Springtime in the City

Mom and I got back from Venice last night and then I dropped her off at the airport this morning. She's heading back to Texas and I'm heading back to bed. I'm exhausted! It was kind of a crazy week and a crazy weekend, but we had a great time. More on Venice coming soon.

Shannon just told me about this cool site - Splash Cast - and I've been creating some slideshows to post on the ol' blog here. Here's one with some pictures of stuff that's been happening here in Madrid: baseball game, bowling with friends, eating lunch on campus, and who knows what else. I hope you enjoy!

Shine or Rain

Earlier this week we had some of the best weather we've had all spring. High 70s and warm, it was great. Then Wednesday, the rain came. It cooled off quite a bit and I think it's supposed to rain into the better part of next week too. Bummer that my last bit of time left will be rainy, but hopefully it will clear up soon. Enough of the weather report...

So Mom got into Madrid on Sunday and I've been running her all over town ever since. She's been seeing everything Madrid has to offer and she even took some side trips to Segovia and El Escorial. I think she's having fun; I hope she is! This afternoon we are leaving for Venice for the weekend and I am really excited about that. I keep kind of forgetting that we're actually going because I've been so busy the past few weeks but I'm looking forward to a good weekend.Last Saturday's baseball game was a ton of fun. We had a lot of Spanish friends come out for the picnic and game and I think they really enjoyed it. The food was great and we had a lot leftover. It was fun trying to explain the rules of baseball to them because there are so many rules that you don't think about people not already knowing them. Like when you have to stand on the base and when you can run through the base. And who to throw the ball to. It was fun. We also taught them "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" during our 7th inning stretch and popcorn break. We didn't really play 7 innings, but you know. After the game, we went to Jan's and had coke floats and some people watched The Sandlot. A classic for our generation, but slightly hard to translate to Spaniards. Americans are just weird sometimes.

So this week has been pretty crazy and I'm starting to say goodbye to some of my friends and having some of our last meetings. Our director, Jan, had a little goodbye party for us interns and she made us hamburgers and milkshakes and it was delicious. I had a pickle for the first time in months and I was ecstatic. So I have about a week and a half left now and I'm trying to fit everything in. A few things left in Madrid that I want to see and of course hanging out with friends 'one last time'. I've been having a lot of 'one last times' recently and that's been pretty sad. Or sentimental really.

Well, I have to go pack my suitcase because we're leaving in a few hours and I've packed nothing. Have a great weekend everyone! Love you.

The time is flying...

So only three weeks left here in sunny, beautiful Spain. Hard to believe.

This week we have a volunteer team in Madrid hanging out with us and helping us with some of our events this week. They are a crazy bunch of ladies from Tennessee that have serious southern accents. I love it. Everything they say just cracks me up. It's been too long since I've heard that deep south talkin'.

Monday we had another baking day where we invited our Spanish friends over and this time we taught them how to make chocolate chip cookies. It was a lot of fun and we had a bunch of people show up. Even my roommate and some of her friends came which was exciting and they are just hilarious so I was glad they came. Since they are hard to come by here, we sent all the Spaniards home with some chocolate chips and brown sugar so they could attempt to make the cookies on their own at home. Tomorrow, Friday, we're having another baking day but in this one, the Spaniards are teaching us how to make tortilla espanola! I'm excited about this. I think they'll get a kick out of it too.

This Saturday is our big event for the semester...a picnic and baseball game! We're going to have the all-American picnic foods: hot dogs, baked beans, potato salad, apple pie, popcorn. And then we're going to teach our Spanish friends how to play baseball and maybe some ultimate frisbee. I can't wait! I think it's going to be hilarious to see all of us play, or attempt to play, I should say. Everyone's pretty excited about this week, so pray that people actually show up! We're thinking around 30 or 40 but you can't really tell.

And then...Mom comes on Sunday! That should be pretty exciting. We are going to Venice not this weekend, but the next and I'm really excited about that. Yay!

Berlin Part III

More on our Berlin adventures…

We took a day trip out to Potsdam, a little town about 30 minutes from Berlin, and we saw the beautiful gardens of the Sansoucci Park. This park is huge and it has at least 3 palaces and lots of other beautiful buildings and fountains and statues and thing.

