Rounding off Week 2!

Let's see...where to begin! I have been keeping myself pretty busy this week which is good, but also meant I put off updating this thing for a while! Remind me not to do that - it is hard to remember back exactly when I did what / my thoughts and feelings and all that good stuff!

Let's just start with Thursday!

I pulled my first all-nighter on Thursday! After supper, Colleen, Tracie, and I got ready to meet some people at 12ish and from there go and hang out...I wasn't planning on staying out very late because I was going to the Naval museum the next morning but I was having so much fun, I just couldn't go home at 1:30. This of course meant that I had to stay out until the Metro opened back up at 6 AM.

We started the night at this diskotecha called the Diskotecha Palacio. This place was really nice. They had projection TVs, a nice sized dance floor, cute booths next to the dance floor and good music! We didn't stay at this place very long, but I wouldn't mind going back some night! When we got there, it was still early for the Club scene so it wasn't very crowded at all. We stayed there until about 1, and then we started to make our way back to JOY, which was the night club that we wanted to go and dance the night away at! There was a huge line to get into JOY so we ended up waiting for a little over an hour to get in there. But once inside the wait was worth it. Previous to that, we were hanging out with Tracie's friends from Duke, but once there we kind of split off from them to go find some of our other friends who were at JOY as well. I couldn't believe the number of SLU kids I saw there, although I shouldn't have been suprised - it is the Thursday night thing to do! Anyway, ended up just dancing and hanging out for the rest of the night! I couldn't believe that the night flew by so fast...and that I made it staying up that late! Of course, my sleep schedule has been completely off since doing that but I had fun, so no regrets! At a little after 5am, we left JOY and found this great Chocolate and Churros place right nearby. Chocolate and Churros seems like the hip thing to do after dancing because the place was crowded! We had so much fun watching them make the Churros and sipping our Hot Chocolate. We felt very madrid native! Anyway, got back on the Metro from there, and went to sleep very quickly after!

Exploration History (Friday Morning)

3 hours never have slept by so fast! I felt like I just laid down when I heard my alarm go off, waking me to get ready to go to the naval museum with my oceanography class! I didn't really have high hopes for the museum but it exceded all of my low expectations by 200 fold!!! Our teacher really knows a lot of naval history (well ocean explorations!) so it was really fun to tour the museum with her because she knows so many stories. I will just tell the highlights to save you from this blog getting astronomically long. (we weren't allowed to take photos at this museum so I will have to do my best to describe it from memory!) One of the first things we saw at the museum was Juan de la Cosa's map. This map is definitely the jewel of the entire museum. Juan de la Cosa was a cartographer who went on Columbus's maiden voyage. He drew the first European world map that included the Americas on it.

This is a web image of the map.  One of the lines running horizontally shows the Treaty of Tordesillas which was signed in 1494 and divided which lands Spain and Portugal agreed to colonize.  South of the line was conquered by Portugal and North belonged to Spain.  This is the longest treaty to still be withheld and "in-force" today (although this really doesn't have any legal implications since Spain nor Portugal control any colonies in the Americas anymore!)  This treaty helps show us why Mexico speaks Spanish and Brazil speaks Portugese!

 

Another interesting artifact of the museum was a rock.  This rock is important because it is the rock that Juan Cortez stood on when he set foot and conquered Mexico for Spain.  At least that is what they claim.... it was carbon dated and is old enough to fit the time period, but you can decide for yourself if you believe it or not!

Another really cool feature of the museum was that it included the models of many of the ships that were sailed during Spain's history.  Back when these huge ships were being constructed, the designers would create a scaled down model of the ship and work out every little detail on there before they built the ship in actual dimensions!  On display they had the model of the Santa Maria (not pictured), which is the ship that crashed into the America's on Columbus's voyage to the New World.  Since the wood from the Santa Maria was used to build the first fort, this is all we have left of it!

It is definitely interesting to hear history told from a Spanish point of view.  For instance, when our teacher was talking about the Spanish-American War, she explained that this was a touchy subject for her Grandparents who were very small or born shortly after this occured.  Spain did not like losing Cuba, their last colony, to us at all, especially when they are not to blame for the cause of the war.  In case your history lessons are coming in a little less then clear, you may remember that we went to war with Spain because we believed that they fired on and sunk our ship the USS Maine, which was docked down in Cuba.  Spain lost the war and Cuba.  Of course now, more and more evidence is showing that the sinking of the USS Maine was actually caused by an internal explosion (bad gunpowder) because the blast blew outwards and not inwards like it would have if Spain really did attack it.  Our teacher laughed about it and said that although it was a big deal to her grandparents, no one cares anymore! 

