Week 2: Registration, Rastro, and Churros y Chocolate

Hello again!

This week has been much more laid back than last week. We've had a lot more time to roam around the city and do some exploring. We've had a few orientations, but we've mainly had our Cursillo de enero (Mini-course about Spain). I've been looking for pisos (apartments) too and I registered for classes this week too!

1. Cursillo de enero: Our mini-course has focused on grammar in Spain and barrios (neighborhoods) of Madrid, Flamenco, the economy, and politics. Our professor for grammar (Francisco) was awesome! He was hilarious and made going over grammar way more interesting. Some of you maybe thinking "Kelsey, you've been taking Spanish for 8 years, why do you have to take another grammar class?" (It's okay, I thought the same thing when I found out we were taking one!), and the reason was mainly to learn the vosotros verb conjugations. Basically, its the informal "y'all" form for all you non-Spanish speakers out there. In the States, we don't learn vosotros because we learn Latin American Spanish. It's been hard to get in the habit of using it, but I think I'm slowly starting to catch on! I'm also starting to pick up on the "th" sound for cs and zs (so I pronounce gracias like this: grathias and plaza like this: platha).It's been difficult to understand the accent when people are speaking to me, but I'm getting used to it! Like I said, we've also talked about the different barrios (neighborhoods) in Madrid. I've mainly been exploring Sol (the center), Cuatro Caminos (lots of zapaterias (shoe stores)), Chamberi (a little north of the center), and Arguelles (the student area).

The prof that talked to us about Flamenco was nice, he played a bit of Flamenco for us on his guitar and he also taught us some of the basic rhythms.

The professor that talked to us about the economy was a bit...dry? I didn't enjoy that part as much. It was hard to understand because I didn't know the equivalent of the concepts he was talking about in English so it was hard to follow in Spanish. Basically what I got out of it was that Spain is in a major crisis right now and about 26% of the population is unemployed.

I loved the part about politics. I though it was really interesting and I liked our professor a lot. We learned about la Familia Real (royal family), and about the coat of arms that's on the Spanish flag. It was fascinating. Brief history lesson here: Each of the 5 parts on the coat of arms represents Castilla, Leon, Granada, Aragon, and another I didn't catch the name of. The one in the middle represents the Bourbon kings. The crown represents the monarchy. The pillars are the pillars of Hercules. They represent the Rock of Gibraltar (which according to Greek mythology marked the end of the world or in Latin "Non Plus Ultra"). When Colombus passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, he proved that the world didn't end there and went on to discover America. So now, on the Spanish flag it says in Latina "Plus Ultra" which means there is more. Also, the ribbon wrapped around the two pillars is where the US dollar sign ($) comes from! How fascinating is that?!

2. Piso Hunting: This is the part that I was/am most stressed out about before coming here. My coordinator, Amy, gave us a whole orientation about how to find an apartment using websites, what to say to people, and even gave us some contacts to use. I've seen 4 so far this week. I've been looking in Arguelles, near C/ Princesa (one of the main streets, huge shopping center, really close to the metro, and only like 10-15 minutes from the Facultad). We're supposed to call and talk to people in Spanish (which has been extremely nerve wracking!), but the first two pisos I called seemed to notice I was struggling and switched into English, which was a bit frustrating because I wanted to practice my Spanish. The first one was pricey for how much space there was (and two of the people were leaving, which was a little weird), the second was a definite no. It was in the basement of a building and there wasn't a whole lot of room. The third was okay (and it was the first one I spoke Spanish at--I didn't do too horribly!). The fourth was awesome! I'm in the process of trying to get a contract written for me to live there! It's in Arguelles (the student area of Madrid) and its only about a 5-10 minute walk to the Metro stop and the huge Corte Ingles (Spain's version of Walmart) and a ton of stores on Calle de Princesas. If I get the piso, I'll be living with three other girls, all students. One of them is Spanish (from Salamanca) and the other two are French! I'm really really excited about this one!

