Briannah's Adventures Abroad : November 2015

Here in little Salamanca I am living with a lovely host family. We live in the Barrio del Oeste (West Neighborhood), which is a super nifty place, because a couple years ago they started a project where young artists can paint the garage doors. It is sort of like a walking outdoor art gallery. We personally live near the giant green dinosaur. Near the central fountain there are trees and bikes covered in crocheted yarn, etc... super creative hippie stuff like that.
Other than blabbing about the beautiful garage doors in the neighborhood (they are seriously the coolest garage doors you will ever see), I should tell you a bit about our actual house. Spaniards don't spend much time in their houses, so nothing too exciting happens here, but we do always have a big family lunch together. Me and another student from my program live with our host mom, Pilar. She has a son and daughter both in their twenties who live with their dad (though the son spends most of the year working elsewhere). They all come over for lunch and we tend to share our individual plans for the afternoon whilst watching the actual news on TV. Lots of news. Overall, we become very well informed citizens over lunch.
Only downside of lunch is that it's at 2:00pm at the earliest, which is pretty early for Spanish standards. The meal schedule in Spain is delayed about 2-3 hours and becomes increasingly delayed as the day goes on. Spaniards don't really start functioning till 9am at the earliest. Lunch happens anywhere between 2-4pm. Dinner in our house is at 9pm, but that's pretty early for Spain, as some people don't eat until 10:30 or 11:00pm. I have developed a new habit of eating chocolate chip greek yogurt for dessert with every meal. I tell myself it's healthy because it's yogurt. Yogurt or fruit is the typical dessert here (despite the impression I've given with my addiction to ice cream shops and bakeries).
Then there is Jaco. An extremely tiny Yorkshire terrier who enjoys barking, peeing around the house, and running in circles. Overall, a friendly little dude. He thinks his reflection is another dog, but... at least he's cute. He also, thankfully, is very Spanish in his sleeping habits, i.e. he knows how to sleep in like a champ.
My host mom is very good at putting up with my creative grammar and vocabulary. Sometimes I say things that apparently are non-existent and she gets quite a kick out of it, so much so that she starts incorporating my made-up words into the family lexicon. I tell her that's dangerous because then I will keep thinking they are words! She finally informed me the other day that I'd been calling the trashcan the garbage man. To my credit, in Latin America the word for garbage man can also mean trashcan, but I guess that is definitely not the case here. Contrary to the implications of my Spanish, there is indeed not a little garbage man living under our sink.

