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!)