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the story of the girl who wanted to be peter pan
Oct. 8th, 2007
11:57 pm
I haven't written in this in forever. But today there are three types of milk in my house (skim, soy and half and half) and a bunch of chocolate chip cookies in a big yellow bowl. That seemed like a good thing to tell the world. If you want a cookie, stop by!
Dec. 22nd, 2006
12:40 pm
I know that I rarely write on this thing, but I love the funny little writing things that go around and my semester finally being over, I have a spare moment. Gabe gave me the letter P to write about. So here is a list of all things that start with P and make me happy! If you want a letter, leave a comment and I’ll give you one.
Pets- the idea of opening your home and having an animal live in it is so silly, but so great. My current pride and joy is an Asian Leaf Turtle named Diesel Dyke (or just Diesel, depending on whom I’m talking with). Ms. Katie is her other mother. I took her to the vet today and she was poked and prodded and given a clean bill of health. Other pets I have recently loved or expect to love soon include Katie’s cat, who is extremely crabby and has a funny pouch stomach because she has too much skin, Ella and Joey, who are kittens-turning-into-cat friends, and a pony (!) named Cotton who lives in Maryland with lots of geese (!!)
Periwinkle- a nice color but mostly I like the name, which is hilariously gay and silly.
Passing- I switch lanes a lot when I drive on the highway because I don’t like to be stuck behind slow cars, and I don’t like to make other people wait behind me if I am a slow car. People from Michigan tend to be particularly adept at passing on the right, but it’s better not to make people do that.
Peaches- both the fruit and the extremely raunchy musician.
Polka dots- make everything better!
Photography- I used to take lots of pictures in high school but then I stopped. Still, there is nothing quite like the smell of a darkroom and capturing a shifting moment is a beautiful accomplishment.
Poetry- there are so many endless debates on what makes poetry. To me, I think it is expressing an emotion in as few words as possible. Lovely.
Peace Like a River- this is a stark and beautiful book. It is simple and has both a character with asthma, and lots of religious references.
Nov. 18th, 2006
04:15 pm
This tattoo feels like home and God, and how those are so much the same. Space and loneliness. But also love, fierce and uncompromised. Unconditional. That the world doesn't give a damn about me. That that makes me love it that much more. That the life of this tattoo is completely insignificant compared to the life of the lakes, and people, and the sky.
Oct. 26th, 2006
Sep. 14th, 2006
12:09 am
I bought three plums from Meijer and they are tasteless.
I’ve been ignoring everyone who doesn’t live in Richmond because I am so busy.
I’m terrified of my professors.
My brain hurts.
All of my recent readings have been linked to sexual violence and oppression.
It’s been grey and rainy here.
I have a cough that won’t go away.
My turtle has decided I would be good to eat and keeps trying to bite me.
I’m exhausted.
I have 50 pages of reading and a short paper to do before tomorrow.
I’m happy. Really, truly, happy.
Aug. 31st, 2006
04:14 pm
Because I don't have the time or energy to post about the new amazing pet in my life, I am stealing my roommate's story about her. Here is Katie's great post about Diesel Dyke, who I love very much and just spent a huge amount of money on. I rescued her from some stupid boy who left her in one of the houses near campus over the summer. Just abandoned her in a tiny little tank. She is an Asian Leaf Turtle with a life span of 50 years. She is currently 3, so I imagine we will be together for awhile.
Katie's Post:
Our amazing turtle Diesel Dyke just stalked and ate a live guppy. Diesel is technically Evelyn's turtle, but as long as we are roommates I feel that I can claim partial ownership of the turtle (without having to pay for the new aquarium, hurray). This may be the first time Diesel has tasted live fish, but she knew just what to do. I was strangely proud and horrified as I watched her charge back and forth in the water, finally gripping the fish in her mouth and pulling it onto the large rock on one side of the tank. She held the fish in her mouth and used her front feet and claws to support the sides of the fish until she could literally rip it apart. She trapped the head in her hands and ate the tail, then devoured the rest. I had no idea it would be so brutal, but it's supposed to be good for her to get a combination of live fish and her regular reptile food pellets. I'm sure it was quite stimulating for little Diesel.