Lindsey really wanted to go to the opera and I thought it sounded fun, so we found some tickets to see Tristan and Isolde, a German opera by Wagner. Very famous. Our seats were on the very last row, but that was not going to deter us. We brought snacks (just in case) and we were chatting with the very nice German couple next to us, when we glanced at the program. It was a five-hour-long opera! We thought it had to be a typo, but the couple next to us said, “It’s only 5 hours? Oh that’s short for Wagner.” Yikes. So it begins. Singing in German, subtitled in German, and practically no action, so I had no idea what was happening. I didn’t even know the basic plot so I was totally lost and the singers were giving me no clue. I fell asleep for about 40 minutes and I woke up at the first (yes, first) intermission. The couple next to us says they are bored and they’re leaving to go see a movie. We decide this is torture so we leave too. So we got some pretzels and chocolate and went back to the hostel.

We went to church on Easter at the International Baptist Church that some friends of Lindsey had told us about and that was great. The kids had a little Easter presentation and we got some chocolate for being first time visitors. German church is great! At the end of the service, one of the members of the congregation, a German man, got up to share a special song on Easter. He was an opera singer and he sang the most beautiful song, O Divine Redeemer. It was amazing. I told Lindsey that this 5 minutes of opera was better than the hour and a half of the other that I slept through. It was beautiful.

Some other random things we saw/did in Berlin:

• We saw a guy in an Easter Bunny suit at the train station in Potsdam so I took my picture with him and he gave us chocolate bunnies. I’m glad I was in Germany for Easter because they celebrate it a lot like we do in the States, with bunnies and eggs and chocolate.
• We had lots of good food while we were there because one of the best parts of traveling is the eating! Besides our delicious hamburgers at Andy’s Diner, we also had some excellent German food, currywurst, burritos and some kebabs. Lindsey had her first kebab experience and she’s a fan! We also enjoyed our fair share of pretzels, German baked goods and of course, chocolate.
• We went to a couple of really interesting museums. We went to the Jewish Museum which is the most visited museum in Berlin and had a ton of information. You could spend a year in there. We also went to the Pergamon Museum and there they had these huge displays of whole Roman altars rebuilt 2 stories high and part of the ancient gate of Babylon. It was pretty impressive and very cool to walk around these exhibits that were life size.

I really enjoyed my time in Berlin and I would recommend visiting it to anyone. I never really thought that Berlin was high on my list of places to see, but it is such an interesting city with so much history and character that it is not to be missed. You can definitely see the difference still between east and west Berlin and it is a constantly changing city. I think if I go back there in five or ten years, it will be a different city.

Berlin Part II

Sachsenhausen

On Friday, we took a guided tour out to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp just outside Berlin. The whole experience is really hard to describe. It’s one thing to read about these things or even see pictures or movies, but to actually stand on the spot where these things happened, is something else. It was intense. Sachsenhausen was not the first concentration camp but it was the first to be built with that intention. It became the model camp, and camps after it were based on it and structured similarly. It was first used as political prisoner work camp but it gradually began to include more people as Hitler’s plan for the Jews progressed. After the war ended in 1945 and the Soviets took control of East Germany, the camp was used by the Soviets as a prison until 1950. They tried to cover up a lot of what went on there and some information has only recently come out about what happened.

In the 60s or 70s, the East German government built a memorial to those killed in the camp, but they only acknowledged the communist victims. They made no mention of the Jews or other people groups there, and they built these very historically inaccurate reconstructions and one kind of disturbing statue depicting the liberation of the camp with a very healthy Soviet prisoner being greeted by a Soviet businessperson and soldier. Our guide told us that most of the East German memorial will be torn down and replaced with accurate replications, but the statue will stay up to show another aspect of the history of that place, the East German spin on things I guess. Does that make sense? I don’t know if I explained that well.

The whole experience is really hard to describe. It’s one thing to read about these things or even see pictures or movies, but to actually stand on the spot where these things happened, is something else. It was intense. I had to keep reminding myself where I was because the whole thing was just unreal.

The camp is located on the edge of the town of Oranienburg and people live very close to the edges of the camp. Our guide answered the question we were all thinking: how could the people of Oranienburg be so close to this and not know what was going on? Or if they knew what was going on, why didn’t they do anything? She said that you have to ask yourself what you would have done. If you had a family, or children. If the government put up a prison (which was what it began as), you would think that people who were in there deserved to be in there for some reason, wouldn’t you? But then, when does it cross the line? And what do you do? It’s hard to think about and I don’t know any answers. I just hope that this never happens again.

Berlin Part I

(Lindsey and I - our reflection in the inner dome of the Reichstag)

So we got back to Madrid around 1 am on Tuesday night and then Lindsey and I turned around and left for Berlin at 8 am on Wednesday! We were pretty much exhausted but very excited. After a stop in Milan, we got to Berlin in the evening and checked into our hostel, which was better than we thought. We walked around our neighborhood a bit and then ate dinner at this place called Andy’s Diner. It’s run by this American guy and I had the most amazing cheeseburger there! With pickles! Oh, it’s been too long. Don’t worry, we eventually got to the German food, we were just so excited to have burgers.

