Open Letters

An Open Letter to the Alicante Bus System

The recipient.

Hello New Friend,

Why can’t we just get along?  I realize that I am new to the area and that everyone from Spain actually seems to understand you, but why do you make it so difficult for me?  Each day I wake up, shaking off my nightmares from the previous day’s indiscretions you committed against me, hoping to reach the point in our relationship where you stop seeing me as an outsider and welcome me as one of your own.  I take time each morning, carefully observing your routes, planning the moment where I will see your massive form loping around the bend and you will stop in front of me with that characteristic “hissss” and I will board you without feeling the sting of your rejection.  But every day, my careful preparation goes unnoticed as you find a way to thwart me yet again; your strategic diversions of my attention so hurtful to me like your bite on my hand.  As our time together is quickly dwindling, I fear I’ll never fully understand you before I leave Alicante, nor you, I.  So please take this letter as a peace offering, that you may recognize my deeply rooted good intentions and replace your obvious feelings of malcontent toward me with those of warmth and affection.  I cannot bear being your toy mouse any longer.

Sincerely,

Alicia (The American Girl)

An Open Letter to Borja’s Cat, Zipi

The recipient.

Hello New Friend,

Why can’t we just get along?  I realize that I am new to the area and that everyone from Spain actually seems to understand you, but why do you make it so difficult for me?  Each day I wake up, shaking off my nightmares from the previous day’s indiscretions you committed against me, hoping to reach the point in our relationship where you stop seeing me as an outsider and welcome me as one of your own.  I take time each morning, carefully observing your routes, planning the moment where I will see your massive form loping around the bend and you will stop in front of me with that characteristic “hissss” and I will pet you without feeling the sting of your rejection.  But every day, my careful preparation goes unnoticed as you find a way to thwart me yet again; your strategic diversions of my attention so hurtful to me like your bite on my hand.  As our time together is quickly dwindling, I fear I’ll never fully understand you before I leave Alicante, nor you, I.  So please take this letter as a peace offering, that you may recognize my deeply rooted good intentions and replace your obvious feelings of malcontent toward me with those of warmth and affection.  I cannot bear being your toy mouse any longer.

Sincerely,

Alicia (The American Girl)

Meet Me Halfway

As today marks completion of half of this crazy Spanish adventure (yup, it’s been 44 days already peeps), I have some fun metacognitive updates on my self-actualization for you! 

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Aren’t you so excited!?

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As well as a few statistics from my trip thus far!

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Just wait, it’ll be grand.

Before we get to all of that excitement, let me just tell you a little story of how Alicia got her groove back.  

And no, it’s not THAT kind of groove.  Get your head out of the gutter, Dadddd.

Believe it or not, I have been known to whip up some pretty tasty treats in the past, as well as present them in a fashionable and completely domestic princess-esque manner.  Those ice cubes looking a little plain?  Let’s jazz ‘em up with some lemon slices!  Need to add a little ‘umpfh’ to that plate of cookies?  Throw a doily under it!  Don’t have any time or energy, your friends are on their way over, and something may be burning?  Make those intricately designed, time consuming, highly unnecessary but oh-so-adorable place cards anyway!

Aside from my reign as Domestic Princess of my kitchen, I also serve as the Queen of Biting Off More Than Thou Can Cheweth Land.  Hence, pierogies.  And after the Great Pierogi Debacle of 2011, I was feeling less like Martha Stewart and more like I had just made my generous Spanish family “Polish Surprise” for Easter, with the surprise being that your mouth becomes cemented shut.  So in desperate search of a comeback, I went with a pair of good ol’ standbys: jambalaya and marinated meat.  You may be thinking, “Alicia, how oh so dull of you.  What ever happened to fancy stuff like cornish game hen, and flounder, and roasted red pepper risotto??  Standbys...pssshhh.”  Say what you will, but thanks to the recipes of my mom and Mama Rees, and a little creativity at the grocery store, I got the Martha magic back in me.

 Now, I shall treat you to a peek inside my head with a healthy dose of metacognition and a view into the inner-workings of la chica americana.  I don’t talk about how I’m “doing” so much in my blogs because, contrary to the amount of times I make the posts about myself, I really don’t want it all to be about me.  So...with that being said, I’m doing great!  

I wake up every morning and look at the Mediterranean Sea and think of how very lucky I am.  I spend my days touring around Alicante, going to the beach, reading, studying Spanish (sometimes), and doing what I’ve come to love the most, which is writing posts about my (mis)adventures.  Now halfway through my trip, I’m tanner, a little bit fatter (damn you chocolate croissants!), and a lot more broke than when I left, but I’m happier.  I feel more independent, more confident, and more excited about my future than ever before.  I’ve met great people, eaten amazing things (and a few strange things too), seen beautiful places, and I still have a month and a half left.  Of course I miss home and all of you wonderful people that encompass that word in my mind, but I’ve got you all with me here and there are still adventures to be had.  