The natural world is so fascinating. With the way I feel about meat, I realize I would stop eating it completely if I had to stalk and kill an animal everytime I wanted to eat one. At the same time, I don't feel guilty about eating meat except for very rare occasions. It's funny, I was once a partial vegetarian, and I know vegans, vegetarians, and people who will eat only locally grown, humanely killed animals. I respect all these lifestyles, but I place almost no restrictions on my own meat eating anymore. As long as I don't eat meat more than two or three times a week, I greatly enjoy it.
Still, I'm pretty sure I don't enjoy meat half as much as Diesel enjoyed that fish. She is a surprisingly limber turtle. She can crane that neck of hers out shockingly far! It was exciting to watch her; Ev, Ely and I were totally spellbound. I don't really want to think to much about the vicarious pleasure we derived from watching an animal kill another animal!
I feel like I need to start a baby book, like a new mother. "Diesel's First Taste of Live Meat" would be an excellent starting entry. Other options: "How Diesel Dyke Got Her Name" and "The Day We Moved the Aquarium Rocks Around."
Aug. 5th, 2006
08:51 pm
I got the most beautiful letter in the mail the other day. I have been talking about it nonstop.
Jul. 22nd, 2006
01:05 am
Ani Difranco is pregnant!!! Crazy.
http://www.silive.com/newsflash/metro/i
Jul. 3rd, 2006
01:51 pm - crash
There was a subway crash in Valencia, with more than 30 people dead. I need to contact my friends there and make sure they are okay. I hate how shattering things can be, how scary. I hate that these things are possible.
Jun. 10th, 2006
11:34 am
"American liberals may be blue, but American gays and lesbians are a deeper, darker shade of blue. Living in a country with a two-party system in which one of the politcial parties- the one that just so happens to control all three branches of the federal government and dominates the supposedly "liberal" mainstream media- "activates" its base by beating up on us year after year has left American gays and lesbians feeling battered and imperiled. Straight liberals are blue; gays and lesbians are black and blue" -Dan Savage
May. 23rd, 2006
10:02 am
Back in America. In Ann Arbor the buildings all look brand new, the streets are big, there aren't very many cars (but they are big too!) and my house is a mansion. I ate both a bagel and a hamburger yesterday and they were amazing. Now I have three months here and then back to Earlham. I think adjusting to this country will take some time, but so far I'm doing okay.
Mar. 29th, 2006
05:05 pm - grrr i hate being sick
I’ve been terribly, maddeningly sick for the last week. Being around smoke for five days during the fallas -from fireworks, pertardos, the mascletas, cigarettes and of course the fallas themselves- kicked my asthma into gear, and I’ve been having a hard time breathing. I actually went to the hospital because I had been on an arsenal of drugs that should have made me better and instead I was getting worse. At the hospital they gave me two breathing treatments (oxygen masks), checked my heart with fancy electrodes because apparently it was going to fast, and x-rayed my chest (I get to keep the x-rays! As faulty and frustrating as my lungs are, it’s still pretty cool to have two huge photos of them). Luckily they didn’t find anything terrible wrong with me, other than just usual asthma shit. But they upped my medicine -inhalers, a steroid and antibiotics- which is super strong and has some unfortunate side effects, like making me shaky, jittery and weak.
Then I was feeling a little better asthma-wise, although really tired from the medicine, when I got hit by a terrible stomach bug (second worst I’ve ever gotten- the worst was in Tanzania when I was sixteen) that knocked me out for a couple of days and sent me back to the hospital, this time in Barcelona because we were there on an excursion. Sadly I was so sick that the only part of Barcelona I saw was the hotel room and the hospital. I’ve been home resting and trying to recover for a few days now. I’ve been going a little stir crazy because I can’t really do anything. Reading makes me nauseous so I’ve been listening to Harry Potter and the Prisionor of Azkaban on my ipod, which has its merits but is getting a little tiresome. Hopefully I can go back to school fulltime soon. Also annoying is that there is a field trip to Granada this weekend and now I don’t think I can go because I’m just too drained. Bah humbug.
