With Friends Like These

Hola!

Goodness! This week has just flown by! There were so many fun things that happened this week...well really it was one thing but it went on the whole week. Festivos de primavera is pretty much spring break, with the exception that there are a lot more traditional customs added to it. The second day, literally every one young, old, adolescent, you name it, was on the street from 11:00am to 9:00pm for one huge botellon which is pretty much an all day drinking fest while dressed in traditional Murcian attire. It was definitely interesting from the perspective as someone who does not drink. Definitely fun, dancing in the streets, culture parades, and everyone just enjoying being with each other.

All of this was really fun, but the best part by far was not the Murcian flair or even the beach, it was seeing my fellow LV's. Yesterday (Friday) I got together, via skype, with my LV class for the day of scholars presentations. Now, I knew already that I missed them all, obviously, but when I saw them all looking so happy to see me, and saying hello and how much they missed me, I got tears in my eyes. I didn't realize just how much I missed them all. The presentations were amazing! I was literally speechless for a couple of them. This day of scholars brought us so much closer together. 

On this side of the world, after I got off skype with my friends from back home, I walked out of my room and my roommates told me to go in the living room. I looked into the dark room first and saw shadows and was instantly unsure but, none the less I walked in with a tiny push from my other roommate, and surprise! My other roommate and 6 of my friends were all standing there, the lights now on, with birthday hats and confetti! Now, my birthday is on September 9th, but they decided to throw me an early birthday party since I won't be here with them to celebrate my actual birthday with them. They made me dinner, and baked me an apple cake complete with candles and m&m's on top! It was definitely a surprise! I didn't even hear them when they were setting up the room.

I am so TRULY blessed to have friends like these. Friends that write postcards, keep in contact, let them be a part of their presentation day, throw early birthday parties and so much more. With friends like these, any person could feel spoiled not by his/her friends doing all these things for him/her, but just by knowing he/she has friends that care enough about her to make him/her feel so special; I know I do!

The phrase, "you never know what you've got until it's gone," may be true in most instances, but in the case of my friends, I don't know what I have done to deserve such beautiful, wonderful, strong, amazing people in my life, but I know just how special my friends are to me. I know with friends like these, it will be very hard to feel alone or abandoned because of how much care and love my friends have for me and I hope they know I have for them. They will always be in my life no matter what; if not physically, mentally, spiritually, I know they are always there!

I love my friends all around the world!

Nos vemos <3

(More pictures from the birthday celebration...)

The real fun begins!

Hola!

This week was pretty fantastic! I saw so many pretty procesionals. My favorite one had to be this one:

This one was my favorite, because the red that you see beneath Jesus on the cross, is hundreds of red carnations! All of the processions had hundreds of flowers on them, but this one was the best arrangement by far (at least in my opinion).

Besides the parades, I did a few other things as well. I went to the beach in alicante which was pretty fun. Most people may not know this, but I actually extremely EXTREMELY disliked the beach. However, since I have been in Spain I have found a bit of comfort in it. Don't get me wrong, I still hate the sand and the water and the combination of the two, but the atmosphere is so relaxing, I think I can get over it at least for a few hours at a time. I was so comfortable at the beach that I even touch the water and did an elbow stand on the shore.

 

As well as going to the beach, I have been working out. I LOVE working out! It makes me feel so good and I love challenging myself to do more in my workouts. It was even more fun these past few weeks, because I have started my own little workout group with a few of the girls I am here with. It is so fun.

To finish off the weekend, I went to the mall with one of my friends that I met here named Amber. She is super cool and shopping with her was so fun! Because tomorrow is Easter, I wanted to get a new outfit for the occasion so we went to the mall and found this: 

It looks way better on, but it is night time now and I have no good lighting (maybe I will post it on Facebook tomorrow since that is what the outfit is for).

Other than that my week has been pretty standard, but don't fret, because next week is vacaciones de primavera (spring break for real)! That's right, no school for a whole other week! 

Let the real fun begin!

Spring Break!

Okay everybody, after waiting all week spring break is here. Here, spring break is not just a four day weekend or a week, it's a whole two weeks! The first week is semana Santa and the second is vacaciones de primavera.

During semana Santa, there are big procesionals that go through the city with statues from the salzillo museum. These statues are huge so you would think they would put them on cars and drive them around...NO. There are about 24 men that carry them throughout the city. They switch people out, but still those are pretty heavy and very far distances to carry them.