3. Registration: I registered for classes on Thursday. I'm taking: Pintura Espanola de Museo del Prado II, La Mujer en la Literatura Hispanica, Historia de Hispanoamerica, Introduccion a la Cultura y Mitologia Clasica, Cultura Andalusi.

Pintura Espanola de Museo del Prado: I'm going to be studying art movements and learning about the paintings specifically in the Prado. Every Wednesday, we get to the Prado to learn about certain paintings in person! I'm ridiculously excited for this, a good number of my friends are taking this class too!

La Mujer en la Literatura Hispanica: So this one is all about the importance and the role women play in Hispanic Lit. I've got this class with one of my friends for sure!

Historia de Hispanoamerica: This is Hispanic history, so it should be interesting. I've always really liked learning about history!

Introduccion a la Cultura y Mitologia Clasica: I AM SO EXCITED FOR THIS CLASS! I love Greek and Roman mythology (slash anything to do with Classic Humanities) if you couldn't tell from my history lesson earlier. This is a Complutense class so I'll be with real Spanish profs and students!

Cultura Andalusi: This is all about Andalusian culture (Southern Spain), its supposed to look at the Arabic influences in Southern Spain. I'm also really excited for this one, if I can get in! Complutense has a rule that no more than 5 Reunidas (Northamerican) students can be in a class :( So keep your fingers crossed for me!

4. El Rastro: Every Sunday, Madrid has a huge Rastro (flea market) in Plaza de Tirso de Molina, which is only about a 10-minute walk from my senora's. A few of my friends and I got up this morning to wander around, I was amazed at how huge it was! I knew it was big, but it seemed to just keep going and going and going! There were tons of bufandas (scarves) and bolsas (purses) that I wanted to buy! We had to be very careful while we were at El Rastro because it is notorious for pickpockets, so unfortunately I don't have any pictures of my own of it. But I pulled this picture off of Google to give you an idea of how many people were there.

5. La Vida Madrilena: Nightlife in Madrid is huge. Last night, my friends and I decided to do a bit of exploring in Puerta del Sol (center of the city). At 11:30 at night, Sol was just as busy as it usually is during the day. We went to an Irish pub, where I tried Guiness (I'm not a huge fan). The best part of the night was discovering La Fountana de Oro, which is a Spanish bar that we stumbled across in Sol. It had a live band that was playing classic 80s rock! It was really funny to hear the singer talk to the crowd in Spanish and then sing all of the songs in English. The craziest thing for me was that we left around when the Metro started to close (around 1 AM), and there were tons and tons of people still pouring into Sol getting ready to go out as we were getting ready to turn in for the night.

Churros y Chocolate--The best invention ever. When I first heard about it, I thought that the churros would be like the ones we have back home, coated in sugar. But the ones here are just the fried dough which you then dip in delicious melted chocolate. So far, I've been to two Churros y Chocolate places: Churros & Chocolate and Maestro Churrero, they were good but I'm excited to go to  Chocolateria de San Gines which supposedly has the best churros y chocolate in the city! I definitely recommend going to a Churros y Chocolate place if you ever come to Spain!

My friend Amber with our churros y chocolate

Liz--100 Montaditos? Absolutely fantastic! Today, Victoria (my roommate) and I asked our senora if there were any good, cheap cafes to eat around Embajadores and she recommended that we go to Sol to go to 100 Montaditos. I looked it up on the internet, and it turns out that there is one thats only about a 10-15 minutes walk from our senora's piso at Puerta de Toledo. 100 Montaditos is a little place that served 100 different kinds of mini-bocadillos (sandwiches). The best part? All of them only cost 1 euro! It was absolutely delicious, I tried the bocadillos de calamares (calamari sandwich) and it was phenomenal! I've been trying to try as many new things as possible, but so far my favorite type of bocadillo is calamari.

