old part of town is to be endlessly climbing and descending “a few stairs” (!!). Trekking my way around town, I was stunned at all the color. I never expected to see such bright buildings in the middle of La Mancha. Old, mottled stone, yes. Robin’s egg blue? Goldfinch yellow? Gunmetal gray flanked by pink and orange? Much more unexpected!

Sadly, not having a car, I was unable to visit the other main attraction of Cuenca, located about 15 miles outside of town: the Enchanted City, a maze of odd rock formations not unlike the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, though probably not as colorful. But just across the bridge from the old city you can see a few hints as to what la Ciudad Encantada must be like…

Meanderings: Madrid
One morning I wandered down to a rather ordinary looking garden next to Plaza España to have a look at the Egyptian temple there. Yep, you read right. El Templo de Debod was donated by Egypt to Spain around 40 years ago in gratitude for Spain’s archeological aid. You can still see some hieroglyphics carved on the inside of the temple—not your everyday museum in Spain.

Some family friends were over visiting their daughter here in Spain, and I had the pleasure of giving them a slightly whirlwind tour of my favorite corners of Madrid. It’s kind of fun to play tourist every once in a while, to pop into one of those incense-selling stores and fantasize about buying the giant bronze tiger sculpture—where you might put it, how you might get it there, how much of a hassle that might be, and whether it mightn’t just be easier to pick up and move to Madrid rather than transport the heavy beast across the ocean…. Or, you could just buy a little wooden bird and call it a day. If you must.

Then, just before Easter last year, my parents arrived in Madrid after a long flight from MSP, and I got to play tour guide. We toured the Royal Palace (a first for me; my favorite part was the endless rows of porcelain jars in the old pharmacy), wandered the Retiro gardens, craned our necks staring up at the architecture along Gran Vía, had lunches and suppers in some of my favorite haunts around town, and even got to see the inside of Parliament!

For me, though, the best part of their visit was introducing my folks to my Spanish friends and families. Before my parents had even arrived, I had already filled their week-long schedule with lunch and dinner dates with my favorite people in the city! Looking back, I’m pretty sure that week's worth of meeting the various people who have adopted me here in Spain is the reason my parents so readily supported yet another year’s return to Madrid. Así que gracias de nuevo a todos! And of course I got to bring them around some of the most beautiful corners of my adopted city: I tried to share my obsession with the Cibeles fountain, we wandered through the quote-lined streets of Barrio de las Letras, we sat for a long while just smelling the daffodils and watching the passersby in Plaza de Oriente, we ate jamón in Plaza Mayor and saw the Palm Sunday procession on its way to the cathedral… in short (or long), a wonderful week for all three of us.

My culinary masterpiece of the visit, if not the entire year, was dinner at my apartment with my parents and roommates: I tried my hand at homemade paella! It turned out marvelously, if I may say so myself. With, of course, a little advice from one of the teachers at school… and one of my students… and the fishmonger down the street. Naturally.

Lisbon, Round 2
After my parents left, all too soon for all three of us, I went once more to Lisbon to spend the rest of my spring break. There I met up with Alberto el Virrey and two of his friends, who were kind enough to let me join their wanderings throughout the city. Though I had enjoyed traveling alone through Lisbon the first time, and the second time around spent some lovely mornings by myself getting lost in the winding, blinding white streets of the Alfama, it was even better to have company. Lots of laughter and silly pictures, not to mention a crazy night out in the Bairro Alto where we ended up as part of an impromptu concert in the street at 4 in the morning! I ended up retracing a lot of my steps from the previous visit, but took more time to just relax and soak in the sights—and the Portuguese sun, which finally made an appearance! Unlike my previous December trip, this time the weather couldn’t have been nicer. Blue skies, a warm sun and a cool breeze, with cloud shadows dancing across the walls—it couldn’t have been more perfect.

Flashback Fall 2009/Winter 2010: My five-year-old students sang “Let It Snow”… and it did.

