La Feria

I'm going to take a radically different approach in telling you all about the day spent in Jaen, starting with exploring the city and ending with the Feria de San Lucas.

I got on the Erasmus bus at noon with Juan, Justine, and her friend Nolwenn, another French Erasmus chick, after a difficult night including only 3 shaky hours of sleep. Felt like a wreck.

Me on the bus ride. Some of my hair has migrated.

We got to Jaén and decided to ditch the Erasmus group, as exploring a city with 80-ish people is far from ideal. The city was lovely, packed with fairgoers, and all throughout were mini-performances.

Flamenco costumes were not limited to that adorable pair of children, and women in the traditional dresses were everywhere. With the atmosphere, the beautiful city, and a little caffeine, it didn’t take long for my frown to turn upside down.

We wandered upwards and got treated to this view:

 

After some exploring, we went back to the cathedral to meet up with the group for the 40-minute trek up to the Castilla de Santa Catalina. My tiredness started to catch up with me, but I got a little more caffeinated and waited it out.

At the top, we did some mountain modeling and watched the sunset.

Although beautiful, it was freezing at the top with the windchill, and as my clothing choice evidences, I haven't quite gotten it into my head that it isn't summer anymore. I wasn't too bummed when we started our trek down to the fair. On the way down, I started talking to this guy...from Iraq!

 

I had so many questions for him. We ended up having an awesome conversation. He's from Baghdad and is working on his Master's in engineering (forget which type) at UGR. We then got to the fair, which was huge, colorful, and packed with people.

 I was really fond of the Cala lily light archways.

It was split up into different branches with categories such as food, bar/discoteca tents, flamenco tents, and games and rides.

Spain is funny about its religious celebrations. They range from traditional to an excuse for a no-holds-barred, massive party.

Juan and I got wrapped up in our conversation and ended up separated from Nolwenn and Justine. For us, the first order of business was food. We sat down at this food tent and spent a while pondering which overpriced fair food seemed like the best deal. We'd almost settled on a hamburger and migas, a typical dish in Murcia and the plate in the bottom left of the picture below. Last minute, when the waiter comes over, we decide, screw that, we're getting something more authentic, so Juan asks the waiter if they have pescadito frito variado (mixed fried fish) for two people. Of course, the waiter says, and goes off. We look at the menu again and realize that the dish is 30 friggin' euros. So I wanted to smack Juan in the face, but it was pretty funny and the food was delicious, so I sort of forgave him.

 Mean muggin'

 We met back up with Nolwenn and Justine, then headed to the rides. Juan explained this ride as an integral part of his childhood: you go in circles on the train and a clown smacks you on the head with a broom, and if you manage to steal the broom from him, you get to keep it and can ride a bunch of events free.

 

 Whatever works, Spain.

This one was a little different: the clown gave out balloons and little toys throughout, and Juan failed at stealing the broom. Yet due to his enthusiastic effort, the clown gave it to him at the end. Unfortunately, the free ride rule seemed to no longer apply. My Hello Kitty balloon thing had a disconcerting warning at the bottom, advising "Washing hands after play." Wow, thanks for the lead poisoning, China.

 We gave away the balloons to some very happy children, who might get lead poisoning.

 The next stop was the discoteca section. As we waded through the trash and broken glass built up from a week's worth of partying, I was grateful for my leather boots. The scene, although lots of fun for a mature, responsible woman of 20 whole entire years such as myself, made me appreciate that teenage partying, although far from limited in the States, is not quite this sanctioned.

 

This 80s band from Murcia was playing in one of the tents. I wasn't too into them, but just another example of what was up.

 

When Juan and I bought mojitos, we got free hats. A little loosened up, we wore the ridiculous straw creations with absolutely no shame. At one point, a guy asked me if he could borrow it to take a picture. Of course, I needed one with him too.

 

Humor>how bad I look here.

The four of us spent the rest of the night dancing at various tent-discos and passing around the hats.

That is, until around 2, when the exhaustion started kicking in once more. Juan went to hang out with another friend, and the two girls and I went and sat at a table for the last hour and a half until the bus took us back to Granada.

On the walk home from the bus station, for the first time this year, I saw my breath condense in the early morning Autumn air.

It was so cold I grew even more facial hair.