Cristina, Me, Tiana, Pilar

Our neighborhood

The Plaza Mayor at Christmas time

Clearly my blog has been a tad dormant since the Camino... nevertheless, I've been up to quite a bit during my Spanish semester. I'm fully settled into the University life here in Salamanca. I tend to fill my time with classes, consuming lots of chocolate and other sweets, and visiting some other Spanish cities. I do other things of course, but I'd say my three principal activities can be summed up to school, eating (sweets) and traveling.
I have classes Monday thru Friday, practically all day, but when I'm not in class I'm usually visiting the Croissantería París. As is implied in the name, it is a small bakery where you can get croissants filled with every sort of sugary goodness, from milk chocolate and bananas to raspberry and cheese filling. They also have savory ones with ham and goat cheese. Now that it is autumn, the ice cream options are slightly more limited, but prior to the arrival of fall, I succeeded in trying every ice cream and frozen yogurt place in or near the Plaza Mayor. With such awkward gaps of time between classes as well as the abundance of cafés and bakeries here, it is quite easy to come to love snacking in Spain. And I haven't even gotten to talking about tapas! I mostly eat at home, but when I go out or am traveling, I enjoy the Spanish cuisine of tapas. Around just about every corner is a bar with a unique selection of tapas (basically little appetizer items) to pick from. If you go up thinking you'll just order wine, you'll also ending up ordering a tapa, for me anything with goat cheese. And vice versa, if you go up just to order a tapa, you naturally end up ordering a drink well. All in all, the Spaniards have mastered art of the evening drinking and snacking outing, which I of course supplement with ice cream.
Other than indulging in pastries, ice cream and goat cheese, I attempt to bit by bit master the ins and outs of Spanish grammar. I have 6 classes all in Spanish, which has turned out to be much easier than expected. I still have an exceedingly annoying amount of work, but the fact that it's in Spanish doesn't seem to make it too much worse. I have 2 university spanish linguistics classes. My favorite is definitely Spanish phonetics and phonology, because I'm a proud linguistics nerd. For that class, I actually have one professor that teaches us phonology and another professor that teaches us phonology. One of them is an older man who is quite hilarious but also hard to understand because he has a very low gruff voice and use a lot of colloquial expressions. The other professor is a very graceful young woman with the most mellifluous voice ever. In my other Spanish linguistics class, which is sort of a mix of Spanish syntactic theory and general linguistics, I was quickly confronted with one of the many cultural differences between university in Spain and university in the US. Spanish students have the tendency to maintain a dull roar during most of the class. To put it lightly, in addition to attempting to grasp the material of the class, I am learning to separate the professor's voice from the Spanish chitter chatter and ideally tune out the latter. In that class, I also had the "opportunity" (or misfortune, depending on your attitude) to give a presentation in front of the whole class. The topic being one with lots of linguistic terminology, having never given a presentation in Spanish and not being a native speaker, let's be real, I don't think I've ever been so nervous in my whole life. It was like 10 times more nerve-wracking than the SAT's, but just like the SAT's I totally survived and am quite proud of myself.
Despite having class Monday through Friday, I have been able to travel a bit in Spain, though after the Camino, I was also quite content to stay in one place for a little while. I travelled to Barcelona one weekend and had the most fantastic time ever! Barcelona is an amazing city with so many crazy cool Gaudí buildings, food, more food, beach, more food and nice people. I was also lucky to have a super fun guide and friend to show me around, Susana. We managed to squeeze as much as possible into one weekend and even made it all the way to Figueres to see the Dalí Museum (side note: best museum in the whole world) and be total Dalí nerds. I will update more about Barcelona later!
I also made a day trip to Valladolid, a city just an hour from Salamanca. Definitely NOT touristy, but my professor from Grinnell is from there and I wanted to see where she's from. Even better yet, she happens to be there this semester, so she showed me around her city. I also visited the science museum, perhaps for a slightly younger audience, but it was super cool. I went to the museum at 2:00pm, which might seem trivial, however, it meant I had the ENTIRE museum to myself. 2:00pm is the commencement of lunch + siesta in Spain, everyone (except the people who work in restaurants) closes shop and goes home (or occasionally out) to eat. Thus, the American tourist (me) had the entire museum to herself! Valladolid isn't famous for too much, but once again, they did not fail me with their food... amongst my exploring I of course made it to a chocolate shop and bakery. They also have PEACOCKS in the park! I tried to contain my excitement but wow peacocks are so cool. Overall, a lovely day with my professor, peacocks, museums and chocolate.
Near the beginning of the semester, my program took us on a trip to Sevilla and Granada. Sevilla wasn't too exciting because I'd lived there before, however, it was a grand time with friends from the program. Me, Sylvia, and Celia rowed a rowboat around the little river around the Plaza de España. We did not tip over and we only hit two other people's boats. We managed to find amazing (and amazingly expensive, but totally worth it) baklava and dried fruit. In Granada, we visited the world famous Alhambra, which is a gigantic palace, village, fortress, garden, etc.... from the Muslim kings in Spain from before the Catholics took over in 1492. It is of course absolutely gorgeous and filled with amazingly intricate arabic designs and writing.
A couple weeks ago, I think, time is a little hard to keep track of here, Sylvia, Celia, Sara and I decided to take our rowboat adventure skills to the mountains of Salamanca. We took a trip to Béjar, a pretty boring little town with a weird sounding name that is nestled in a beautiful mountain range. We did some fall hiking and got to see an amazing sunset, chestnut covered paths, moss covered rocks and the leaves changing color to bright orange. We spent Halloween in Candelario, a tiny town famous for being the second prettiest town in Spain. We went for a morning hike and made friends with a very fuzzy and handsome donkey and were blessed with a beautiful rainbow. Though it's hard to get any better than donkeys and rainbows, we also went to a town event which consisted of free chestnuts and sangria for everyone. It was a nice halloween treat to have "chestnuts roasting on an open fire."
Okay, I think I've written enough for this to be getting a bit long for a blog post. Ideally, I'll improve my blogging skills and there'll be more posts to come! Sending you all love and laughter from Spain, Briannah.