Preparing for Las Fallas

On Friday, after classes, I am going to Valencia with a large group of my fellow engineers. We have a three-day weekend and it so happens that there is a huge festival in Valencia. The festival is held in honor of St. Joseph's Day. It is massive and takes over the whole town. There are huge firework displays everyday, floats consisting of papiermâché sculptures, concerts, bullfights, parades, cooking competitions, and street parties. The grand finale of the festival consists of burning all of floats at midnight. Unfortunately, we will not be able to witness it because we have class on March 19. 

I'm excited for this weekend, but I'm also kind of nervous. I've heard that this festival is crazy. There are going to be tons of people everywhere. The fireworks displays are deafeningly loud and so powerful that they literally shake the city. I think I'm going to need earplugs!

El Escorial

This past Friday, I went to El Escorial with my civilization class. San Lorenzo de El Escorial is a town about 45 kilometers northwest of Madrid. Half of the kids in my civilzation class don't have class on Fridays because they aren't in the engineering program. They met at the Institute at 1:00 pm and took a charted bus to UAM, where they picked me and the other engineers up after our classes. The drive to El Escorial took around an hour and a half because of traffic. When we finally got to the town, we toured the Royal Seat of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, which is a palace that was built for Phillip II of Spain. The tour lasted around two hours. Honestly, I didn't really enjoy it that much because I was exhausted after a busy week of school. Also, the weather was very gloomy; the sky was grey and the weather was cold and very rainy. However, I was impressed by the size of the palace. It contains a school, a library, a church, and of course living quarters for the families of the monarchs that one resided there. Today, the Royal Seat of San Lorenzo de El Escorial is open to the public for tours and it no longer houses Spanish royals. After the tour, we all loaded back onto the bus and headed back to Madrid. The trip was short, but it was enough for us to be able to put into context the history we've been learning about for the past month.

Things I've noticed...differences

I apologize for being the most inconsistent blogger ever. These past two weeks have been insanely busy and not in a fun way. School has been intense with homework, exams, and three hour long bio labs everyday for the past two weeks. I love studying abroad but it would be so much better to just be abroad, without the studying.

Anyways, I've been meaning to write this post for almost two months (basically since I got to Madrid). There are so many differences between the US and Spain. Some big, some small. Having never been out of the United States before I came to study abroad in Spain, I expected to experience some sort of culture shock. That really hasn't happened but it has been fun noticing all the differences between the United States and Spain.

• In buildings, the ground floor is considered zero, the basement is negative one, and what would be the second floor in the US is considered the first floor.

• Street signs are located on the sides of buildings, not near the traffic lights.

• Everyone smokes. In Colorado, not that many people smoke. In Boston, a lot of people smoke. In Madrid, EVERYONE smokes

• Cars are much nicer to pedestrians and actually yield, unlike in Boston

• The Metro is really nice. It's clean, efficient, user friendly, and has good coverage of the city

• Old ladies wear big, long fur coats. Not just some old ladies, all old ladies.

• You must ask for the check at a restaurant otherwise they'll never bring it to you

• Another restaurant one: you tip, at the VERY MOST, 10 percent. Waiters are actually paid normal wages and don't live off tips like in the States

• Dog poop everywhere. It's like no one cleans up after their animals.

• You pay for water here. In the States, if you ask the waiter for water they'll bring you a free glass of tap water. In Spain, they'll bring you a bottle of water unless you specifically ask for tap water

• There are roadside gas stations. They are literally located on the sidewalk and cars pull up in the right lane of the street to fill up.

There really are so many more but I'm too exhausted from these past two nightmarish weeks to think of more. I'll post a part two with more differences in a few weeks.