Rick Steves kinda wrote this museum off, but the history buff in me really ate this museum up!!!  It made me want to go see more artifacts and uncover some more history!!  Good thing I got a chance to do so in Toledo!

Cave Bar (Friday night!)

So after I got back from the Naval Museum, I stayed awake for a little while and just putzed around the room and stuff!  Then I took a 3 hour power nap!  After that nap I woke up hungry - good thing because Nena made us a special supper!  For supper she made us a special Spanish dish which can best be described as a dry stew!  We started out eating chicken noodle soup with Garbonzo (yes they have them here!!!) beans.  It was very delicious.  The main course followed and included Chiorzo Sausage, Chicken, and Stew Meat which we ate seperate from the Garbonzo beans and Cabbage, and the Potatoes and Carrots!  This was all amazing!  Not the way I usually eat stew, but it was delicious and I think would be fun to make sometime when I get home! 

After that filling meal, I went out with some friends to this bar which is decorated like a cave!  There is not really much to say outside of that it really does feel like you are in a cave and it was an amazing night!  The music was really good and I just had a blast dancing and hanging out with the girls!

Holy Toledo! (Saturday)

Finally, I am catching back up with the current day on this blog!

Toledo was absolutely incredible - I thought it was way better then Segovia although I have to warn you that my camera died during the day so I didn't get to take very many pictures as I would have liked too!  Although we spent a lot of the day at the Santa Cruz Museum and the Cathedral and we weren't allowed to take pictures anyway in those places!  Rick Steves made the trip to Toledo today!  Boy am I glad I have that book!  It is incredible - the best tour guide book of Spain I think you could ask for!  I love that he points out what to look for at the Museums and also gives a detailed self-guided tour of the Cathedral.  I had a ton of fun just giving myself a tour of the Cathedral - being able to walk around at leisure and search for the things he mentions in his book!  As much as I could easily bore you with all the interesting things I learned while reading it, I will just have to let you guys read the book sometime because it really isn't worth explaining without the pictures to follow it!

I felt like Toledo was a great city to tour on our own!  It was super cheap to get to and from there and there are so many little things to get find to do!  We had big plans for this city but only did half the things we had planned to do which is fine because Toledo is easy enough to get back to if you wanted to on a boring day!  We went to the Santa Cruz museum which has some famous El Grecko paintings.  I thought his stuff was cool (all religious paintings), but I think I liked Goya's work a lot better.  Grecko's work seemed very dark and he used a lot of the same color schemes.  His painting of the Assumption of Mary was incredible!  I enjoyed looking at that one and reading the Rick Steves commentary that went with it!

After the museum we went in search of lunch - the Rick Steves book talked about having a picnic and getting food from the market, but we couldn't find the market!  Plus we were starving so we ended up just picking a random place.  Lunch cost us 10 Euros each which was a little bit more than what we were planning on but it was a really fun Lunch so it is hard to complain about it!  For lunch, the four of us split a meatlover's equivalent pizza (it had sausage, ham, and hot dogs [frankfurts] on it), a seafood and noodles Paella (not true paella since it was made with noodles and not rice - but still delicious) and carcamudas (meat appetizer with a really tangy stew sauce) YUM!  This was a fun treat, but although I think we could have eaten just as much a lot cheaper if we would have found that supermarket or the sandwich shop we saw on our way back to the bus! 

After this, we went to the Cathedral and spent at least an hour walking around there!  Fun sidebit - there was a baby getting baptized while we were there.  It was kinda funny because people (including us) walked up to it thinking the priest was giving a tour only to realize we were actually witnessing a baptism!  Very neat experience because of course, they said the ceremony in Spanish.  I do have to say that the people's mumbled "I do" responses to the Baptismal Promises sounds the same in both languages!!!  Literally still sounds like a unified mumble!!! 

As I said it is hard to type about this without pictures to back it up, so I am including a photo slide show with brief captions!



When we got back from Toledo we were ready for Supper!  Nena never runs out of ways to spice up leftovers - she has a gift.  We never feel like we are eating the same thing twice because she prepares it differently.  Tonight's soup was all the stew stuff we had last night only this time it was indeed stew!  Who knew Garbonzo beans went with everything!  Following that we had Deviled eggs (made with Tuna), fried Eggplant - I swear the one time we get vegetables she goes and fries them on us - Meatloaf in a tomato paste followed by a dark chocolate hardshell icecream bar for desert.  I checked the scale after I ate - haven't put on any weight but I need to keep a constant eye on that - I think it is her personal goal in life to make sure we leave the table saying "Atope" which basically means I'm full - or in my case, I feel like I just ate 2 thanksgiving dinners full!!!