it´s been a while....

So I’m just getting to Sevilla right now. The train ride is almost over and I must say…I quite enjoy the train…there are many things to see out the windows and many things you can learn from those around you. Every time I’ve taken the train out of Cádiz, I’ve noticed certain manmade channels that stretch for miles, but never have I understood exactly what they are for. So I figured, this is probably my last time going through here…I really should ask someone. So I turned around and asked the lady who was sitting behind me what they were…and she kindly explained that they were used to harvest salt from the sea. The channels were filled with water and then cut off from the ocean until they dried up completely and left all their salt behind. She also explained that all but a very few had been abandoned already. In her kindness she also went on to explain that not only had that area once been full of salt makers (there has to be a better term for that….I just can’t think of it yet…) but also water mills to grind the wheat produced in the region. But apparently those are all but completely abandoned as well and only two actually remain active in the area.

Another special treat on this train ride has been seeing all the sunflowers in full bloom; I bet mom would’ve gotten a kick out of that. Now that I have no home I’ve been eating a bit less and there’s no easy meals…as in…I make most of my food in an effort to save money…so I can’t wait to get home to mom’s and abuelita’s stellar cooking…honestly I think I will request to be brought directly from the airport to abuelitas house as being home and away from amazing food is worse than purgatory…it’s an all out hell…so yes…that is my one request…when I get home…have good, non-spanish, food waiting for me :D

I’m telling you this right now Danny…if our parents buy you a laptop and if you decide to travel like me…get a small one…lol…15” max…

But I really do like this laptop…it’s a great machine…just a massive one as well….it’s my friend though…and when it dies I will surely feel it from the very depths of my soul…or not…but I will be upset surely.

I’m sort of nervous about this whole journeying through the world with nothing but my shadow for company thing…I can’t wait until I get my camping backpack as that will be such a wonderfully…wonderful…commodity I could simply…chuckle…

I apologize for the extremely laid back nature of this post but I’ve been journaling basically the entire time since I got in the train and so I’m kind of all serious’d out….I’ll make a better…serious one later….oui?

Da

Buna ziua mon amies (sp?)

Sevilla - Take Two

"Flowers in a Sevillan Park"

As the culminating event of several weeks of growing boredom I took the train to Sevilla at 7PM on the 21^st of March 2008, Good Friday. The initial plan was rather straightforward and thoroughly uncomplicated; go to Sevilla, see the holy week processions, don’t die. Some might call this poorly thought out, but what I’d come to find is that you can truly think an idea to death and sometimes it’s best to throw caution to the winds, just making it up as you go along.

The train arrived at quarter to nine, or rather a mere 15minutes after the tourism office had closed for the evening. Seeing as I barely had money enough for the return train buying a map was out of the question and a Taxi even more so. Thus I had no idea of where I was in a city I’d only briefly seen once before and one which was currently so woefully packed with tourists (due to Sevilla’s famed holy week festivities) that asking for directions wasn’t much use either. After 15minutes of fruitless asking about within the train station I decided the best course of action would be taking a lap around the building in an attempt to get my bearings.

From the interior the train station seems impossibly large, but this isn’t so much because its true size is really that staggering but rather because the architecture is so simple it just makes the whole place look considerably larger than it is. What I mean by this is that the interior of the train station is about as complicated as an airplane hangar. It’s big (with at least 20meters from the station floor to the ceiling) it only has 2 floors, and the second only covers the last quarter of the building despite being the only location for shops and ticket sales.

Upon exiting the station I lapped the pyramid like building, stumbling over lovers and lost tourists alike, all taking haven in the inviting shadows the building provides. Directly in front of the main entrance there’s a “Corte Ingles” (Spain’s only department store) and I guessed (correctly thank God) that the center of the city would be in that general direction and even if it weren’t I’d still at least be able to find a map to consult in a building that large. ‘Alas I’d forgotten that it was Good Friday and NOTHING was open. Desperate now, I decided to just follow two young folks in the hope that they, like most of the city, would be on their way to the city center. After a few hundred meters I saw a sign that defines Spain as a tourist nation but does help tremendously when you haven’t a bloody clue of where you are or even in what direction you should be headed.

Spain is a country with as few street signs as Mexico City (none and impossible to find) but what it does have are directional signs that are clearly designed to augment the country’s tourist based economy. These signs point to either a landmark or a hotel and the one labeled “Centro Ciudad” (City Center) turned out to be my Godsend. So it was these signs that I followed right into the historic heart of Sevilla. I followed the signs as the streets began to narrow and the buildings shrank with smaller windows and shorter doorways. I followed the signs as the streets became more crowded, I followed the signs all the way until I could hear the somber drumbeat of the holy week processions.