Today was just an average lazy Saturday. I woke up at 11, got some corn flakes, and proceeded to try to be productive. I put some laundry away and after that I worked on some GRE math prep. After that went disastrously, anyone who knows me knows, and if they didn't know before they do now, that I am terrible at math! I don't wanna talk about it.

After that I laid down for a bit to relax and I suddenly got a feeling that I should go for a walk at 6:30. So naturally, I recruited my friend Amber and we began our walk. On our way toward the river we heard this drumming. When we got closer, we realized it was two of the statues being carried! We thought they started tomorrow on Sunday, but we were wrong! It was so cool. We got to watch them switch carriers, watch the directors direct them, the religious leaders, and a marching that followed them. Of course, there were costumes involved as well! It was so amazing! I took a ton of pictures.

After they passed us, we began our walk for the second time, right when we turned the corner, there was another statue being carried! It was completely different from the other two! The first two were, Santa Maria de los Angeles (not the place, of the angels) and the other was Jesus on the cross. This next one was Jesus carrying the cross in one of the most elegant robe I have ever seen. All of the statues, except the one of Jesus on the cross, have real clothes on and real flowers surrounding them. The one of Jesus carrying the cross even has real 100% human hair that is touched only by the best hair dressers in the city!

After we watched that statue go by, along with another marching band, we continued yet again on our walk but again we were interrupted by yet another statue being carried! This one was another statue of Santa Maria from a different museum but still with extremely elegant clothing and tons of flowers surrounding her. 

I am so happy I had the urge to go for a walk at the time that I did! It is one thing to hear about the procesionals, but another thing to be able to see them yourself! So amazing!

Tomorrow, I am going to the beach yet again but definitely coming back in time to see the next statues.

I am a day early, but happy Easter to those of you who celebrate it and if not, happy sunday! 

Hasta luego!

The drum line.

The new carriers

The statue of Santa Maria de Los Angeles

Jesus on the cross

Religious leaders

Marchers in training.

Jesus carrying the cross

Santa Maria de Los Angeles

These are only some of the statues, might I add! There are more to come!

Meeting Placido Domingo

This past week has gone by sooo slowly however, that did not stop me from having a new experience.

I had never met anyone famous until this past Monday. 

All week during rehearsals for orchestra, our conductor would always be saying something in Spanish really fast followed by Placido Domingo. I thought nothing of it because I thought he was saying plaza Domingo which is a plaza here in Murcia. I had assumed that we were playing in the plaza, however I could not have been more wrong.

On Monday at the concert everyone was in a frenzy and there were news cameras and reporters everywhere and I thought to myself "this is a little over board for a concert." After we warmed up, we gathered outside with our instruments for a picture. I was close to the middle of the photo when the photographer told me to move over so we could leave space for Placido. I was still confused because again I heard plaza but I moved over without objection. All of a sudden a man in a robe with white carnations came and stood between me and the conductor. He was very nice. He talked to all of us and said how honored he was to be at the university. Then he gave me a pat on the shoulder and walked away.

After he walked away, everyone was telling me how lucky I was to have stood next to him and how I had been touched by a god. I asked them all who he was and they all said Placido Domingo. At that point I understood that that was his name, but I did not understand why he was so special...then we went to actually play the concert. On all of the screens, there were pictures of Placido. After we played the first couple of pieces, there was a PowerPoint presentation and that's when it hit me who he was. There were clips of him singing at the opera and in private concerts.

I then finally realized, that I had just met Placido Domingo world renouned opera singer who is being inducted as a professor here at the university. Talk about shocked! I felt really cool after realizing who he is and honored to have been standing so near to him and to recieve a pat from him. Not quite a touch by a god, but pretty darn close!

After that, the week kind of flat lined with nothing exciting. The only other thing that I can say was pretty exciting was organizing an exercise group for me and three of my friends here. We are gettin swole together!

Have a great week and hope you read this Saturday! 

Out of your comfort zone

I know, I missed last weeks post, but when you read why, I think you will actually be proud of me. Plus where I was, there was no service so even if I had time, I would not have been able to post anyway.

As most of you know, I tried out for the university orchestra. What most of you don't know, is that I made it! I am an official member of the Murcia university orchestra. Also, when I auditioned, I was placed into a small chamber group! I was/am ecstatic that I made it!

Two weeks ago, we started our rehearsals. Generally, the first rehearsal is the most nerve racking one because your coming into a group that have know one another for a long time and you also don't know your skill level in comparison to theirs. Some people don't get nervous by these things, but these types of things are things that I worry about even in my home orchestra.