Mar. 28th, 2006
04:18 pm - life through flames
The fallas were amazing and crazy. The city got so full; it seemed like someone blew into it like a balloon. Usually Valencia has about 800,000 residents, and there were about 1.5 million tourists from outside the city. I’m not claustrophobic and big crowds have never really bothered me, but tripling the population of a city for five days is enough to make anyone a little edgy. My falla is right near my apartment, on a little side street that is nicely isolated from the downtown. So I only went downtown twice. Both times were crazy. Walks that would normally take about 15 minutes took an hour or so. There were people from all over the world and it was fun to hear them speaking in all of their languages. I was tempted to say things to people speaking in English, because I haven’t spoken to a stranger in English in months, but I never did.
Here are some things I did during the falla. I can’t figure out how to load pictures onto this website, but you can go to my fallas website, www.arrancapins.org, for pictures
The first day of fallas was just spent trying to get the damn thing done. We pulled the columns into the street to finish them, and a bunch of people worked on putting the base together. I left that night at about 2:30am, but a lot of people stuck around until 7:30 in the morning, which is when the whole thing was finally up and complete. It was so exciting to go there the next day and see it put together. I hadn’t been able to visualize what it would look like very well, but it turned out really well, sort of a miracle given the lack of organization during the whole process.
The next day some men cooked dinner in the street on open fires and we ate together and listened to a band play (which played blues music sung in Catalan!). We also set off fireworks, and I got to light a box, which was a new experience for me. Now that the work of the falla was done, people were a lot more relaxed than I had seen them before. The main part of dinner was good- sort of a pasta dish with hare. But for an appetizer, one of the men cooked moro, which is basically fried pig’s face, ears, and tail. I decided to be brave and try it. I didn’t like the face because it was pure fat, and I really don’t like how animal fat tastes (except, as my father pointed out, in bacon). The ear was so repulsive to me that I nonchalantly dropped it on the ground after one bite. It was fatty too, but what made it worse was a layer of really tough cartilage in between the two strips of fat. By this point, I felt that I had done my civic duty and so I didn’t try the tails. For the brave of heart, here is a picture of the bowl of pigs’ tails before being cooked. They straighten out once of the pig and are bare and fleshy, like really long fingers.
On Friday we had a parade around the neighborhood and I was in it as a person lighting pertardos. These are like big firecrackers. First they shoot up four big sparks and then explode with a huge BANG! I, along with about 7 other people, wore a big red tough outfit to protect myself from sparks and held the pertardos at arms length in a piece of wood build like a nutcracker. You light the pertardo, watch the sparks go off and then after it explodes you let it go. Everyone at the falla was so excited that I was going to be doing this, and so worried that I might be scared (which I was), that I was given directions in both Spanish and broken English about 7 times. It was a great adrenaline rush to have it explode so close to me. Also during this parade there was a giant that some adults paraded with and all of the kids got under this big cloth dragon and weaved it along. There were also some high school kids playing traditional Valencian music.
On Saturday I went with my friend Eva downtown to watch part of the ofrenda, which is where the fallas (not ours) march in a parade wearing traditional outfits to give flowers to the Virgin Mary. The parade was beautiful and the best part was the kids and babies in little tiny dresses and outfits. On Saturday we also met up with my friend Alexa, who I went to high school with but hadn’t seen in two years. She lives in Granada now and was in town for the fallas with a friend. It was great to see her. She came with us to the ofrenda and then to the falla, where we had paella for dinner. About six different people cooked different types of paella. I helped Eva some with her paella, which was traditional Valencian- chicken and rabbit. I definitely need to learn how to make paella before I come home.
