Feria Taurina de Olivenza

Two weekends ago my friends and I went to a festival in a nearby town, Olivenza, that marked the beginning of the the Bullfighting season in Spain (Feria Tuarina = Festival of the Bulls). Like any other Spanish festival it involved alot of eating and drinking in the streets. The most important part, however, was the bullfight. The festival lasted 4 days, and there was a bullfight each day. In each bullfight there were three toreros (bullfighters) and six bulls, and each torero fought two bulls.

We tried to get tickets to one of the fights, but it was completely sold out. We left, but then came back about an hour into the fight just to see if we could buy tickets from people who didn't use the tickets they had already bought. Instead of watching the bull fight we saw something much different.

When we walked up to the bullring we saw a large crowd of people standing outside of the doors. We didn't know why they were standing there waiting, but we soon found out. There was a knock on from the inside of the bullring, then police began to push the crowd to the sides. The doors burst open, and three horses ran out, dragging a dead bull out of the ring. The children ran over to the bull and tried to pull out the banderillas (the long, colorful things with a sharp end that are used to weaken the bull). The children who got the banderillas were really excited. Then, the bull was lifted with a machine into a truck, where butchers were waiting to butcher the bull for everyone to see. They used axes and huge knives, and you could see the blood spraying all over the walls of the truck and the men. Yuck! We had no idea that they butcher the bulls right outside of the ring. It turns out that watching the butchering of the bulls is almost as fun as watching the bullfight. The amusing part was that the outside of the truck had a cartoon of a smiling bull, but inside the bull was in pieces, and i don't think it was happy...

Bull with banderillas

Cayetano Rivera

Though I really didn't like watching what happens after the fight, I still want to see a bullfight. It's been a large part of the Spanish Culture, and I think it would be worthwhile to see once. I have heard many different opinions of bullfights since being in Spain; some people saying it is a disgrace, some saying it is extremely important to Spanish Culture, and some saying they are indifferent. While I was studying in Granada, people talked about the artistry and beauty of the bullfight, which is interesting to me, so I'd like to see one to be able to make my own opinions. Also, I think the traje de luz (the outfit that the torero wears) is beautiful, and toreros have a stereotype of being super guapo and manly! Nowadays, toreros have become huge celebrities and are viewed as sex symbols, as can be seen in the ad for Loewe's cologne. So, the bullfight interests me more because of artistic and fashion side, rather than watching a man fight and kill a bull. There will be bullfights in Badajoz during the Feria de San Juan in June, so I will probably go to see one then.

I can't stand it!!!

I'm getting so sick of living in the dorm. I've had my complaints all year, about the food, the size of my room, not being able to have visitors, etc., but those are all things I can deal with. The one thing that has driven me absolutely nuts every single time is the laundry. It has been bad all along, but has gotten worse now. Originally we had one normal washer and one dryer (yes, I know I should feel lucky that I have a dryer) for 80 + residents. It was hard to find a time when both the washer and dryer were free. Because if you use both at the same time the fuse blows... So, it would normally take me a few days to clean my clothes; from the time I decided I needed to do laundry until the washing machine was actually available.

Last week they exchanged the washer and dryer for new, smaller, and apparently more economical versions. Unfortunately, the wash cycle on the new machine takes TWO HOURS! And, when I took my clothes out of the washer, after 2 hours, they were sopping wet. So I had to wring out all of my clothes in the sink, then put them in the dryer for another 2 hours. Now I don't know how I will ever have time to wash my clothes. I put them in the washer tonight at 9pm, it's now 11, and they won't be done until 1am. To me this is absurd. I have put up with a lot of inconvencies living here, but this just seems totally ridiculous. Yes, it costs less now, but I don't have time to sit around the dorm for 4 hours waiting for my clothes.