Filosofizin'

This past week, I've been preoccupied with school. I dropped my Power in the Modern Age class, leaving me with my final four, and I'm increasingly realizing that it will not be as low key as I'd thought. After I get back from winter break, I'll feel the crunch of papers, projects, and finals all right away, unless I actively fight the illusion of infinite time that this side of Christmas creates. For example, contrary to the stereotype, studying ancient philosophy to the level of being able to explain it myself is significantly more challenging than getting stoned, eating Cheetos, and wondering if our universe is a grain of sand under a giant's fingernail. Despite the challenging levels of abstraction, it's fascinating to see the conclusions of the first people who tried to explain the world through deduction, without invoking mythology. For example, Thales, one of the very first Western philosophers (~500 BCE) concluded that all matter was one substance at its core, which he determined to be water. We can laugh, or we can consider: while all matter is not water, all matter is atoms. Although misguided, he proposed the idea of the fundamental building block. Given the lack of modern science, even some Greek myths show surprising, albeit anthropomorphic corollaries to the modern theories, such as the idea of an initial vague 'Chaos' from which the earth, the oceans, the sky, and everything else, including the gods, and later humans, was born. It's not quite the Big Bang, but the Chaos concept seems closer than the far more recent Judeo-Christian Genesis.

I don't have much to tell about my other classes, except for that they're going fairly well despite the general wow-this-will-be-harder-than-I-thought. But tomorrow I'm going to the Feria de San Lucas in Jaén, the capital of an adjacent Andalusian province through an Erasmus trip. The bus leaves at noon tomorrow and gets back in the wee hours of Sunday morning, so I'm sure it will be quite the adventure...

The other day I had a great conversation with my mom (Hi Mommy!) and I told her that I didn't feel like I was, ah, changing, the way study abroad is supposed to do to you, although I told her that now, the idea of moving across the country for work or whatever comes after seems totally reasonable whereas before it seemed super scary, almost unimaginable. According to her, that's a big deal. So it has been noted :)

10/10/11

What I've been doing:

--Going on my second wind. I didn't post for a little while because I was on a bit of a low and didn't have much to say, but I'm in love with life here all over again. All of it. From my walk up the hill to class, to my stop at the fruteria to get some veggies for dinner, to the October weather in the high 80s, to laughing-until-I-cry conversations with my roommates or coming home to find that one of them made fresh-baked crepes, or pasta, or lentils...all the daily routines are wonderful, not to mention the extraordinary, the day trips, the longer excursions. It's all a dream.

--Checking out Camborio for the first time, and shortly, the second. It's a discoteca in the hills of the Sacromonte, and like all the homes of the neighborhood, the club is built into a cave and the terrace is right across from the Alhambra, which is lit up beautifully at night. This gives it a very, very cool ambiance.

--Going on a really neat hike in the Sierra Nevadas out of a town called Monachil with my roommates and a whole load of my French roommate's friends. The hike went over a bunch of hanging bridges over the river, then to an area where we had to walk along a narrow ledge above the river while rock formations stuck out, minimizing the ledge-space to occasionally scary levels, then up to some amazing views of the Sierras. I was pleasantly surprised by the group's willingness to scramble up sketchy ass slopes and peaks for random summitventures. We also passed an absolutely killer rock climbing area replete with anchors suitable for both lead and top rope climbing, and with walls that looked doable for a beginner but entertaining enough for more advanced climbers. MUST...FIND...CLIMBING PARTNER! We also had a hysterical conversation with an eccentric Spanish grandma who asked me in slightly more vulgar terms if I was of the heterosexual persuasion, after being told that I didn't get it on with either of my male roommates.

--Going to class. As of today, I've finally had all my classes! I'm super excited for sociology of education because I get to do my presentation on problems facing teachers today and can draw upon my international experience. In anthro of religion, my group will present on Hinduism. The Power in the Modern Age has a professor with some very obnoxious postmodern-type ideas, such as that there are no errors in history and that I only think there are because I'm from the US. Still, I like the people in the class and the discussion-based style breaks up the monotony of lecture. That alone might make me stay in that class over intro to traditional music, which has so much potential but is made awful by an hour and a half of theoretical lecture per class before we actually get to see/hear anything.

--Workin' out. Gym membership, spin class, wassup?

--Learning that the Modern Age is not our current, very modern age, but in fact the time from the end of the 15th century to the 18th. Dammit, history, stop making me look dumb.

What I've noticed recently: it's becoming hard to back-translate situations, phrases, and words into English when recounting stories, and that Spaniards' relaxed attitudes about class also manifests itself in a lack of self-consciousness about speaking up, answering professors' questions or asking their own, and giving a lengthy, genuine response if that's what they feel like doing at the moment.