Hot town, summer in the city

Well, summer looks like it's in no hurry to wind down here in Saharan Madrid (as a friend of mine nicknamed the city), at least if you define summer by the temperature outside. Actually, that's a bit of a lie; despite our past week of near, at, or above 100-degree days, the ten-day forecast claims that starting Monday, temperatures will hover just above 90. Ha.

I have a love-hate relationship with summertime Madrid. Unlike summertime Boston (or I guess really any of New England/NY), Madrid is hot and desert-dry. That means no thunder-and-lightening, and I can count on one hand how many times it's rained since June. I love the heat and lack of rain. But lately I've almost had enough of the heat. I can only take so many nights of trying to fall asleep at 2 am when it's a breezeless 85 degrees outside (and, what's worse, in my room). August in Madrid is the time everyone goes on vacation. Despite the economic problems here in Spain, many small shops close down for a couple of weeks and some even the whole month while their owners make the trek out of the desert to the water-laden coasts. I like Madrid when it's a little quieter. I hate when I go out to buy stamps or some fruit and find out the estanco (tobacco stand where it's most common to buy stamps) or the fruteria is closed due to vacation.

This August is a little different. The Pope is in town (really) for the Jornada Mundial de la Juventud, World Youth Day. Where does the Pope stay when he visits Madrid? Couldn't tell you. As for the thousands (literally, they're EVERYWHERE) of the world's Catholic youths, I think they're staying in schools, with host families, maybe in churches...who knows. All I know is that a lot of activities are taking part in El Retiro, the huge park literally 5 minutes down the street from where I live, so I've had multiple encounters with foreign language-speaking hoards of teenagers. The other night I was waiting to cross the street (on a couple of separate occasions, actually), only to be delayed by police on motorcycles escorting parades of buses full of bishops, priests, and other apparently important religious people. (Ever seen a bus full of bishops in their bishop garb fly by? Let me tell you, it's a sight to see.)

Confessionals set up in the park

Apparently they're expecting a lot of guilt-ridden teenagers.

Anyway, despite the Catholic chaos, this has been a boring month. Aside from finding a new apartment (in the process still) and working out all my documents to renew my visa, I really don't have any obligations, which means I've been reading a lot and watching a lot of tv. I was exploring the city on the cooler days (and by cooler I mean 95 degrees or less), but the past week or so has just been too hot to go out past noon.

Until next time, if the heat and boredom haven't killed me.

When 90 degrees begins to feel cool

Madrid - "the most Spanish of all cities"

Apparently one of Hemingway's favorite cities in the world was Madrid. I feel like I vaguely knew that he spent time here way back when, but either way, I thought this NY Times article was interesting.

On a more or less entirely different note, the other night we had an end-of-the-year party celebration at school with our program coordinator, professors, and staff. There are a good amount of us staying next year to teach and some even to translate, but it's going to be weird not seeing some of these people again. Coming from a university with a near 5000-student undergraduate class, being in a program of 23 people is a huge difference for me. It's had its ups and downs in terms of size, but overall it's been a good ten or so months.

Everyone, including some of our professors

Everyone with our program coordinator.

With our program coordinator.

That's pretty much it. The thesis is in the final stages (aka editing, writing a conclusion, formatting), so that's pretty much all that's in store for the final two weeks of June. Hasta entonces.

Just an fyi, an article from June 1st from the newspaper El Pais in English about the protests.

La Plaza de Solución

Well, it's been about two and a half weeks since the protests started here on May 15th, and as far as I can tell there is no projected end in sight. I'm horrible with understanding most things political, so I can't give a very good account of what's been going on, but I think the wiki article gives a good, broad summary. It's an interesting time to be in Spain.

I live a couple of miles from the center, so I actually hadn't been over to the Plaza del Sol, where people are still camped out (literally, with tents). I was in the area today, so I decided to walk through and take a look. It's not exactly the prettiest of sights but it's also not as dirty as the news has been claiming. I was probably also there at a relatively quiet time; not a whole lot was going on. I'm really curious to know how much - if at all - the protests are being covered in the news in the US. I haven't seen much on the NY Times online, and the fact that no one from home has mentioned it to me or asked me about it makes me think there's not a whole lot, but I obviously can't watch the news on tv.

Entrance to the metro, covered in signs and posters

"Now or never"

"There isn't enough bread for so much chorizo"

"Something beautiful is sprouting"

Reactions to high unemployment rates

So many posters

Plaza de ‘Sol’ución

22-M

It's kind of sad that the Spanish news has something to say almost every day (if not every) about what's going on in the US, but it takes a week for US newspapers to bother writing up a story about Spanish goings-on (this time, a week of protests in Puerta del Sol). Anyway, elections (for regional and local governments) take place today, so the protests will presumably stop after the results are announced.

Lanzarote: volcanoes and camels and craters, oh my!

This past weekend I went to the island of Lanzarote, one of the seven islands in the Canaries, which belong to Spain but are off the coast of northern Africa. Lanzarote, like the other islands, is pretty small, only 40 miles from the southernmost to the northernmost points, and a maximum of 15 miles wide. It's also completely volcanic, and several of the beaches are "volcanic" and have black sand, which I think is really cool. It's also really hot and really humid, although it gets very little annual rainfall.

Playa Grande in Puerto
del Carmen

On the first day we just explored the part of the island where we were staying, Puerto del Carmen. There are several "golden sand" beaches there and a lot of touristy restaurants and shops. Tourism is the main industry in Lanzarote, and there are a LOT of Germans and British people that go on vacation there (so much so that the airport signs are first in German, then English, and then Spanish). Anyway, we sat on the beach during the afternoon, and then after that we went to explore the area a bit more.