In January I actually decided to look for an apartment, because I was tired of living here. I ended up deciding that I could stick it out for the next couple months, just because it was free. I had a really hard time thinking about paying for an apartment when I have everything here for free. I will never live in a dorm again though! The positive side of living in the residence is that I don't think I will ever have another living sitaution as inconvenient as this. And I will greatly appreciate having my own place next year, even though it means I have to clean and take care of all the other things that come with having an apartment. Now I know that having a free place to live is not necessarily worth all of the cons that come with it...

Carnaval

Last weekend there was a HUGE celebration in Badajoz for Carnaval. Everyone says that Badajoz has the 3rd largest Carnaval celebration in all of Spain. We had two days off of school, and everyone was in costumes for the entire 4 day weekend. Carnaval here has a couple main components: Las Comparsas, Las Murgas, Botellon, and to close the celebration there is El entierro de la sardina (The Burial of the Sardine).

The Comparsas are large groups of people, about 100 in each group, all dressed in very eleborate and intricate costumes. Each comparsa has a group that dances and is followed my a group of drummers. Each group selects a theme shorter after Carnaval for the next year, and the people in these groups work on the costumes, dances and music all year. There was a children's parade on Friday and the adult parade on Sunday, with about 20 Comparsas in each parade. The costumes were amazing!

The Murgas are groups of people who sing humerous and satirical songs. They are normally politically or socially driven, and there is a competition every year for the best Murgas. The competition begins a week or two before Carnaval and the winner is selected during the celebration. I went to see one of the groups, but I couldn't really understand the jokes they were singing about.

 There are two main nights that people celebrate all night in the streets. Everyone dressed up in costumes, like for Halloween. I dressed up as a nerd one day and a ninja the other day. Both nights there is a Botellon, or "Big Bottle". Botellon is common the rest of the year too, where people gather outdoors and drink. During Carnaval though, there are thousands of people in the plazas in the old part of the city.





On Monday night everyone stays out until the next morning, and goes directly to the Burial of the Sardine. This year it was raining, so there weren't as many people there as there usually are. The Burrial of the Sardine is the symbolic end of Carnaval. It consists of people dressed as "death" carrying a stuffed Sardine, while a man dressed as a widow cries and acts as if someone very important has died. The bars all served fried sardines and beer. It was quite ridiculous, especially at 10am after being out dressed as a Nija all night.

Click to see photos from Hoy neswpaper of Burrial of the Sardine


That's Carnaval in a nutshell. It was a lot of fun, but by the end I was so tired!

Today I went on my first field trip with my students. The 3rd of ESO group went to a nearby school for its "dia del centro". Students from16 bilingual sections from surrounding towns came to participate in a day of speaking English and playing games. There were more or less 20 students from each school, which means 320 students, plus a couple teachers from each school. With that amount of people it turned out to be impossible to control anyone, and I'm pretty sure the students just hung out and spoke Spanish all day. There was a schedule of events, but there was no organized way of telling the students where they were supposed to go and when. I ended up sitting in the auditorium with David for the whole morning listening to students presentations about their schools, watching an abridged rendition of High School Musical and watching students sing karaoke in Spanish. I was amazed at how disorganized everything was in comparison to how everything always has to be organized to a T in the states.

One of the consequences of this disorganization arrose later in the day when we were leaving. Apparently there had been an soccer game earlier in the day, and there had been some tension between my students and another group of kids who didn't even go to the school. These kids were able to just walk in because no one was keeping track of who should be there and who shouldn't. There was an issue with one of the other kids pushing and teasing the students from my school, and later on when it was time to leave it escalated to the point I had to step in.

At the end of the day the students were waiting outside the school gate for the bus, alone. They shouldn't have been allowed to just leave in the first place, but again, no one was keeping track of the students. I was outside talking to another lanuguage assistant and waiting to leave when I saw a couple students run over to me saying that the other kids from the game were going to hit my kids. So I ran over and pushed the kids apart and just stood between them. I told them to leave in my not perfect Spanish, and they just laughed at me. The kids were standing all around us, and kept trying to get my students, and I had to push them away a couple of times.