So to complete today’s post and to highlight some (hopefully) interesting factoids about my trip so far, I’ve compiled a list of statistics about Alicia in Spain.  Here are the running totals thus far:

Days in Spain: 44

Blog posts written: 15

Number of words written: 10,859

Minutes of video taken: 54 minutes, 46 seconds

Number of photos taken: 2,067

Estimated number of loaves of bread consumed: 11

Net weight gain/loss: + 4 lbs.

Pairs of shoes purchased: 5

They look so innocent here.

Average inches taller than most Spanish men I am: 2-3 inches

Percentage of music played on the radio that is American: roughly 75%

Estimated number of times I’ve been to the beach: 20

Average amount of time it takes me to say one sentence in Spanish: 2 minutes

Favorite Spanish food so far: Almond gazpacho, Amparo’s lentil soup, and Fanta Límon of course.

Least favorite Spanish food so far: A kind of fish I had in Sevilla that had an almost powdery consistency...blach.

Favorite tourist attraction so far: Catedral de Santa María de Sede in Sevilla

Least favorite tourist attraction so far: The nudie beaches and the wildlife that inhabit those...parts.

Absolute favorite thing about España so far: A few things; the people; all the buildings are old and gorgeous; the sunshine.

Least favorite thing about España so far: All of you aren’t here to enjoy it with me!

Goals for the next month and a half: Learn wayyy more Spanish, make friends with Borja's cat, Zipi, who I'm pretty sure is really a small bear, secure a summer job at home, do more traveling here, and learn how to drive a stick (a manual car, Daddd, quit thinking so dirty).

So there you have it!  Halfway through la chica americana in España!  But where will she end up next!?

Stay tuned...and thanks for reading,

Alicia

I Stand Corrected

I have a thing for grammar.  For the English language in general.  I love words.  I love combinations of words, and great writing, and detailed storytelling.  With creativity and the conventions of modern English, we produce tales of great beauty or terror, happiness or depression, mystery, rights-of-passage, fantasy, or even, say, the travel experiences of an oftentimes clueless American girl in a foreign land.  

In the midst of the Great Hack Attack of 2011, when many of my friends and family received emails and Facebook messages from “me” claiming “I” had been mugged in London and needed a questionable amount of money to get “home,” I had quite a few people tell me the way they knew it could not have been me: the spelling and grammar were less than stellar.  It overjoyed me to hear that my friends and family were sure that, even under duress and in a state of panic, I would adhere to the correct rules of our written language.  You guys know me so well.  

So by knowing this little quirky (nerdy) factoid about me, it may not be difficult to extrapolate that, at times in my life, I have had the tendency to correct people when they speak...incorrectly.  “Are you sure you “sawed” it happen?  No, you didn’t “seen” it happen either, sorry.”  Eventually, I realized that people generally don’t like being interrupted and corrected mid-story, or speech, or lecture, and this nasty little habit came to a stop.  

And now here I am, in Spain, slowly and painfully trying to speak a language that’s, well, foreign to me, and I get corrected ALL. THE. TIME.  Mid-word, mid-sentence, I’m pretty sure Borja’s even corrected me mid-thought.  And when these events occur, I can’t help but think I hear:

Alicia, it’s God.  You had it kind of rough for a while and so now I’m going to give you a present.  Go to Spain.  Have a great time.  Finish working on you so you can come home and be the strong girl I know you are.  I’m giving you this heaping plate full of destiny, but juuuusssstttt so you remember who’s really in charge, here’s a tiny sprinkling of Karma to keep you in check.  Let’s not forget whose Boss around here.  Oh, and quit eating the chocolate-filled croissants.  

(I have trouble listening to that last bit).

So in the hopes of improving my handle on the lingo, I've now begun Intermediate Spanish with zero prior Spanish instruction and exactly 40 days immersed in the culture.  And, let me just say, it isn’t so bad!  Of course there were times in class where I’m sure the professor peered out into the group and saw me with a very tragically confused look on my face, but I know I wasn’t alone.  I’m pretty sure I saw the same expression flash across the faces of all my classmates at one time or another.  But do you know what really made me happy about the course?  Even though it’s only been a few months since I finished my degree, being back in the classroom was like coming home again.  

(Hold on, I just need to push my glasses back up my nose and work out some figures on my calculator).

But seriously, I’m going to make a big effort to rock this class and hopefully come home with a nice strong base of Spanish under my belt.  That way, when I start a Spanish course or two in the fall...I’m sorry but I just can’t help myself...I'll have something to work with.  

So before I leave you to head outside with my bag of books on this beautiful day in Alicante, I just want to relay a few anecdotes about some vocabulary mix-ups I’ve had here in Spain.

The Spanish word for “summer” is verano while “vegetable” is verdura.  A couple weeks after I arrived, I told José Antonio that I like to go to the beach in a vegetable.  He still reminds me of that often.

