Gah! It’s been far too long! I intended to start this blog in the first week I was here, but I’ve just been having so many experiences that I find it’s hard to get around to it. From now on, I’ll be posting at least every two weeks, just to kind of recollect my thoughts and my experiences.
So, a brief overview of my journey so far: we all arrived in Madrid, where we stayed for a week. During that time, we visited La Alcazar Real, the Royal Palace in Madrid. Got some gorgeous panoramas:
We also traveled to Toledo
Toledo from a nearby hill
and Segovia.
To be honest, for me, the whole journey was great, but the time spent in museums was a lot of Spanish very rapidly for me, with a lot of vocabulary I didn’t understand. I found myself kind of bored with the rigidity of the tours, and wanted to be able to go out and explore the museums by myself.
In Madrid, we visited the most famous museum in Spain: Museo del Prado, followed by a museum named Thyssen. I found Thyssen more interesting: it had a wider variety of art that we were able to see, and was more familiar feeling.
We’ve also been on a trip from Sevilla to Cordoba, where we saw a famous church and the Mezquita (Mosque).
My host family is quite the bunch. They’re super warm and accepting, especially my host mom. Sometimes, I gotta wonder if I’m being rude because I don’t really understand the language that well, but what can I do?
The new word of the house is “chungo,” which means “bad.” I learned it from my history professor and brought it back with me, and my host famiily thought it was hilarious. Now we have a saying: “si tu estás en esta casa, eres chungo!” It’s developed into a few different jokes. The dog, Uva (grape), is the “chungest.” She’s “super-chunga.” She barks nearly every time someone opens the front door, and at first she was scared of my roommate and I. We all call each other chungos around the table, and now Marta (my older host sister) and I have a “baile chungo,” a chungo dance, which involves basically shaking our arms around.
And oh geez, the week I wrote this was midterms. My history of art professor was expecting us to memorize a TON of stuff, but everything turned out. Now, I’m headed to a microtheater to see a few small comedies. Until next time!
-G