School

Towards the end of November, they had a castañera at school: a chestnut-roasting party. Delicious, though just a few castañas go a long way, but it was delightful holding a couple piping-hot chestnuts in my hands in a cool breeze. And since this was held on the preschool playground and tiny little fingers had a hard time prying open stubborn nutshells, I was quickly forced to become an expert in chestnut shelling. I had slivers under my thumbnails for days.
Soon after that was Thanksgiving (the next best thing to being home: Pilgrim hats and Indian headdresses, pumpkin pie, turkey, and a whipped cream fight, with many thanks to hostess Kacie and her flatmates!), and I had long discussions with most of my classes about what they were thankful for. The five-year-olds, naturally, had the most interesting answers, ranging from their families to Virgin Mary to their dolls to soldiers to flowers to… pigeons. Yep. Thanksgiving in Spain—never a dull moment.

We also had the Christmas concert to deal with. After months of teaching the same Christmas tunes until our ears rang with jingle bells, all the little kiddies turned up dressed in the most adorable costumes. Santas, reindeer (complete with bright red foam noses!), angels, stars, and a slightly bizarre conglomeration of Hindu, Hawaiian, cowboy, Indian, and Argentine dancers. Oh, and kung-fu fighters. Because it was also Multicultural/Biodiversity Month, and… yeah, that’s all the explanation I’ve got!

At any rate, as I mentioned in the title, I spent all of December teaching “Let It Snow” to the five-year-olds. Apparently it worked a little too well…

Traffic and Weather Report

I think every flight I took over Christmas vacation was delayed by weather. At separate points in time, I was nearly stranded in Zurich and Chicago, and was frantically texting roommates and asking them to notify my folks (and vice-versa, on the return trip). The details don’t bear repeating, but it was a giant, headache-inducing fiasco on both sides of the ocean. But, both times, I eventually arrived. To a LOT of snow. Isn’t it funny how quickly you get used to a warmer climate? Despite not feeling the cold of Madrid nearly as much as the madrileños, I got home and promptly froze.

I do believe we had a high one day of -1ºF, and I was definitely up at 7 a.m. Christmas day to snowblow so we could actually leave our driveway. I’m sure we got at least 18 inches while I was home. Made for some great photographs to impress my students back here, though! Even if certain people still claim not to believe me. :-) (Still working on that snowball shipment, Jose. It might be stuck in customs.)

Because when I got back to Madrid, just after Pichu (bless her heart) picked me up from the airport, it started to snow. Fairly heavily. So my first night back in Spain after the holidays had me feeling like I’d never left Minnesota: Pichu and I were eating supper in a Burger King and watching the thick white stuff coat everything outside. The next morning I ended up not going to work at all, because the buses to Majadahonda weren’t running due to the snow! Total accumulation: about 1 ½ inches. Snow day. Go figure.

Irony (n.): surviving a month of winter in Minnesota only to slip and fall on the ice in Madrid. But, once again, the photos were worth it: an icicle-covered Cibeles fountain is not exactly an everyday sight.

Carnival

Due to an unfortunately timed migraine, I did not get out and find some fabulous costume to scare the little kiddies like I did on Halloween. (Most of them were quite delighted, actually, but the first graders still called me “witch” and ran away when they saw me in the hallway a month later.) So I did the next best thing: I grabbed an apron and a spoon and made the world’s tallest and most awkward chef’s hat out of a giant piece of construction paper. All day long kids asked me if we were going to cook in class, and all day long I had to crouch to get through doorways. (Beginning to see how my dad feels walking through old European buildings…) Aside from the English teachers/flies buzzing around in their mini-strainer/compound eye glasses and saran wrap wings, most of the preschool and grade school kids were dressed up as various peoples from around the world. My second graders were cowboys and Indians and shot me dead a number of times. I guess I should be thankful I wasn’t scalped! I also had the interesting experience of helping kindergarteners get all costumed up in felt skirts or suspenders. And I saw the world’s cutest costume conglomeration: a little two-year old, wandering around dressed as a fuzzy little giraffe… with a Shrek mask. After everyone had paraded around the playground, they had their own Burial of the Sardine—only they burned the poor, giant paper fish instead of burying a little smelly dead one, like happens on Ash Wednesday somewhere in Madrid. (If that makes no sense at all to you, look up my blog entry from February of 2008 called “What to do with a dead fish”. If it still makes no sense at all, well, I can’t blame you on that one. It’s a sardine, for crying out loud!)