Dust and roses

Monday, June 7, 10:50pm. I’m sitting in the Parque Federico Garcia Lorca, blogging and enjoying the lovely nighttime weather. I know, it seems strange to be hanging out in a park at 11pm, but (1) it’s almost empty, (2) it’s a two-minute walk from my homestay, and (3) Granada’s nightlife is just beginning. I’m a little tardy (okay, very tardy) on this first blog entry, for which I do apologize. Let’s see if I can capture the slightly overwhelming flood of impressions of this past week.

So I arrived in Granada, took a taxi from the airport with one of my program-mates, and showed up in a traffic circle filled with construction. If Granadans thought traffic was bad before, it’s been made far more confusing by the beginning of construction on a Metro system. (Honestly, the city doesn’t need it. The buses are comprehensive and cheap, and the city is easily traverseable on foot, as well. But, progress is progress.) Monday was a getting-to-know-you day in several respects, with regard to my host mom, the city, another time zone change, the works. Tuesday was orientation, Wednesday, classes, Thursday and Friday days off, and today, classes began again in earnest.

I, along with a GMU softball player named Beth, have been adopted into a large, warm, loud, constantly moving Andalucian family. Sra. Encarnacion Ventura insisted from the beginning that we call her Encarna (even our professors tell us to call them by first names. Very different from the Russian formality to which I’ve grown accustomed). I’ve met three of her seven children so far, and five of her eleven grandchildren, the youngest of which (five-year-old Cristina) has attached herself to me and Beth like a chattering chick. Beth and I are the only ones who actually live with Sra. Ventura, but it’s very rare that at least three other people aren’t over for lunch. The kids eat in one room, the adults (including us!) in another, with the television on in the background and practically inaudible under multiple lightning-fast conversations. It took me about a day and a half to stop injecting Russian words into my conversations; now, I speak about 80% in Spanish, including among our group (occasionally to their annoyance). The cultural transition has taken much less time than I expected. :)

Bueno, so, the rest of the week. We met on Tuesday at the Centro para Lenguas Modernas (Modern Language Center), tucked away in some aristocratic family’s old summer house in the center of the city. Professor Ramos, our coordinator, was very pleased to finally meet me and passed on her best greetings to Mom. :) We took our placement tests, received a boatload of introductory information, spent a while standing around between meetings (this quickly became a common theme), and were eventually dismissed and told to meet at a similar house in the far northern part of the city at 9pm. That evening, after a very welcome siesta and some more unpacking, the eighteen of us met for dinner, had a little too much wine (thanks to the generosity of the servers), and spent three hours socializing, taking photos, and (eventually) dancing in the garden.

We were informed on Tuesday that we had arrived in the middle of Granada’s biggest party of the year, the Feria de Corpus Cristi, so Thursday and Friday were days off for pretty much the entire city. As it turns out, half of Wednesday was, too; our second professor dismissed us after about five minutes of class to go see the parade making its way down the Gran Via. This one was mainly for the kids, so I understand, but I still enjoyed it immensely: the people on stilts and wearing giant costumes, the bands, the completely random collection of costumed individuals throwing smoke bombs on the street. The centerpiece of this parade was a statue of a flamenco-costumed woman riding a dragon, called La Tarasca. (I’m not sure whether that’s the name of the woman, the dragon, or the statue.) Why the woman riding a dragon is so important, I have no idea, but at least it was pretty.

Even our days off were busy. Beth and Sra. Ventura decided that we would spend Thursday at the beach, accompanied by Beth’s friend Tara and Sra. Ventura’s cousin Pilar. So, we did. I remember now one of the many good reasons I don’t spend much time at the beach. I do love to relax, but even after applying what must have been a quarter of my bottle of SPF 50 sunscreen, I STILL managed to return to Granada the shade of a freshly cooked lobster. Thankfully, four days later, the burns have stopped hurting; even so, I carry a tube of aloe in my purse. When you’re as pale as I am, you can’t be too careful. :P Most of the group went to a different beach on Saturday, an opportunity which I politely declined on grounds of preserving my sanity. I was oddly satisfied to note that some of them returned roughly the same color as myself. -grin-