They were saying things to me that I half understood-enough to know they were not at all friendly- and one of them stood so close behind me I could feel his face in my hair, just to push my buttons.  I had enough of a power position, though, that they didn't try to push past me, and finally I got my students inside of the school gates.  The group of quinquis (loosly translated to hooligans-but with a negative conotation) taunted us and even banged on our bus as we were leaving.

Today was the first day I have been in the position where I needed to be in control, but couldn't because I don't speak Spanish fluently. Usually I am able to communicate whatever I need, but here I was just at a loss. I knew that the only thing I could do was to keep them apart until another teacher came out. Luckily we were supposed to leave right then, so the other teachers came out shortly after.

This situation would have been so easily avoided if there had been some form of supervision throughout the day. This was an issue that had escalated from earlier in the day, and should have been taken care of right then. Instead, I was the only one there to deal with it when it finally turned into a fight. Hmm...

Lots of travels

I've been really busy the last few weeks. It seems like I have hardly spent any time at home. In the past month I've been to Salamanca, Lisbon and Sevilla. When I am home, the internet in the dorm shuts off a lot, so it takes forever to write a blog and upload pictures. That is one of the complaints I have about the dorm on a list of many. I will leave my issues with the dorm for another post, though.

So, my first trip after rreturning to Spain was to Salamanca. My friend Morgan studied abroad in there, so she was our tour guide that weekend. I was there once before with my study abroad program, but we didn't spend enough time there to explore. This time we went to all of the historical sites: the cathedral, la Casa de las Conchas (The entire outside of the building is covered in shells or 'conchas'), the university, and of course Plaza Mayor. We stayed in a great hostal that had a balcony overlooking the plaza.

Two weeks later we took a trip to Lisbon. The only time I had been there before is when I was flying from Porto to Philadelphia, with a stop over in Lisbon. Our suitcases made the plane, but we didn't. We had to stay the night in Lisbon without clothes, toothbrush or anything. We managed to get by, and actually had a great time eating American food at Hard Rock Cafe and going to a Sporting Club soccer match.

This time the trip was very different. We rode an old trolly up to Saint George's Castle where we had a beautiful view of the city and the river. We ate and went out in Barrio Alto, the old part of the city, and ventured to some small towns on the coast. We tried to have a picnic on the beach in Cascais, but as soon as we got off the train it started to pour. We ended up having our picnic under an awning of a building across from the trainstation. Later, it stopped raining and we were able to walk to the beach, where we all took our shoes off and played in the sand and water for a few minutes. It was still too cold to stay out long, so we headed back shortly after to Lisbon.

The next day we went to a beautiful town in the mountians, called Sintra. High up on the summit of one mountain there is a castle called the Palace of Pena. It is a castle that seems like it is out of a fairytale. The ouside is blue, pink, yellow and purple, and resembles a dollhouse. There was a beautful view of the valley and the Atlantic Ocean in the distance. Overall I really enjoyed Lisbon and would love to go back again to see all of the things I still haven't seen.

Unfortunately, I'm still not able to upload pictures, but you can search for any of the places I talked about to see them online!

It's been a while...

 I'm sorry I haven't written in so long, I was really busy while home, and have also been super busy since returning to Spain. I'll just write a brief summary of everything that has been going on over the past month. First, I want to comment that my trip to Valencia (pre-hospital) was wonderful. It is a great city with a really interesting science museum that they call La ciudad de las ciencias. There are multiple, futuristic looking buildings each dedicated to a type of science. It seemed like we could have been in Star Wars! We rented bikes one day with some people we met in the hostal which was also alot of fun!

My trip home for Christmas was really nice. It was great to see my family and friends. I spent 2 weeks at home and then went to NYC to spend New Years with my friends from college. Then back home for a couple days and two days later I left for Spain.

Dad's side of the family. Mom, I don't have any from yours :(

Now I am back in Badajoz and am getting used to being here again. I lost some of my Spanish while I was at home, so now I have to practice alot! I am making plans for lots of trips now, including Salamanca this coming weekend and Lisbon in February. I also have Mallora, Germany, Denmark and the Running of the Bulls in the works for later this year!