On top of all of those reasons, the fact that everybody except me speaks fluent Spanish (obviously). After all of those nerves passed, I was able to look past all of these silly little things and just focus on the one thing we all have in common...the music. Music knows no language. Even if the lyrics are not in someone's native language, just the flow and rhythm of the music alone can help the person interpret how to feel or what emotion the artist was feeling or trying to portray when the song was written/performed.

Last week, we had our first concert in Abarán. It was such a neat experience. We stayed overnight in an old school/church. The first night we didn't have any water but the next morning it was up and running. I was really nervous because I was worried that people would not try to include me and that I would not try to include myself due to the language barrier. Yet again, I was over reacting. Everyone was very excited to have me there and were more than willing to help me when I didn't understand. They even invited me to stay up late with them to play games and perform some silly pieces on our instruments.

That Saturday, we had two concerts. One in the morning for the community kids and another in the evening for general public. I enjoyed both of the concerts very much. They were very fun and everybody loved the concerts.

From that weekend alone I feel I broke a little of my walls down. I was forced to communicate and participate and once I got over the nerves I met new people, made a few friends and now I have been invited to play in more concerts this up coming week!

What a great week!

Until next time!

I will be catching up on work for a bit!

Thank GOODNESS for the beach

Hola!

This week has been a bit stressful for all of us internationals in my class. For some reason out professors are unsatisfied with our work that we have been doing.

Our history/literature teacher was very upset with our class last week. For literature we had to do an analysis of a poem that we read in class. A side note: when it comes to analyzing poems or anything really, I can not say it is one of my strong points even in English. I digress, but anyway, the week before we had a discussion about what an analysis was and how to do one properly, which was great because ever teacher wants an analysis done differently. So the next week we turned in our papers and the day after turning them in, we recieved them back and our teacher was very disappointed. No one got 100% but no one failed either but he was very dissatisfied with our work. He began yelling at us telling us we don't care about our work and didn't take time to do the assignment, we just wrote whatever we wanted and handed it in. He told us that we were the worst group of internationals and that we are lazy.

Now, how he got all this information from one assignment I don't know but, I can't speak for everyone in my class, but I personally worked very hard on my analysis. Sure, there were things in there that may not have been exactly what he was looking for, but that does not by any means mean that I did not try my best on the assignment. I am bad at analyses in English as it is so I knew this one was not going to be much easier. If I were lazy, I would not have even bothered to do the assignment. 

The next class was not much better. The next week, we had the same teacher and he proceeded to tell us that all of our teachers had a meeting about our class about how we need to change our attitudes and how they think we are only studying abroad to travel and don't actually care about learning Spanish. The next class we had written and oral expression. This is a different professor and she came in and showed us an example of a badly written paper. It said, "Tengo una hermana, el es guapo y simpactico." For those of you who don't speak Spanish that means, "I have a sister, he is handsome and he is nice." Our teacher proceeded to tell us that this is a mistake that a person in level one Spanish would make and we all agreed. Then she continued and said that we had made those kind of mistakes on our assignments for her.

Pause: I know my Spanish is not that great, however, there is no possible way, that I would make this kind of mistake at my level of Spanish. If I did, I would ask to be sent home because I was probably very ill to even think that was correct.

Continuing, she too began telling us how much we don't care about our work and how our attitudes need to change about our work. She said she could not even grade our papers because we would have all failed and proceeded to hand back our papers. Generally when a teacher hands back a paper, even if it is not for a grade, there is some sort of marking on the paper. In this case, there was nothing. I raised my hand and said, " how are we supposed to know what mistakes we made, if there are no marks on the paper? It is impossible to make corrections to something that when we turned in we thought was correct but you are telling us there are tons of mistakes." So she took them back and graded them in class. Again, I don't know about everyone else, but my paper only had two marks on it and they had nothing to do with the problem she was indicating. According to what everyone else was saying, none of them had that problem either. 

In my head I was appalled (and probably on my face too) that she would even think it was okay to hand back a paper that she said has so many mistakes but has not marked anything on the paper. If when I turn in the paper, We think is perfect, and it gets returned to us after being told it was terrible but there are no marks, how are we supposed to know what our mistakes are? That is a terrible teaching tactic to me. Furthermore, if we had made mistakes like that on our papers, that is a reflections on her teaching skills because she is the one who is supposed to be teaching us how to write correctly.

These teachers are going to drive me insane. 