Cerveceria 100 Montaditos--Sign

5. Viajes--Over the next five months, I have so many places I want to go and see all over Spain and Europe itself. I'm excited to say that I'm officailly going to Cadiz for Carnival the weekend of February 15th-17th! I'm so incredibly excited, Carnival in Cadiz is the biggest Carnival celebration in all of Spain! Also, my friends and I are planning a day trip to Salamanca sometime this month too!

That's all I've got right now, tune in next week to see how my first two days of classes went!

Besos,
Kelsey

Week 1: Museo del Prado, Old Madrid, and Toledo

Settle in chicos and chicas, this is going to be a long one!

I've officially been in Madrid for about a week now and I have been ridiculously busy. For the past few days, I've been attending program orientations, a tour of the Prado, a walking tour of Old Madrid, a day trip to Toledo, and piso hunting. Needless to say, it's been a very eventful and exciting week!

1. Orientations: This week, I've had about 5 program orientations which covered topics like general information about Madrid, Academics, Compultense classes, and Housing.  Random WIPT program fact: There are 80 WIPTers total (30 for the year and 50 for this semester only) making us one of the largest study abroad programs at Universidad Compultense de Madrid (UCM)

Academics are split into two sections for my program: courses from Reunidas (all of these classes are with North American students taught in Spanish by Spanish professors--I will be taking three of these types of classes) and courses from Compultense (courses in Spanish with Spanish professors and students--I have to take two of these classes). I have registration on Thursday, so after next week I can let you know what classes I'm going to be taking!

Building where WIPT office and Orientation is

Housing is pretty stressful. Amy, the Student Services Cordinator, sat us down and took us through the piso (apartment) hunting process. I have to be moved out of my homestay  on February 14th, so over the next week I will be calling different pisos that have rooms (habitaciones) for rent until June. I'm looking in the Arguelles, Moncloa, Cuatro Caminos, and Chamberi areas of Madrid. Right now, I live near Embajadores and it takes a solid 40-45 minutes to get from Embajadores to UCM . The neighborhoods I'm looking at are about 15 mins away from UCM. I've posted a map of the city and where I am in comparison to the Universidad and a picture of my room in my homestay as well!

 

My room at my homestay

(Maps, Left: Madrid Metro, My stop is circled near the middle, UCM is circled under the key;

Maps, Righ: Madrid Map, My homestay is circled at the bottom, UCM is circled at the top)

2. Tour of Museo del Prado: On Thursday, I had my first solo metro ride because my roommate and I are part of different excursion groups. My mission? To get to the Museo del Prado. It took me two metro lines and about 20 minutes to get to my stop (Banco de Espana); after that things got a little hairy. I started out by leaving the metro station by going the complete wrong direction. I walked along Calle de Alcala from the metro stop (which was at the intersection of Calle de Alcala (the street that goes into Sol) and Paseo del Prado (the street that goes right past the Prado) all the way to Sol before I realized I was going the complete wrong direction. After a bit of backtracking, I made it onto Paseo del Prado and walked for a solid 15 minutes before asking for a passerby directions to the Prado, it turned out I was literally right next to it without even realizing it! 

When I finally met up with my group, I met our tour guide, Pablo. Before I start talking about everything I saw, just some general info about the Prado. It's HUGE. I'm pretty sure its like the 3rd largest art collection in the world or something like that. It focuses mainly on Spanish painters like El Greco, Velazquez, and Goya. My tour was a general tour of the Prado so we saw a bit of everything. But I saw Las Meninas by Velazquez (one of my favorite paintings!), Goya's La maja desnuda, La maja vestida, Saturno devorando sus hijos, and tons more! I took a class last semester about the history and culture of Spain and we spent a lot of time talking about Velazquez and Goya so it was an amazing experience to be able to see those works in person. I was literally like 2 feet away from them. It was one of the coolest things I've every seen. We didn't take any pictures inside, but I have one that I took while we were waiting to go in.