Sunday was the last day of fallas and the busiest. At 1 we had a parade around the neighborhood wearing traditional (18th and 19th century) outfits. Because Eva is pregnant, she couldn’t wear her dress (they are super tight around the waist), so she let me borrow it. These dresses consist of three skirts, a blouse, a corset-type vest, jewelry and an elaborate hairstyle that involves fake hair being braided into a twist. It took about and hour and a half to get the dress on and the hair done, and was by far the most elaborate thing I’ve ever worn.
After the parade we all ate together and then had a globario, which consisted of popping 2,500 balloons. First the kids who were too little to hold needles stomped on 500 balloons that had been taped to the ground. Then we went in lines popping the rest of the balloons all in quick succession. It was loud and exhilarating. The idea of blowing up that many balloons just for the purpose of popping them is so decadent and lively. Afterwards the coordinator the falla told me I should start a globario in the states. I told him I couldn’t really imagine anything that wasteful and loud and plain fun being as accepted in the states. “Oh,” he said, turning to some onlookers, “she lives in such a strange country. The vote for Bush and everything”.
Sunday night was the big climax of everything- the burning of the fallas. First the falla infantile was burnt. This falla is smaller (infantile means child) and had been done by an artist, so I didn’t feel any particular connection to it. It also didn’t burn very well. First they string the fallas with dynamite, which made the whole thing go up in a glorious bout of flames. But those flames died out pretty quickly, and people had to shove the pieces around to help it light on fire.
The big falla, the one we built, was a different story. I don’t really think I have words to describe how it felt to watch it burn, but I’ll try. The falla was strung with both dynamite and pertardos, so when they first lit it, it caught fire and shot up beautiful sparks. Unlike the infantile, it burnt well and quickly. The food column went first because that had the most Styrofoam, which burns at breakneck speed (doing god knows what to the environment). Watching the column build was like watching it unbuild itself. We had first painted the columns, then covered them in images, they added the Styrofoam sculptures, and as the column burnt, that process was reversed: the sculptures fell away, then the images so the column was plain and then the column itself was burning. After the food column, everything else caught fire. I felt that in that moment I understood the fallas in a way I had been unable to before. The fallas are about the start of the New Year, which for the Valencians is really March 20th, the first day of spring. They are about rebirth and a type of renewal that can really only come with destruction. There is something so primal about fire, and about art, and there is something so tragically human about learning to let things go. We had worked so hard on that falla, and watching it burn, I understood the beauty in creating something just for the purpose of destroying it. I didn’t cry watching it burn, but my chest felt tight and I felt connected to Valencia in a way that I hadn’t before. It wasn’t really a spiritual experience, because it didn’t bring me to a higher or different world- it sent me spiraling right into the pit of what it means to be human, about how sad and wonderful and complicated it is to live knowing that one day you have to die and let go of everything and acknowledge that you are small and meaningless and that that’s okay.
Mar. 13th, 2006
05:19 pm
The fallas starts on Wednesday, but the city is already starting to go crazy. Some of the sculptures have been put up (not ours because it’s still not done) and people have started setting off fireworks all the time on the streets. One thing that’s popular thing right now are these firecrackers like exploding snaps from the States, but a lot bigger. You throw them on the ground and they make an enormous amount of noise. Once exploded right next to be yesterday and I couldn’t hear out of one ear for a few minutes. That was a little scary.
The biggest noise maker of the month is the mascleta, which happens at 2pm everyday from March 1-March 19, which is when the fallas end. The mascleta is a demonstration of the biggest firecrackers the city has. It lasts for about 5 minutes, takes place in the main square right outside town hall (my impression is that the city actually pays for the mascleta), and is a rhythmic serious of bangs finished with the loudest collection of firecrackers I’ve ever heard. There are some lights too, but since it happens in the afternoon, they don’t really matter. The emphasis is completely on the noise.