Really pretty volcanic crater in Timan-
faya National Park

On Saturday (the second day), we decided to do a day-long excursion that took us all over the island with a tour guide, which was really great because although there are buses on Lanzarote (called guaguas), they don't go everywhere. The tour bus first took us to el Golfo, a volcanic rock/sand beach with a sea-level crater filled with yellow-green water that gets its color from the algae in it. Then after that we went to Timanfaya National Park, were you can see all the volcanic mountains up close, which may sound boring but they are actually really pretty and many of them are lots of different colors. There's also a restaurant on top of one of the volcanoes (a semi-dormant one), and they cook their food primarily with the heat of the volcano. After that we went to a restaurant in a nearby town for lunch. We had potaje, a stew made of vegetables and chick peas, which was really good. Then we had fish with potatoes with the two sauces typical of the Canaries, mojo picon and mojo verde. The first one is red and spicy and the second is green and really garlicy. After lunch we drove through some of the vineyards on the island, which are much different from what most people probably picture as vineyards. The vines grow really close to the ground and grow in the soil that is below the black lava sand/rocks. Apparently the wine industry is really challenging because of the lack of rainfall in Lanzarote. Severe heat waves as well as rain too early in

Vineyards

 the season can more or less destroy the crop. We stopped at a winery where we were able to try a couple of different wines, which I wasn't a huge fan of (they had a strange, gasoline-like flavor to them). But apparently the wines of Lanzarote have a good reputation (as well as a certain goat cheese, which I sadly did not have the change to try). After that we drove up towards the northern part of the island, first through the Valley of a Thousand Palms, where supposedly in the 17th and 18th centuries (I think), the townspeople used to plant one palm tree for every girl who was born and two for every boy (how rude). As a result, the area has the greatest density of palm trees on the island. Next we stopped at a lookout point on the northwest coast, where you can see another small island, La Graciosa, which belongs to Lanzarote. Unfortunately it was a really hazy day so the view wasn't too clear. After that we went to Jameos del Agua, which is basically a volcanic cave. That was the last main thing we saw on the excursion. Over the course of the day we saw various works of art/architecture that Cesar Manrique, a famous architect and artist from Lanzarote. Some of the things he designed were the restaurant on top of the volcano in Timanfaya National Park, various statues, (at the entrance to the park, at Jameos del Agua, etc.), a huge cactus garden (which we didn't get to see), windmills, and Monument to the Peasant. All of his works are pretty interesting, although some are really abstract (in particular the Monument to the Peasant).

On Sunday, our last day, we decided to go to the town of Playa Blanca, where the beaches have practically white sand (looked more like normal sand to me, but hey). It's also right north of another island in the Canaries, Fuerteventura (although we didn't go there). We spent most of the day on the beach or walking around the town. Unfortunately I only have a few pictures of Playa Blanca because that's when my camera pretty much full-out died...but oh well.

Que bien te lo montas

Well, the semester is over. I turned in a paper Monday, took one exam yesterday morning, and had one more this morning. It's kind of a big relief because I'm anxious and looking forward to getting back to my thesis, which I haven't really been able to give my full attention to much at all this semester. (Right now I have the rough draft for one of the 4 chapters done.)

plain

cinnamon raisin

Semana Santa was a great trip (London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Toledo), although I would really like to go back to London, there's a lot we saw there but a lot we didn't have time for. In other news, lately I've been trying to cope with the lack of bagels in this country, but due to my lack of success with that, I found a pretty good bagel recipe online and I've made them twice now, the first time cinnamon raisin and the second time just plain ones. Maybe if I wind up hating teaching next year I'll just open up my own bagel shop.

Lastly, on Friday I leave to go to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands for the weekend with two friends. Then it's just me and the thesis 'til the end of June...

Los menores en Cataluña desde la transición: el uso del catalán y del castellano

Well, the semester is wrapping up and with that comes (for the MA students in Madrid), the graduate student symposium. Basically it is a huge conference in which every student has to prepare a 15-20 minute presentation about his or her thesis up until that point in time. It was organized into three sessions over the course of five hours, with presentations going on in three different rooms during each session.

Before the presentations. Nah, not nervous at alllll.

My presentation went pretty well. It was on the longer side, around 20 minutes, but after I started I wasn't nervous at all. All of the other presentations that I saw were really interesting. People are researching a really wide variety of topics, from linguistic topics such as Spanish versus English terms of endearment to cultural and literary topics like post-modernization and the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. My project looks to compare the the language uses in Cataluña between the younger people who have grown up since the end of Francoism in the late 70s and the older generations of people who grew up before then. (For those who don't know, in Cataluña there are two co-official languages, Spanish and Catalan, although over the past 30 or so years the people and government of Cataluña has put forth a lot of efforts to try to make Catalan the more politically and culturally dominant language.)

Brittany's a little rebel and was taking pictures 

during people's presentations. My advisor is

the guy sitting there...I don't think he liked my 

presentation much because I read too

much and didn't "improvisar."

Brittany and me!

Brittany and me with our mentor, José Pazó

Anyway, now that that's all over, we have only one week of classes left! I have one 20 or so page paper to write and two exams to take, then it's just thesis from then on through the end of June. I can't believe how fast this year has gone by, but this semester has been really busy so I guess that speeds things up.

I'll be posting my pictures soon from my spring break travels with Chris (we went to London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and various places in and around Madrid). For now I need to go to sleep and start pondering that 20-page paper that I need to start tomorrow...

[Photo credits go to Kat and Brittany, as I was too lazy to pull out my stubborn, semi-broken camera and take some of my own.]

Not an April Fools joke...

I heard that the Boston area got some snow last night so I just wanted to make you all feel better about that by telling you that its currently 77 degrees here!