 

Entrance to Museo del Prado

3. Walking Tour of Old Madrid: On Friday morning, we had another group excursion, this time it was a tour of Old Madrid. We met up at the metro stop Opera (which is right next to Teatro Real--The Royal Opera House) and spent two hours walking around the city before ending at Puerta del Sol which is the center of the city (and Spain!). We saw so many buildings but the highlights were Teatro Real, Palacio Real, Catedral de Nuestra Senora la Almudena, Plaza Mayor, and Kilometro Cero. All of them were so beautiful and the architecture was absolutely amazing. I've posted a picture of each below, but just something random I've noticed here--there are a lot of dogs. But all of them are extremely well behaved, most of the time their owners don't have them on a leash because the dogs just follow their owners.

Teatro Real

Plaza Mayor

Palacio Real

Catedral de Nuestra Senora de La Almudena

Kilometro Cero--this marks the center of Madrid and Spain

4. Day trip to Toledo: On Saturday, we left bright and early to go to Toledo. Toledo is only about an hour outside of Madrid. It is absolutely gorgeous. It was rainy and gross out on Saturday, but the trip was worth the rain and cold! Toledo sits high on a hill and is surrounded by the Tagus River. The streets are very narrow and winding, and made up of cobblestone (Sidenote: make sure you wear comfy shoes when you walk around Toledo--the cobblestones kill your feet!). My impression of Toledo was that it was quaint and filled with some amazing architecture. 

We started out at Puerta de Alfonso VI and walked through the city stopping at Mezquita de Cristo de la Cruz, Plaza Zocodover, Santa Iglesia Catedral Primada, Iglesia de Santo Tome, Sinegoga de El transito, and Monesteria de San Juan de los Reyes before ending at Puente de San Martin. My favorite places were Mezquita de Cristo de la Cruz, Plaza Zocodover, Santa Iglesia Catedral Primada and Monesteria de San Juan de los Reyes. The architecure in all of Toledo is a mix of Roman and Moor so there are a lot of arches and a mixture of brick and stone on the buildings. 

Some interesting things about the sights: Mezquita de Cristo de la Cruz was initially mosque before an addition was put on it to convert it into a Christian church. Plaza Zocodover is a large plaza with a ton of different shops and cafes. Toledo is well-known for Don Quijote and marzapan so there were a lot of stores that sold swords (both real and wooden) and cafes that sold tons of different types of marzapan (I tried it, but I'm not a big fan). Santa Iglesia Catedral Primada was...I don't even know how to describe it. It was amazing. There were so many little details everywhere. It's absolutely massive with a ton of statues and stained glass. The entire time I was there all I could think about was how people were able to create all of the tiniest details without the help of the technology that we can use today. I was extremely impressed by it. Monesteria de San Juan de los Reyes was quite big as well, not as big as the Catedral, but pretty big. It had a court yard with orange trees and in the main sanctuary there were tons of details that represented los Reyes Catolicos (Fernando II and Isabel I). Our tour guide did an amazing job explaining everything to us, unfortunately my camera died before I could take pictures of the Monesteria. 

Also in Toledo, we were able to see a ton of works by Greco, some were in the Catedral. They were as amazing as everything else.

Toledo

Ceiling in Mezquita de Cristo de la Luz

Front of the Catedral

Greco (inside Catedral)

As Week 1 comes to a close, I've got just a few things I've noticed. First, my Spanish is getting better! I'm a lot less self-conscious about speaking Spanish. My friends and I are pretty consistently  switching back and forth between Spanish and English (mainly trying to use English when we don't know a word or sentence or something like that) which is good because it forces me to practice. Everything with my senora is going well, she is an amazing cook. She made tortilla espanola (egg and potato omelette) for us this week which was probably one of the best things I've ever had. She also made this really yummy pumpkin soup. Second, the food in general here is 20x better than in the US. The produce is extremely fresh, I've had a lot of fish since getting here (including either swordfish or soul?fish, I couldn't understand the waiter and paella de mariscos [shellfish paella]). Also, Dad--are you ready for this?--I had olives with dinner last night and I actually liked them AND I've been eating a lot of tomatoes too! Oh, and pineapple! Everything is just so good and fresh that it tastes completely different here than they are in the US. Third, Madrid is ridiculously hilly. I'm so used to Chicago and how flat it is that I wasn't really prepared for it! Not to mention madrilenos (people from Madrid) walk everywhere! My legs are getting a little sore from the constant walking up hills in the middle of the city!

