March 23, Day 65: And Then Suddenly It Was Summertime

There are no two ways around it: this past week has been absolutely gorgeous. I've spent several hours the last few days perched in my windowsill filling out apartment rental documents and reading Canterbury Tales, carefully gathering up what little sun my dainty Irish complexion can handle. Actually, it got a bit too toasty for me on the sill, but then sun just followed me around the room so I gave up and went back to my usual sunbath spot anyway.

The last few days - well, more weeks - have been a complete torpedo of activity, with postponed Spring Break posts, photos to edit, homework to read, sleep to catch up on, trips to plan, finances to document, finances to worry about, drafting a Rome post, unpacking, laundry, Castle Cabaret auditions/production meetings, helping organize the scavenger hunt (honestly not as much as Ali!), packing for Belgium, and finalizing the house for next year.

Wow, I haven't actually looked at the whole to-do list yet. Maybe it's good that I'm considering another weekend at home.

As of now, the big Belgium weekend is finally upon me. There are no words to describe how excited (yet anxious) I'm feeling right now. I looked at the ISB virtual tour and while some things looked familiar, there were a lot of things that seemed very different. Honestly, if I don't see the red cacti in the ECC playground, things are gonna get sassy.

Concerning Spring Break, I paused the tape way back at the end of the first day of Madrid. I'm going to rewind my life back to then, hit play, kind of fast forward to now, and just generally complicate this VHS metaphor. Aaand... <<

(Pause for Scavenger Hunt, dressup and 80's themed American Night)
Oh wait, now it's 3am. Oops!

Anyway, Saturday morning in Madrid, 3/3/12, our plans said to go to some museum around the city and be guided through with a teacher or two. However, at the last minute our professors decided to switch things up and go to the higher quality museum, so there we went - only to find out that voices above whispering level are not permitted in the museum.

Hmm.

A class lecture about art in an art museum that doesn't allow speech?

Hmm indeed.

We finagled our way through that little loophole by studying pictures and discussing them in the stairwell with Dulcia and Dojna as our chaperones. Honestly, I'd give my right arm for those two to chaperone my group through the Sistine Chapel, if not a whole leg along with it.

Lunchtime was a mixture of emotional tension, oblivion, and ignorance on several parties' part, but we found a good place with €2 sandwiches, so that at least worked well. Unfortunately, lunch was both preceded and followed by various argumentative and biased two-person discussions that I hadn't been interested in joining to begin with; that particularly tense episode was followed with some chocolate-dipped churro and yet another Loading of the Buses.

With that, we drove to a monastery about 45 minutes from the center of Madrid, perched at the top of a small village. For some unknown reason, said village had a surprising American twist - as Chris B said, "Hey guys, we could've stayed in a Best Western!"
"Oh, so is today the day we just say whatever stupid sh** pops into our head? Hey guys, I could punch that baby! Hey guys, I could kill Mel! Hey guys, I could cut Bekka's face off!"

...Let's just say that Emily was a bit fed up with the various tidbits Captain Obvious had thrown around throughout the day.

Monastery/religious "retreat" for some Hapsburg King

The monastery itself was gorgeous but all in all a bit time-consumptive for me, as I was stressing about getting back to the city in time for the required 20th Cent. Art Music concert. There was really no need to stress, as Lucy reminded me, but honestly there were a few interpersonal things upsetting me that were best expressed through general stress. It happens. We got back a bit ahead of schedule anyway, so I got more dressed up and then found  the promised land a block away from our hostel. The promised land, for those who don't know me, refers to that magical, caffeinated land of Starbucks. Mocha frapp yes please.

Taryn, Emily, Jen, and I figured out the location of the concert hall; despite all of my time worries, we were the first of our group there and a good half hour early. I know, rare for me, but it was also nice to get a bit of chill time. The evening followed a very interesting concert. One of the pieces had a cello solo that was kind of like listening to free-association cello thought; it was very experimental and weird but I actually loved it. The whole thing ended with Firebird, which was of course magnificent, but the conductor's shirt had come untucked during the night and was frequently showing off his rather corpulent figure. A bit distracting, honestly.

Later that night, I wound up having KFC for dinner (horrible I know but it was so good), and then we went out to one of the biggest clubs I'll probably ever be in - Discotheque Kapital, 7 stories tall with a different atmosphere/music selection on each floor. Again, my favorites were the hiphop and radio hits floor, but I met someone out on the hiphop floor who seemed to take a liking to me. Then... well, my history professor said the day before leaving, "One rule about Spain: Don't kiss Fascists."
So, while I and this Madridian Whomever were dancing, I stepped back for a second and...
"Wait. Are you a fascist?"
"Uh uh uh"
"... Sorry, I need to go."