Friday was a little more like what I’m used to for a study abroad program: two excursions, to Fuente Vaqueros and the Albaicin. Fuente Vaqueros is a little town about half an hour outside of Granada, noteworthy for being the birthplace of the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I brought several of his works with me to Granada (thanks, Mom!), and I happen to actually like them, so I found this trip to be really kind of neat; most of the rest of the group looked a little bored, but the guide did her best. Our guides for our excursions are two professors from the CLM, named Maricarmen and Elios, and they’re actually pretty amazing. :) Maricarmen was also responsible for leading us through the winding maze that is the Albaicin, basically the historic Arab-inspired quarter of Granada. We passed many a palace belonging to the rich folk of the time, picked our way down tiny cobblestoned alleys, and took dozens of photos of the views that only got better as we climbed. I like to think I’m getting better at landscape photography, though that may only be because there are SO MANY opportunities here. :D

I almost forgot to mention: as part of the festival of Corpus Christi, there’s a giant fair on the far western end of the city, where I spent two wonderful evenings (Wednesday and Saturday). It’s sort of a combination of a county fair and…well, to be honest, I’m not sure what to compare it to. There’s a section full of rides for the kids, sweet sellers everywhere, and games (and people carrying around the ludicrous stuffed animals won from said games), and then there’s the part that’s truly Spanish. A good two hundred tent enclosures are arranged in streets in the back part of the fair, all of which are sponsored by clubs, the university, the local government, and the like, and all of which are places to gather, socialize, drink, and dance. Considering that almost the only dancing I know how to do is Latin, and also considering that nobody judges anybody else because they’re all too busy having fun, this was by far my favorite part. I spent both nights dancing until well after two in the morning, and went home by the convenient Feria shuttles, which were running until something like six a.m. (I also tried both sangria and some sort of local wine sold in shots. A shot of cheap vodka is generally fairly vile; a shot of cheap, dark wine is REALLY awful, but hey, it’s a tradition. Sangria is quite tasty, but I limited myself to one glass a night. ‘Vino de verano,’ literally ‘summer wine,’ is possibly even better; it’s basically just a red wine spritzer, heavy on the spritz.)

So…chronological order be blasted, where was I? Saturday. Right. After the walking tour, most of us were honestly exhausted, so we went home and went to bed. While most of the group spent Saturday tanning/burning on the beach, I slept in, read for a while, enjoyed the air conditioning, then set off in the late afternoon to go explore. I rather like taking the back streets in this city and just seeing where I end up. I know where the dangerous neighborhoods are, but they’re on the other end of the city from my homestay, so as long as I pay SOME attention to where I’m going, the results are generally quite pleasant. I ended up back in the Albaicin on Saturday, where I sat in a little hole-in-the-wall Moroccan tea shop for a couple hours and savored a book and some lovely herbal tea. On my way back, I passed an artisans’ market in an alley and stopped to browse (why not?), and ended up buying an inexpensive and very comfortable dress. At some point when it doesn’t showcase my sunburn quite so brilliantly, I’ll post pictures. :) I did a little souvenir shopping and returned home to meet a thoroughly tanned Beth, chat for a while, enjoy dinner with Encarna, and head out to the Feria.

We spent Sunday in the old capital of the Umayyad (I think) Caliphate, the city of Cordoba. While Granada is hot, Cordoba, situated right atop a river, is hot and muggy. Thankfully, Elios’ stories about the Madina Al-Zahar kept us plenty distracted from the weather. About the only problem with the whole day is that I will forever associate the Madina (the ruins of the Caliph’s palace) with the phrase ‘sexo, drogas, y rock-and-roll,’ thanks to our guide. :) We then spent a pleasant hour or so in the Mezquita de Cordoba, the mosque-temple-cathedral that is a wonder of mixed medieval architecture. Seriously, there’s no way I can explain this place, although my photos might begin to give an idea (once I upload them). I thought I’d had enough of gorgeous religious architecture in St. Petersburg, but this was completely different…and mind-blowing.

And so we come back to today, and classes, and all that important stuff. The bookstore is out of the Level 6 textbook, and has been for a while, but they should have it in by Thursday; in the meantime, our professors are liberal with their photocopies. Gracia engaged us in a conversation about idioms, hand gestures, and general untranslateables, while Montserrat fired every aspect of the past tense she could think of at us, and Mariangeles explained the system of autonomous communities in Spain. Five hours straight of Spanish is kind of a lot, but hey, I knew what I was getting into when I started this program. I sort of feel sorry for the students in the Initial levels…they’re probably at least a little overwhelmed.

The park closes at midnight, so I should probably get a move on towards going back home. Beth will be asleep (although I’m not sure how, as she took a five-hour siesta), Encarna will be watching another talk show or travel program, and I will set my alarm for seven hours from now to wash the dust and sweat from my hair. I’ll be back here soon, though. Palm trees line the dirt paths of the park, and a huge rose garden blooms just around the corner. The whole city smells like dust and roses.