…so now it’s been 6 weeks since that weekend and I still haven’t finished this bloody paper trying to describe it…so I feel like I’ll summarize the night a tad bit more…

After getting downtown and indeed walking through the whole darned thing I came to the conclusion that I was hungry and that I would be absolutely no fun whatsoever if I didn’t get myself fed. So that’s exactly what I did. I worked my way back to a Kebab I’d seen (cheap, filling Turkish food…reminiscent of Greek gyros). While ordering I struck up a conversation with the two folks who worked there as they were both young and obviously foreign. The young man seemingly Moorish by descent and the girl Polish or something of the sort. As it turns out, the guy was Moroccan and the girl from St. Petersburg, a city which according to her, reaches -30 degrees Celsius in the Winter! That’s really cold…

A few minutes into the conversation this Italian guy next to me butted in and his girlfriend also joined the conversation and so when the Kebab folks had to go back to work I joined the two Italians on a step where we could eat our Kebabs. One thing led to another and when they found out I was all alone without anything to do they invited me to go out with them and their friends, an offer I could hardly turn down seeing as I had nothing else to do and nobody else I knew.

After hitting a few bars and not being allowed to buy my own drinks (the Italians insisted on buying them for me) we made our way to an underground Flamenco club. The place was really cool with the outside looking like a crappy bar with worn wooden doors and an old bearded bouncer with a beret. The Italians said hello and we worked our way inside what seemed to be half building half cave. There was music and everyone´s attention was fixed at the far corner of the room where a man was singing flamenco and utilizing his body as a sort of percussion instrument. Stamping his feet, slapping his thighs and chest and clapping his hands he was his own band, with his own vocal accompaniment and his friend next to him adding flamenco guitar to the mix it was really a sight to see. Now don´t think you´d get bored after a few minutes of this because just when tedium began to set in a lady in a beautiful gypsy dress (Flamenco dress) got up and began to dance around on the stage. All of this was clearly a demonstration in improvisation and was all the more impressive for it. Unfortunately even the greatest musicians become weary after a while and so a good half hour after I’d arrived the musicians called it quits for the evening and everyone went to the bar in the next room where I was once again invited to a beer by my ever generous Italian hosts. At this point it was quickly approaching 3AM and as the Italians had to work the next day they announced their early departure. Before doing so however they inquired as to my sleeping arrangements. When I informed them that...well…there weren´t any and that I would be perfectly fine sleeping at the train station they were absolutely adamant that this could not be and insisted that there was no problem whatsoever with me crashing on their couch. Now ecstatic comes just short of describing my absolute elation at God´s gift to me of running into Sevilla´s most hospitable resident Italians.

So when they left I left with them and crashed on their couch watching TV unable to fall asleep, and just as I began to doze off I was re-awakened by their Roommate´s arrival and so I turned on the TV and pretended to be awake as I was in the dining room and didn´t want her to feel prohibited from using the kitchen in the event she needed or wanted something from there.

As it turns out she did and after making herself spaghetti…at 4AM she sat down with me to eat it and we ended up talking until…11AM

Me + someone who talks as much as I do = no sleep

But that’s not entirely true, I got about an hour and a half of sleep before the Italians woke me up by coming downstairs and telling me they were leaving for work and then another 2 hrs of sleep before I got up and brought the Italians the keys they’d left me to lock up when I left (now that’s trust). I brought the Italians their keys and ate something at the restaurant they worked at before leaving to go around town on a picture taking expedition. I ended my time in Sevilla by meeting a guy from Milwaukee and then sprinting off to the train station so as to avoid missing my train. Not a bad weekend for only having had to spend €20 :D

So what did that teach me? It taught me that you can never be too hospitable, the Italians taught me that there´s no need to hurry through life, and it taught me that travel doesn´t necessarily have to be expensive. Not to mention that this weekend was such a blast it encouraged me to get out of the house..or well…the city a lot more than I otherwise would have. Since then I´ve seen 5 different Spanish cities/towns and enjoyed every last one of them immensely, not to mention I’ve got a ton of nice pictures from all the places :P

Okay I don’t think anyone is reading this…but at least my mom…and maybe Rachel are still reading it so at least it’s worth something more than mere documentation J

Time to go…byebye

-AE Herrera

Semana Santa

This week is Holy Week and the entire Spanish ¨Community¨ (the communities are like states) of Andalucia (the southernmost community of which Cádiz is a province) goes crazy over this festival. If anyone had any doubts that Catholicism may at times be guilty of idol worship they need only come here during holyweek and observe the somber processions that have a fanatical following all across the south of Spain. Essentially, these are the most somber parades you could ever hope to attend. All the major parishes of the city turn out with everyone from little kids to grown men decked out in those uniforms that we as Americans instantly recognize as being the kind that the Ku Klux Klan wear.