Granted, it was also 4:30 and we had a wakeup call at 8. Yeesh. Chris, Emily C., and I went to grab our coats from the checking counter, only to find that the Florentine scarf I'd stuffed down a coat arm had vanished. Chris ethpañoled into the bouncer's good humor, but the counter-ladies' two checks around the coat room yielded nothing.

Sigh. -1 accessory.

If Kapital was one of the biggest clubs I'll ever be in, the next morning is probably one of the hardest ones I'll ever have (although the last night in Barcelona can definitely match it). We were again tromping through a museum, but this time our chaperone (again Pieter) was actually familiar with the work. It was pretty fantastic, not to mention how I have a whole new respect for museums after my basic art classes in high school. We saw the Garden of Earthly Delights, among many others, and while at first it was gorgeous by the fifteenth minute the Hellish scenes were even making me a bit queasy.

After the museum, Lane, Emily, Alessandra and I went off in search of food - no seafood, for Emily, which was a little tricky in Spain - and eventually found a small place with surprisingly good and filling food. We're not sure what drink Lane ordered though; she asked for a white wine and got what we're pretty sure was a shot of sherry. Oops. Dessert was another Starbucks trip, where again the barista completely botched my name:

Bilanca, I mean honestly

 We all reconvened for the next activity, only to find that both it and the next morning's activity had been scratched. Welp, gelato-in-the-square time it is then!

 I had a glorious two-hour nap, and that night the ALEMLB group struck out in search of tapas and mojitos. We found a great place around the corner from the hotels and chatted until closing time; the bartender, who seemed to like us, gave us shots on the house of some Baileys-ish drink, served with whipped cream and supposedly drunk through a straw. We didn't know that last bit until later. Oops.

Honestly, I should just rename this my "Oops" Semester, because honestly "oops"s are happening a lot more often than "living at the castle" seems to be going.

The Duke toured us around the giant Madrid park, stopping only to watch Scott squirrel-whisper, buy us ice cream, and let us all go wild on the playground.

Entrance to the park

Obviously we are all very mature

Lunch was paella and pain au chocolat avec chocolat here

We all mobbed the Mercado for lunch and all in all it was lovely (for almost everybody), but things got more dramatic when we went to "grab the bus tickets before shopping." That's an epic tale in itself and practically deserves its own movie, let alone blog post, but for now I'll wrap up and at least pretend to do some homework before passing out. By now I'm two weeks ahead of Madrid and comfortably in Miss Kate's house post-wolfing around with a Hug Mug full of tea, so staying up won't be for long.

Until then, bon nuit, buona sera, and buenas noches!
-B

March 15 (Day 57): I Gots A Lotta Esplain' To Do

So first off, I really wanted to update this the night before we left for Madrid with thoughts like "I wonder what Spain will be like" "hopefully the travel will go well" "I'm nervous for the new culture but really excited" "I missed the sun, this should be nice" and "wish me luck getting up at 4am, oh god"
but then there was a jazz show and I took a few extra hours to pack so that didn't really work out. (OOPS)


As of today, it's been a mere 13 days since that fateful morning call and it feels bizarrely normal just to be sitting back on my bed after experiencing so many different things. Obviously my culture shock was not quite that of the 12-person group who ventured off to Morocco, but the Iberian Peninsula was plenty unusual for me this time around.

While there are far more accurate words to describe my packing experience, for now I'll settled on these: unnecessarily complicated, unnecessarily stressful, and (as it turned out) partially unnecessary. I almost made the mistake of bringing three dresses; the two I brought were more than enough, and the two pairs of pants were only really good for traveling. Even then, just one would've been fine. #learningexperience

Getting to Madrid was fairly uneventful, mostly because I slept for nearly the entire bus ride, but we got to the airport an hourish early and meandered around the front area, blearily sipping at coffee or hot chocolate until the meeting time. Apparently there was a Starbucks that I had no idea was there, but I keep leaving my *$s card in my desk so no lattés for this diva :c I wound up visiting a Starbucks in Madrid and Barcelona and having to pay real money - NOT making that mistake in Rome! Seriously, what's one little piece of plastic in a whole bag? Trust me, the gold paint does not add any weight whatsoever, it's totally worth it

The plane ride was a series of naps interspersed with chatting around with surrounding students and generally ignoring the three Dutch ladies beside/behind me, all of whom were equally as blonde, bespectacled, and excitedly exhausted as I was that morning. Alyssa turned around at one point to comment on some joke or another, but instead of her planned retort whispered "BEKKA. YOU LOOK LIKE A FAMILY."