Food is a big part of the fallas. Stands have popped up all over the city selling chocolate (basically very thick hot chocolate), churros (deep fried dough) and buñuelos (pieces of pumpkin in dough and deep fried). There are also smaller stands selling popcorn (which, Grama, you’ll be surprised to find out is actually pretty good), corn on the cob, salted nuts and cotton candy. The cotton candy here is incredibly cheap and they make it right when you buy it. These stands make the city smell delicious and are very tempting, although I’m trying not to eat too much from them! Every night during the fallas themselves, my falla cooks and eats dinner together. There’s a gazpacho night and also a paella night, where I’m going to learn how to make paella! I’m not sure what we eat the rest of the nights because I have a program but it’s in Catalan so I can’t read it.
The schedule during fallas is a little worrisome, because it is a complete reverse of a normal week. Our falla’s activities start at 8pm and go until 5am. Then people sleep during the day. I just hope I can adjust to and from this schedule so that I don’t get sick. Schools (including ours) don’t have classes during the fallas and a lot of people don’t have work. Since my Spanish parents are both teachers, they get the time off, although by this point I think the fallas have lost most of their charm for them.
I’m excited for the festival to really start and if I have any energy left when it’s over, I’ll write about it here.
Feb. 21st, 2006
05:05 pm
Sometimes it is good to herald your own strength. Here the things I am dealing with right now, all for the first time:
Living in a foreign country.
Being across an ocean from everyone who I love and everyone who loves me.
Complete immersion in a different language.
Taking eighteen credits of academic classes.
Recovering from a major breakup.
Living with a random family, in which I’m not a family member or a friend but I’m not really just a boarder.
I think that taken separately, any one of these things would be hard to deal with, and the fact that I am balancing all of them without having a mental breakdown makes me feel like a superhero, if a small time one.
Needless to say, I am really glad that my parents are coming to visit this week. They get here on Thursday and I can’t wait to show them around the city and just be with them. There’s nothing like family.
Jan. 31st, 2006
06:45 pm
Warning: this is very long. But somebody had better read it, because it took me a hell of a long time to write.
So. The fallas. The fallas is an enormous festival that happens every March in Valencia. It lasts for five days, and is nonstop. School is cancelled, and I think most jobs take a break too. The fallas started as a small political demonstration about 150 or 200 years ago; as just a few people in a neighborhood getting together to burn small effigies of political figures they didn’t like. For a while it was illegal because political leaders thought it was too anarchistic, but it kept happening throughout these years. Now, there are about 350 fallas groups, which are designated by neighborhood. Each group (with the exception of mine) hires an artist to build a huge float. The themes vary hugely: there are political fallas, religious ones, ones based on whatever you can think of. There are parades and the floats are put on display for five days, during which time there is basically a nonstop party in the streets. On the night of the fifth day, the floats are strung with dynamite and exploded. Apparently the noise from all of the explosions is so loud that covering your ears doesn’t make any difference at all, and you have to keep your mouth open or else your eardrums will pop.
During the years of the Spanish dictator Franco (1939-1975), he allowed the fallas to continue, but gave them a more religious spin. He started a lot of religious traditions that the fallas follow today: like going to mass together, praying to the saint of the city, and offering flowers to the Virgin Mary. There is also a tradition (although I’m not sure when this started) of the fallera mayor (which means, roughly ‘best person from the falla), which is sort of like Miss America. Each falla chooses one woman to represent them; she is beautiful, young, very skinny, and wears an extravagant dress. I’m not sure what the falleras mayores do during the year, but during the fallas there is a contest between all of them to see who will be the Fallera Mayor de Valencia. Kind of like being Miss American instead of Miss Michigan.
Each of the participants in the Spain program are given a different falla to work with. We go to their meetings, have specific contact people, and have a falla to call our own during the festival. My falla is called Arrancapins, and it is very unusual. The program director here says that all of the fallas are basically the same with the exception of mine. After the death of Franco, the young people in my falla decided they wanted to go back to the more political and less religious roots of the fallas. So they stopped doing any of the religious things, stopped doing the fallera mayor contest because they thought it was sexist, and started building the float on their own rather than hiring an artist to do it for them. Needless to say, this is a great falla for me to be in.