So I won’t detail every little thing that we did because we were there 7 days, and we did a lot! I had the greatest time and I really enjoyed the city. I loved being in an entirely new culture, seeing new architecture, hearing a new language, new foods, everything. Germany is very different from Spain. I love Spain, don’t get me wrong, but it was just a fun change of pace.

We took a bike tour our first day and that was a lot of fun. I had to convince Lindsey to do it but we had a great time seeing the city that way. We saw a ton and it was so much better to have the guide tell us about the places we were seeing then for us just to walk by somewhere, take a picture, and then keep walking. So if you’re in Berlin, take their free tours – NewBerlin Tours. We saw some really exciting things: the Reichstag (where the fire took place that Hitler blamed on the Communists), Museum Island, the Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie (the old border crossing between east and west Berlin), the synagogue that was the only synagogue to survive Kristallnicht/ The night of broken glass, a part of the Berlin Wall still standing, the spot where Hitler’s bunker once was, the Holocaust Memorial, and we even took some lovely rides along the River Spree and through the Tiergarten which were once the royal hunting grounds and now just a pretty park.

(Part of the Berlin Wall)

So much history has happened in Berlin and it was really exciting to see the actual places where these events took place. For example, the Brandenburg Gate. This gate has seen so many important historical moments. Napoleon marched through it and took the statue that was on top of it. Hitler had parades through it at the height of his success. And when the Berlin Wall was put up, it stood in between east and west Berlin in no man’s land. And when the wall fell in 1989, the largest party in the world took place in it’s plaza to celebrate. Amazing!

(The Brandenburg Gate)

Traveling....Sevilla!

Well, let’s go back to the beginning…

First. Sevilla.

Lindsey, Shannon, Tep and I all went to Sevilla for three days at the start of Semana Santa, or the Holy Week leading up to Easter Sunday. We stayed in my friend Kate’s apartment and she wasn’t there so we had the place to ourselves! We took a train at 7:30 from Madrid and got to Sevilla at 10 am. We all planned to meet at the station at 7 and when Shannon wasn’t there by 7, I called her and said “Where in the world are you?” She had slept through her alarm and had just woken up. We were all so afraid she wasn’t going to make the train, but she did! She went from bed to train in a record 25 minutes! She said she told her taxi driver to drive as fast as he could and he laughed at her. Just like in the movies.

So we had a non-stop three days in Sevilla, seeing the sights and watching the processions. In case you didn’t know, Sevilla is known for these religious processions during Semana Santa. Various churches in the city have these brotherhoods that carry these ornate, richly decorated floats of Jesus or Mary through the city. All of the floats leave from their respective churches and make their way to the cathedral and back. Some of the floats are hundreds of years old and some brotherhoods have up to 2500 hundred participants in their church’s procession.

Since we were there on Palm Sunday, we saw a float (in Spanish, a paso) with Jesus depicted riding in on a donkey with palm branches. And we saw a paso with the Last Supper displayed. These pasos weigh tons and they are all carried by men underneath them. They carry the paso at the base of their necks and they take small steps in time to the music and make frequent stops. It’s amazing that these guys will do this for hours because it takes a long time to go from the church to the cathedral and back. My friend Manolo’s church’s paso leaves at noon from the church and doesn’t get back until almost 2 am! That means the procession goes on for 14 hours!

So, we saw pasos Sunday and Monday but on Tuesday, it was raining so the pasos didn’t leave the churches. Shannon and Lindsey had never been to Sevilla so they saw the major sights, like the Cathedral and the Alcazar, while Tep and I hung out and did some shopping. It was so good to be in Sevilla again because I love it so much but it was crazy because there were so many people there. There were people everywhere. But we had a good time anyways. Minus the rain, the weather was nice and the orange trees smelled fabulous. I hope I can go back to Sevilla again one day!

Travels, Travels, Travels...

Well, folks, I got back last night from my 10 days of traveling. We spent all day yesterday traveling from Berlin to Milan, and Milan to Madrid. Lindsey and I spent 6 nights in Berlin and we had a great time. Before that, we spent 3 days in Sevilla enjoying Semana Santa in Spain.

There is so much I want to write about and tell you guys. I think I'll work on updating this thing in installments or something so I can give you all the juicy details. So be looking forward with anticipation to that.

I'll give you some highlights: 5 hour German opera, bike tours of Berlin, currywurst, pretzels, Easter bunny, guided tours, Napoleon, gardens, German food...and so much more!

Talk to you soon!
Love you!