If I truly did not care about these classes, I would not wake up every morning at 8:30am to go to a bunch of classes that I am 85% sure won't even transfer over because I have taken them already, I wouldn't be doing assignments in advance, I wouldn't be taking notes/participating in class. Yes, there are 2 out of the 10 of us who truly do not care enough to either show up or when they do show up, they are disruptive or high on weed, or both. I understand that sometimes we make silly mistakes sometimes yes, but Spanish is not our first language. If it were, would I be in these classes in the first place? No. 

None the less, I think it is very unprofessional to tell students that they do not care and tell them they are lazy and that teachers are having meetings about how they are only in Spain to travel and need to change their attitudes. Especially when there are only a few students who actually fit the bill.

If they think that me showing up, participating, doing homework, and asking questions when I don't understand in class is me not caring, I obviously don't know how to care about class. If they truly think I do not care about class, I will show them what not caring looks like: I am not even going to bother showing up to class and I am going to travel like they think I do.

Thank goodness for the beach, because if I was not able to get away this weekend and relax with friends, I would have been stressed out for the weekend.

Hasta luego,

Thanks for reading :) hopefully this next week will be better (it is only two days long!!!!)

Putting trust in others

Hello everyone,

I know this is the second week that I am late making a post, but I had so many awesome adventures last week that I was unable to stop and blog about it.

Last week was probably one of the most stressful/fun experiences that I have had so far. Me and three friends traveled. Before traveling we had to start off with the basics of research. We had to research how to get there, how much it would cost, what we wanted to do once we got there, and how to get back. The easiest way to research how to get there, was to have one person look up different methods of travel and report back to the others costs and efficiency. That was the first trust test. We had to trust that the person researching actually sifted through everything and found the best/price reasonable method of travel, in return since they were paying for everyone's ticket, they had to trust that everyone had the funds to pay them back. That also trickled into how much it cost. 

What we were doing once we got there was a little more difficult. Some people had specific things they wanted to see. In one instance, we had a tour guide at the colosseum and after that we wanted to go to Vatican City to see the Sistine chapel. After the tour at the colosseum, we asked the tour guide the best way to get to the chapel and she proceeded to tell us that we would not make it there in time to see it. Then suddenly she had the idea to take us herself to the museum because she could get us in a little after hours because she is a tour guide. We talked it over then accepted the offer, however, we really took a big leap because she had to take us across the city to get there.

Pause...

Four American girls, in a completely different country, who have no idea where they are going...

It would have been so easy to lead us to some back alley and rob us or worse. We literally had our lives in her hands...we took a big step trusting her to take us to some place we had never been. 

Luckily she was very trustworthy and took us where we wanted to go. It was amazing! She took us all around the city and showed us where the pope worked and a ton of different exhibits withing the city then finally we made it to the Sistine chapel! It was amazing! We weren't aloud to take pictures, we actually weren't even aloud to talk, while we were there! It was absolutely breath taking. After the tour our tour guide gave us directions of how to get back to our hostel. She was very nice. 

Also on our travel, I got to hang out with my awesome CFAB Ally. It was her birthday so that is originally I decided to meet up with her. We did so many things. We walked around the city, shopped a bit in the street shops, ate tons of gelato and went to the palace pitti (it was closed, but we were still technically there). We saw the duomo, the burial place of Michael Angelo, and the David statue (the copy). I was sad to only have gotten to see her for 2 days, but it was better than not seeing her at all. 

After the trip was over was when the real trust happened. When at the airport, the plain was delayed an hour, so we were left to trust the pilot to get us to the next airport to get our bus. Unfortunately, that did not work out because we arrived at the airport and had to look up more bus schedules. Everyone had to trust me, because I was the only one who had a phone that could access internet. Eventually I found a new bus. Once we got on the bus, once again everyone had trusted me to let them know when our stop was was, that was harder because we were all tired and slept so whenever they asked, it was difficult but we figured it out. 

Eventually we made back to Murcia in one piece. We got to the pantheon, the colosseum, the trevy fountain, the Sistine chapel, the palace pitti, the duomo, the burial place of Michael Angelo, go sing, and eat as much gelato, pizza and pasta as we wanted.

Rome and Florence are/were amazing!

Oh, we were in Italy...did I forget to tell you that?

Traveling is such a fun experience. Having to trust complete strangers or even the judgements of people you know can be difficult, but you have to do it and once you do, it will hopefully/most likely turn into one of the most enjoyable experiences of your life.

That's all I got as far as fun stuff goes. I went to class, went to a museum, went out with some friends, and played pool with some really cool Spaniards. Life continues to treat me well and I am greateful!

Until next time