The theme of our float this year is ‘pleasures and desires,’ and it’s in the shape of an old Roman temple. There are columns in a circle which each represent a different pleasure of being human: travel, nature, sex, food, literature, politics, and games. We’ve been building the columns and just started to cover them with representative objects last night (I helped cut up foam to represent French fries and sewed eyes on stuffed fish for the food column). There are pictures on their website, www.arrancapins.org. The writing is all in Valenciano (which is basically Catalan), so you probably won’t be able to read it (I can’t), but the pictures are updated frequently and will give you sort of an idea of how the project is coming along.
So that’s that.
Family life is different in Spain than in the United States. The gender roles here are what I think of as very 1950s. The mothers do everything. They cook two meals a day, because the families eat lunch and dinner together. They clean up the house, change everyone’s sheets and towels, empty all of the trash bins, and wash, iron and fold all of the laundry. If someone isn’t going to be home for a meal, the mother makes them a sandwich to take, and packs it in a little bag with fruit and napkins. My father makes orange juice once in a while, but that’s about as far as his involvement in anything domestic goes. Having grown up in a house where my father does all of the cooking and my mother handed me a bottle of laundry detergent when I was about seven, this is, to say the least, a little strange. The kids don’t do anything to help except to clear their plates at dinner, and they stop at the plates: they don’t help get anything else off of the table. My mother seems shocked when I clear off the bread or the water bottle. I cleared her plate once and I thought she was going to have a heart attack. And the kids in my program say that all of their families are like this; the program leaders told us it’s just how things are here.
Kids live with their parents until they get married, or until they finally decide to move out; a lot of times this means that people in their twenties and thirties are still living with their families. While they’re living at home, the kids usually have full time jobs. But they don’t help their parents pay rent or pay for food, and their mothers are still catering to their every want. One of my friends here has two sisters in her house who are 21 and 25, and they are extremely picky eaters, so their mother makes them their own meals separate from the rest of the family. At any rate, the young people here end up with a huge amount of disposable income, which is partly why Spain has such a vibrant nightlife. No one invites their friends over to their houses, because the houses don’t belong to them; they belong to the parents. But they have plenty of money that they aren’t spending on anything, so they can afford to go out and get drinks all the time.
Before I came here, my brother told me about some people he knew who had lived in Spain and returned to the States with serious drinking problems, and I can see why. It’s very normal to start drinking here at about 11 in the morning, when everyone has a break from school or work for a coffee. It’s common for Spaniards drink their coffee with whisky, or vodka and whipped cream. Then they drink vine or beer during lunch, at 2:30 and during dinner at 9:30 or 10, and maybe go out for a couple of drinks with friends after dinner. Weekends and weeknights. I don’t know if the concept of alcoholism exists here, but if it does, it must be a much higher amount of drinks than in the US, where doctors ask if you drink 3 or more drinks a day. In my falla, there’s an open bar, and the other people in the falla encourage me to drink. It’s not exactly in a peer-pressure sort of way (these people are in their forties and fifties), more just that they find in incomprehensible that I would rather drink water, and so they assume I must be too shy to ask for alcohol. If I ask for a bottle of water, they say “you don’t even want a gin and tonic?” as if that’s the lightest drink they can imagine. I had a coffee there the other day, and the coordinator of the project told me I should try it with whisky, because that’s what they do in Spain. When we eat dinner together, I usually have wine (a small cup, rather than the large cup followed by a large cup of beer that they drink), but during the last meeting, I had my Nalgene full of water because I’ve been sick and I try to only drink water when I’m sick.
“What are you drinking?” they asked.
“Water,” I replied.
“Just water? There’s nothing else in there?”
Bear in mind that a Nalgene is not a small bottle. It holds 36oz of liquid, so it would be a very large thing to use to carry any clear liquid other than water.
There are some exceptions to this, of course. My parents only drink during weekend lunches, and then only a small amount of wine, although they have an impressive wine collection (but it’s nothing like my real mother’s collection, which is a force to be reckoned with).