We actually kind of did though

Part of the discussion during the inexplicably long descent (seriously, they had us shut our stuff down to "prepare for landing" and then a good 35 minutes later we finally hit the ground. Come on, EasyJet, I mean really) consisted of me passing around my blue glasses because apparently seven different people wanted to try them on "because they're square blue glasses!" Twenty house points to 12 year old Larisa for picking those out; you have single-handedly made me more interesting to tired classmates.

On the way to our hotels, yes hotels no s in the middle thank you very much, Maria - a fellow MCR and crazy-hair-color fan, although she actually has the pink/purple hair that I have since foregone - talked life stories, trip plans, blogging, and whiskey sours. The buses actually dropped us off on the wrong side of our square, so we were all frantically padlocking our bags outside the buses and watching each others' backs going down the square.

We were split into two hotels and didn't actually know who had which building/room until arrival: all of the boys were in the first hotel, closer to the Plaza del Sol, with some of the girls in that building as well. The way they split it up was pretty inexplicable, but I was in the second hotel closer to our meeting-place square with Mel, Alessandra, and Najah.

POP QUIZ!
Once we all bottlenecked and shuffled our ways into the bag storage room, the first activity on the Madrid list was:
a. Bathe
b. Nap
c. Eat
d. Multi-hour walking tour

Thankfully, the answer was C. Lucas led the way to and through a surprisingly filling lunch of tapas and delicious beer, but I surprisingly do not have a picture of it.
Actually that's not surprising at all, because we were all cranky and ravenous, but still. Minus ten foodie points.
Lunch was spicy potatos, garlic shrimp, and cured ham. At some point a bread basket landed on the table and you'd honestly have thought we were vultures.

The walking tour, led by Pieter of the Rijksmuseum, proved remarkably less inspiring than the Amsterdam tour - granted, that was Chester Lee, and nobody can best Chester Lee. At anything. The city is beautiful though! We saw a lot of gorgeous buildings in a very even temperature (finallyyyy), stopped in a square filled with terrifying squeaky-voiced Mickey/Minnie Mouses, fake baby carriages complete with screaming babies, and bizarre goat/yak/nightmare creatures that clacked their mouths as we passed.

Then, they finally let us into our rooms.

So.
Here comes the fun.

My phone had started roaming from the minute we landed in Spain, so I'd very cleverly turned it off. Then, a few hours later, I went to turn it back on. This delightful little piece of machinery requires a PIN to log into.
First try: nope.
Second try: nope.
Third try: nope PIN BLOCKED INPUT PUK NUMBER
.... "well that's just bloody brilliant now isn't it"

My PUK number lives under my bed. My bed in the castle. At this point, a castle with multiple countries between itself and I.

PERFECT.

That night, Mel, Lucas, Chris and I went out for dinner - no free food this time, boo - and I had my first McDonald's of the semester.

Obviously no pictures for this one. (shaaaaame)

That night was Lars's birthday, so we all scattered our way around Madrid to eventually meet up in a flamenco bar. The bar was actually having a show when my group (Lucas, Thea, Jacquie, Mel, Erin, Emily, and myself) showed up, so we scooted back up the road dodging drunk singing men to a little bar. A mojito later (which absolutely paled in comparison to the U Sudu potion), we tried the flamenco bar again.
Bouncer: "Are you all over 18?"
Lucas: "Yes."
Bouncer: "Okay go in"
Lucas: "................... he didn't ask for ID. I LOVE SPAIN!"

There was very little actual flamenco dancing going on, more like yet another Emerson nightlife invasion, but the sangria was good and we all had a fun (but not completely exhausting, for once) night out.

SO before anyone gets their knickers in a twist about the other 9 days of my break, I promise - updates are on the way. However, now I have Monkey Ethics until 4:15, a taxi ride from 4:16 to 5ish, and a flight to catch for Rome. It's never a boring life here, that's for sure!

In the next installments:
The rest of Madrid, including the museum tour with Dulcia (!!!!!) and Club Kapitol
The Epic Commute to Barcelona
Barcelona from Tuesday morning to Friday morning
The Separate but Equally Epic Commute to Porto
Porto, Portugal and all of its perfections, plus some imperfections
and
Rome!

...Ay dios mio that's a lot of writing to do.