I miss everyone lots and lots, but I'm having so much fun here. I'd forgot how much I love learning about the history and architecture of different places! My friends and I have already started planning out where we want to go next in Spain (maybe Barcelona or Grenada?)!

Until next time!
<3 Kelsey

Flying and Orientation Day 1

Greetings from Madrid! I've got just a few notes from my first day in Europe/Madrid:

1. My flights:  My flights were really smooth, and my seven-hour trek from Chicago to Frankfurt felt like it was only about five hours. Honestly for me, the best part was meeting everyone on my program. In total there were about twenty-two of us who flew from Chicago to Frankfurt and Frankfurt to Madrid together. It was great to be able to spend an extra 10-15 hours traveling with people I'm spending the next six months with. Also, flying Lufthansa was awesome; it was very easy day of travel (minus the jet-lag) and I picked up some German!

2.  First Impressions: Madrid is HUGE! I woke up from my mid-flight nap as we were starting our descent into the city and literally all I could see was buildings on buildings on buildings. My fellow WIPTers and I were greeted at the airport by our program staff. Amy and Ksenja gave us our metro passes and then sent us to our homestays. It was a little intimidating just being thrown into a taxi and having to figure everything out on our own; but I'm happy to say that I've been able to follow and understand pretty much everything that people have said to me! My homestay is right off of the Yellow Line (Embajadores stop) in the Puerta del Sol/Embajadores neighborhood so its really easy to get around the city with public transport, not to mention the metro was super easy to figure out!

3. La Universidad Compultense de Madrid: After dropping off our stuff at our homestay, Victoria (the other Purdue student at my homestay)  and I had to go to our first night of orientation. We managed to run into another girl from our program on our way to the Metro who lives a bit further south than we do. We got a tour of campus, which pretty much looks like any other college campus but with a lot more graffiti. After that we just went over some of the basics about our program, learned about campus (apparently, the journalism students are the "most fun students"--direct quote from one of the WIPT staffers) and what we would be doing for the next two weeks during our orientation (mainly learning about Madrid and what campus life is like and how to find an apartment).

One of the hardest things I think is going to be settling into a completely new time schedule, especially with meals here! We have breakfast between 7:30 or 8, lunch around 2 or 3, and then dinner at 9 or 10, definitely not what I'm used too!

That's all I've got for now! Stay tuned though, my next update will have pictures and a trip to Toledo!

<3 Kelsey

Pre-Departure

Hola a todos!


As many of you know, I am studying abroad in Madrid, Spain for the spring semester. That being said, I've decided that creating a blog is the easiest way to keep track of my Spanish and European adventures and share them with you. I arrive in Spain in about a week, so this week all I am focusing on is packing and getting ready to go!

A little bit about my program: I'm going with  a program that is run by Purdue, U of Wisconsin, Indiana, and Tulane. For the first month of the program, I will be staying in a home-stay. During my first month, I will be going through orientation and looking for an apartment in the city (wish me luck!). I will be taking classes at la Universidad Compultense de Madrid, all of my classes will be taught in Spanish by native-speaking professors.

 Its a bit surreal that I am actually going to be in Spain for the semester--its something that I've wanted to do since I was in high school. I'm really excited for traveling all over Spain (and hopefully Europe too!). That's all for now, I'll update again once I'm in Spain.

<3 Kelsey