Also, my three month old brother here has started to talk. He’s not saying anything in Castilian, or Valenicano, or English, but he’s definitely talking in his own little language. I don’t know what he’s saying, but he says it a lot and it seems to be very important. This is a very exciting development because it’s the first time he’s made noise that isn’t screaming. And it’s all happened just within the past couple of days. It’s amazing how quickly babies change.
Jan. 19th, 2006
05:16 pm
so i got to the school for a meeting two hours early because 24 hour time is really confusing. but the computer lab was open, so here i am, writing.
some random observations:
1. walking here is a whole different story than walking in the us, especially in people friendly ann arbor. red lights are not really taken seriously by any of the cars or motercycles; if they don´t feel like stoping, they just drive through them at breakneck speed. also, if they find it convient, cars stop or even park in the middle of intersections. but you never know when they´re going to start again. drivers don´t really stop before pulling out of hidden driveways, and they never look to see if there are pedestrians before turning left. i´m getting better at navigating, but i´ll be very surprised if i make it out of here without being hit by a car or bus.
2. Two of our professors are mother and daughter, and they both seem kind of crazy. The mother, who teaches Cultural Texts, reminds me of Mad Eye Moody from the last Harry Potter movie. Her eyes are fine but she gets this kind of crazy look on her face and opens her eyes really widely when she gets excited. I don’t really know how to better explain it. We also spent the last two class periods (three hours!) talking about a two sentence story called Horror Story, which, roughly translated, goes like this: “The women I loved has transformed into a ghost. I am the place of her apparitions”. I think this gives new meaning to the phrase ‘beating a dead horse’, and makes feel bad for ever critizing Mary Lacey for spending a class period on one poem. The daughter, who teaches art history, hates to get her hands dirty so much that she when she has to use the chalkboard (to write or to erase) she puts on white cotton gloves. i would have thought that by this point she would be used to chalk, but no.
3. my falla is the greatest! more explination later.
4. i had this delicious drink earlier today called a bonbon, which is a shot of espresso with sweetened condensed milk. very tasty. coffee is cheaper here than in the us.
5. i miss everyone.
Jan. 16th, 2006
01:29 pm
Yesterday we visited a monastery from the fifteenth century, which was huge and beautiful. I walked around and thought about the monks that had walked in the same place more than five hundred years ago. The church’s altar and sculptures were not made of wood, as most are, but rather of inlaid stone, of all different colors. The altar was huge and magnificent. The stone was carved into pillars, crosses, and a huge sculpture of a saint killing some kind of terrible creature. It was gorgeous, but in a way, very alien. I can’t imagine having enough faith in anything to feel that I had to undertake such a huge project; can’t imagine building a cathedral or a monastery or carefully picking out stones and carving them and fitting them together so perfectly that they looked painted. There is a lot of religious art in the city, and while some of it is a little bloody for my taste, I find it inspiring nonetheless. Because although I don’t think that I’ll ever love God the way that the artists did, it is somehow comforting that someone did.
I also ate rabbit for the first time yesterday. We had paella for lunch, which is a very typical Valencian rice dish and can be eaten either with shellfish or meat (ours was with chicken and rabbit). It’s been hard adjusting to how heavy the food is here. We eat meat at every meal, and everything (including the vegetables) is cooked with lots of salt and oil. But the paella was very good. I thought the rabbit was okay but a little tough; it wasn’t as good as the chicken. Also I had seen a live rabbit in a market earlier (for sale as a pet; the rabbits for sale as food are dead), and I kept thinking about it. Somehow I can’t work up as much guilt about eating a chicken as a rabbit. It’s strange to think that I was a vegetarian for five years; it doesn’t really feel like a part of me anymore. At any rate, I don’t think I really could be a vegetarian here, not without seeming very rude and/or vanishing from lack of protein.
Our classes start tomorrow, but I have been very busy with orientation, and walking around the city all the time (for at least a couple of hours a day). Still, it will be nice to start classes and figure out what they are going to be like. This semester is going to be so busy. We have five classes and a field study (for 18 credits). Then on top of that we have a couple of cultural activities and/or excursions each week after classes. I guess at Earlham that time would be taken up by Dance Alloy and FTDF for me, so it’s not like it would be free anyways. But those are breaks from academic work, whereas this is just more, albeit interesting, work. Hopefully I will still be standing (and speaking Spanish!) at the end of the semester.