As the procession approaches the first thing you hear is the marching band despite the fact that they´re situated at the very rear of the procession. Slowly they come into view, a band of masked, hooded, and robed people (each procession has it’s own colour scheme) carrying great silver staffs topped with candles. Supposedly the uniform is meant to project the wearer´s spirit to Heaven so that they may be closer to God while wearing it. They´re covered from head to toe in this garb and even their hands are hidden by white gloves meaning that the only part of their flesh that´s at all shown are their eyes through the little slits in the hood. After this great mass of hooded people you are all of a sudden confronted with an enormous float carried by a score of men underneath it and 4 men on each of its corners. The float is a shrine to some sort of religious person or scene. The most common are the grief stricken, but remarkably stoic, virgin mother, the last supper, and the resurrected Christ. Immediately behind the float there is the parish´s marching band, outfitted in what almost look like military uniforms (like most marching bands to be fair). Though the atmosphere and most especially, the floats, are very somber the marching band continues with a victorious sort of song. Which I suppose, taking into account the biblical story that has inspired this week, makes sense.

An interesting custom that most of the little kids and some older women partake in during these holy week processions is the gathering of large ball of wax. As the floats have to stop every few minutes to let them carrying rest, the progress of the processions throughout the city tends to be very choppy. So in these brief but frequent intermissions little kids and older women go out and ask the hooded kids/men to pour wax on their hands from the candles they’re holding (keep in mind…that really has to hurt). After they’ve got a good amount of wax on their hands they roll up the still malleable wax up into a ball and then proceed to ask someone else for more wax so that the ball may grow. By the end of the week many people have balls of wax at least as big as a baseball, some even approaching the size of a small melon. To be completely honest, that’s probably something I would have been very into had I been a youth here =P.

So it's been a while...

And really…it’s just that whenever I sit down to write one of these things it’s cuz I’m bored and when I’m bored I tend to view everything as boring so these posts become long ramblings that, believe me, nobody would want to read nor would I want them to read lest they think me a terrible bore.

But here I am…only semi-bored as I’ve just woken up in the darkness and rain so there’s not much to do outside and if I don’t write this now I fear it will simply never get written.

So it’s been 6months and 2 days since the last time I’ve seen anyone from home…and..well a few days more than that since I’ve seen anyone but Madi my Mom Dad and Dan. Anyone miss me yet? Well I know my mom does at least as she was notably upset at me when I announced that I wouldn’t be returning until August 1^st…but hey, I’m in Europe and don’t know when I’ll be back so I’ve got to take advantage of the opportunity to see as much as possible!

Anywho…in the last few weeks a lot has happened. To those of you who don’t know, I’ve just moved from Burgos (2hrs N. of Madrid) to Cádiz which is on the southern tip of the peninsula. The city is an interesting and historic place seeing as over 3000 years have passed since it was first settled. The City is the Capitol of the province by the same name and is situated on what would be an island but for an extremely narrow strip of land that connects it to mainland Spain.

The city prides itself on the fact that the 1812 constitution was written here and that this was the birthplace of resistance to the Bonaparte occupation of Spain. In that sense it has a relationship to Spain correlative to that of Philadelphia and the United States.

Beyond that they are really quite as vulgar here as in the rest of Spain though I feel like they just don´t see the way they speak as vulgar. What I mean by this is that, unlike in the North, where swears were used as expletives, here they´re just a common part of speech. And it´s not really that they´re even swearing…they just use certain parts of the human anatomy frequently in common speech. I will not elaborate further as I´m not entirely sure who, if anyone, is in my audience but really, if you use your imagination a little I´m sure you can get an idea of what I´m saying. Oh and one further thing, they use these words instead of ¨dude¨ or ¨girlfriend¨ or whatnot, so I don´t know…it´s just a bit odd for an outsider be they Spanish, Latin American, or anyone else.