The one about the Hospital...

This post will be dedicated to my hospital stay, since everyone has been asking me about it and wants to know what happened. I met my friend Maureen in Valencia, then we went to Granada, where she is living. I had some sort of stomach bug, but thought that if I ignored it, it would go away, apparently not... I went to get ready for bed one night when I began to feel a lot of pressure in my chest and didn't have much feeling in my left arm. Again, I tried to ignore it, but it was too uncomfortable, and we decided I should go to the ER. When I got there I had to convince the woman in admissions that I did have insurance, even though I have still not received my insurance card and didn't have any other information about my insurance company. She finally just told me to fax her the information the next day...

When I went to talk to the doctor all of my tests came out normal, and they told me to wait for the results of my blood test. I already had started to feel better and thought it was just a fluke and would be able to go back to Maureen's apartment that night. But when my results came back they told me I needed to stay for a few tests because the results were similar to those of a heart attack (Ah!). Everything is a blur from there, I had people poking me from all angles with an IV, another blood test and some other injections, while they were asking me questions about my health history and my activities of the night. Then they took me to the ICU, but Maureen couldn't come with me, and that's when I started to freak out and cry. They put all of my belongings in a bag and handed them to Maureen, telling her she could come visit for 30 minutes the next day. When I got to the ICU the doctor immediately did an ultrasound of my heart and concluded that it was working perfectly, so I still thought it wasn't serious and would be able to leave the next day.

But that wasn't the case. I spent 2 days in the ICU hooked up to machines to monitor my heart and an IV. I could only get up to go to the bathroom accompanied by a nurse. The ICU was dark and lonely, and I felt really out of place being 22 years old and surrounded by people who were seriously ill. I felt completely fine by the next morning, and the nurses kept the curtain closed around me because they said it was too sad for me to be seeing the other older and sicker people there. I also became well know as la nina americana, and one of the nurses called me la reina (queen).

Then I started to hear rumors about "the planta" which seemed like a magical place that I never would actually get to go to. The planta was the normal cardiac wing of the hospital, where the patients can get up, walk around, have visitors, eat real food and not be attached to an IV. I learned that the doctors really enjoying saying, "just one more day". For six days everyone told me "just one more day, then you can go to the planta", or "just one more test tomorrow and you can leave". 

My bed was the only place big enough for the puzzle...

I eventually got to the planta and Maureen came to visit as much as she could. We did a 1000 piece puzzle, played alot of rummy and went for walks around the hospital and courtyard. I really can't express how grateful I am to her for keeping me company, but more importantly dealing with all of my insurance issues between the hospital and the insurance company.  She did absolutely everything for me.

Finally Free

It was certainly an experience talking with doctors and nurses only in Spanish. I found myself paying more attention to understanding the words they were saying than actually being able to internalize and analyze what they were telling me. It didn't help that I don't know anything about medicine or the heart. I also had some medical students do some of my tests. For an ECO two students worked together to figure out how to do it correctly, and it was actually amusing to observe. I met most of my roomate's family, who was a women in her 40's. Her nephews helped Maureen and I finish our puzzle, and I taught them the English words for the things in the puzzle. I also met another 22 year old boy who was there for the same condition as me. He came into my room one morning, handed me a piece of paper and said, "I drew you a picture. I'm in the room down the hall if you want to talk." It was pretty funny at the time and we ended up hanging out in the courtyard for a while. Many of the teachers from school also called me to check in and see how I was feeling. It was really nice to know that so many people were thinking of me.


This entry is getting quite long, so I will just conclude with my diagnosis. I had mioperiocarditis. I'm not exactly sure of the English translation, but it was an inflammation of a small part of the heart called the pericardium, caused by a virus, and is apparently fairly common in people my age. I am completely fine now, and just need to rest for a couple weeks. I am SO excited to go home and relax with my family after such a stressful and strange week.