Jan. 11th, 2006
04:27 pm - ¡Estoy aqui!
Valencia is full of couples, as, I suppose, is every city after you´ve just had a relationship end. But it is also full of stone buildings, beautiful parks (the main plaza has a huge water fountain!), and kids. I like the way it smells. It´s a clean city and there don´t seem to be as many smokers as in lots of cities, although right now I´m drowning in smoke at the internet cafe, because the people at the computers next to me are both smoking.
My family here is nice. The parents are friendly, although it´s been a little hard for me to break out of my shyness to talk to them much. The mother, Maria, is a professor of dance history, and the father teaches English and Spanish to high schoolers. But Spanish here is not like English in the US; it´s grammer, not literature. In fact, to my great horror, I don´t even think they take lit classes here. At any rate, the girl, also Maria, who is fifteen, isn´t taking lit. Today she was wearing a shirt that said ¨Rodhe Island,¨ which I thought was pretty funny, and was even funnier when I told her I had a friend who went to school in Rhode Island, and she didn´t know what it was. The boy, Guimilla (I think that´s how you spell it), is 12 and reminds me of my cousin Lou, who is also 12. I watched The Simpsons with them today, and man, nothing kills the humor of the Simpsons like changing all the voices so that they sound the same and Bart sounds like a fifty year old man. There is also a baby, Marcos, who mostly cries a lot but is learning to smile and is very cute when he does.
The apartment is beautiful and sprawling. There is a very long hallway, on which are four bedrooms and two bathrooms (which, for some reason, are right next to each other. Go figure). At the end of the hallway are three rooms that are all open to each other: the kitchen, the dining room and the living room. I didn´t think I was going to have my own room, because apartments in Spain are usually smaller, but I do and it´s great. It´s a small room but it has a bed, a bookshelf, a window and a desk, so that´s everything I need.
It rained all day yesterday, so I stayed inside and slept, read, talked with the family some. I was (and still am) pretty homesick, and tired from traveling for about 30 hours and the 6 hour time difference. But today it is warm and there isn´t a cloud in the sky, so I walked downtown to the main plaza, which is surrounded by huge, beautiful old buildings and has a big flower market and some benches to sit on. On my way to the plaza I passed a small park that was built around an old hospital. I´d like to go write there sometime. THis cafe is on a little street inbetween the plaza and the hospital park. I also found the street my school is on, although not the school itself, and it´s only about a fifteen minute walk from my apartment. OUr orientation starts tommorrow and goes through the weekend until Tuesday, which is when our classes start. I haven´t seen anyone else from Earlham yet, because I flew in by myself and was the first to arrive.
Last night at dinner we had orange juice that Fernando, the father, made from fresh oranges with this little juicers machine. I told him it was wonderful and he seemed a little baffled by how impressed I was. There are orange trees on the streets here, like how we have Maple trees at home. And they have huge bunches of oranges right now, but I haven´t picked any because I suspect that´s not really okay.
So that is my life as of now.
Jan. 3rd, 2006
09:28 pm
"Once in my life I knew a grief so hard I could actually hear it inside, scraping at the lining of my stomach, an audible ache, dredging with hooks as rivers are dredged when someone's been missing too long." -Leif Enger, in his book Peace Like a River
I suppose the reason that great authors exist is because they are able to express how we feel, but more articulately than we ever could.
2005 was, for me, confusing. Consuming. In some ways, amazing. I was able to choreograph and dance as much as I wanted, and I learned, and I loved my friends so much it hurt. I read a few amazing books, and learned about great new music and discovered baking bread and finally started to write more. But the ending of it was terrible, and the beginning of 2006 has been, for the same reason, no better. But as Amelia said, this year has to get better because it can hardly get any worse.
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