“Better” in Spanish is mejor, while “woman” is mujer.  I constantly confuse these two, and after a lunch with my host parents in Granada when I was feeling very confident in my ability to understand them when they speak in español, I told them that I believe my Spanish is getting a woman.  José Antonio just about cried laughing there.

Finally, the best story of all is when I unknowingly spoke my first dirty words in Spanish.  After one of the processions of Semana Santa, José Antonio and I bought a big bag of porras which are basically gigantic churros.  We put them in the kitchen, or the cocina.  Now, apparently, while a porra is a delicious treat of fried dough, a porro is a marijuana cigarette.  And while cocina is a kitchen, a cochina is a promiscuous woman.  Now of course I didn’t know about these “other” words and when Amparo, my host mother, arrived home, I confidently told her that the joints were in the whore.  José Antonio and Amparo continue to tell that story in great detail at every social gathering and whenever they introduce me to any of their friends.  “This is Alicia, she’s our American daughter, and you’ll never guess what she said!”  I’m very lucky they both have such a great sense of humor.

If you guys need me, I’ll be in the library, happy as a clam.

Thanks for reading,

Alicia

I realized shortly after publishing my post on Sevilla that I forgot to include this photo, which is my favorite that I've taken in Spain so far.  

Please notice the sign.

A Doozie of a Post

Take a bathroom break now.  Maybe prepare some snacks.  Possibly gather some canned goods that you can use as rations while reading this post.  I've got a lot of ground to cover and this post is a biggie.

On Thursday night, while still in the infinitely ongoing preparation phase of la boda, José Antonio and Amparo sat me down, and with the help of my kind, wonderful, thanks-for-always-translating translator Borja, told me that they were taking me to Sevilla.  They wanted me to see more of Spain than just Alicante (which of course I agreed with) and they had friends who were going to be in the city for a festival.  More on this extremely low-key event later (and by "low-key," I mean insane).  The real excitement about this trip was that we would make the six hour trek from Alicante to Sevilla on Sunday morning, the day after the wedding.  This meant two things: I wouldn’t have time to write a blog post about the wedding before I left (Sorry, guys!) and I’d be hungover in the car for six hours.  Ugh.

After a very scenic journey during which Amparo and I mostly slept with our sunglasses on and José Antonio drove holding his eyelids open, we safely arrived in Sevilla and checked into our hotel.  Around 8ish I donned my stylish high heels and ventured out into the many-a-cobblestoned streets of Sevilla with Amparo and José.  Eventually I will learn that high heels and cobblestones are not an ideal combination for walking MILES around a city and will become smarter about my shoe choices.  Eventually.

Here are a few nighttime photos of our first walk through Sevilla Sunday night:

One very important aspect of this trip was my host parents’ and my determined effort to eat as much as possible with as little guilt as possible.  Beginning around the time of the wedding, we started saying “después Sevilla,” meaning “after Sevilla,” while we gorged ourselves on the fried/greasy/artery-clogging/tasty/I-could-have-eaten-ten-and-probably-did (fill in the blank).  These little savories were anything from croquettas of ham and bechamel sauce to churros with chocolate and sugar at four in the morning.  Let me tell you, nothing quite says “chunky monkey” like waking up with residual churro chocolate on your cheeks.  And at each meal, we collectively said “después Sevilla” and threw another tasty treat down into our unsuspecting digestive systems.  

Monday morning after my regular breakfast of toasted baguette soaked in olive oil and café (unfortunately this is not a Sevilla-only habit), we ventured back into the city streets, this time wearing flats (Ah ha! Monkey CAN learn!).  Though the day was a bit rainy, we visited some of Sevilla’s most beautiful buildings.  A personal favorite (and for all you Star Wars fans out there, you’ll like this one too) was the Plaza de España, also known as Queen Amidala’s palace in Naboo in Episode II.  Just so you all know, I did have to look up that information.  I’m not THAT nerdy.  Here are a few pictures from this beautiful place in Sevilla:

After eating (again), I got to see what I really came to Sevilla for.  As the third largest Christian church and the largest Gothic cathedral in the world, the Catedral de Santa María de la Sede is just too beautiful.  There’s something about gigantic churches, especially this one, that I just love.  Perhaps it’s the fact that you feel like you have to whisper, because, I mean, this place is big:

Or maybe it’s the dual organs with pipes that reach practically up to the ceiling:

Or the altar pieces made of silver:

Or Christopher Columbus...well, at least they think it’s him:

Or this altar, 98 ft. tall by 66 ft. wide, handcarved over 44 years by one man, Flemish woodcarver Pierre Dancart, and then COVERED in gold:

I think, though, my favorite thing about gigantic churches, especially this one, is that the best views come when you look up:

I took this using a mirror on the floor of the cathedral.

And it was just after this that my camera’s memory card and battery both said “Please, we can’t take this anymore!” and I headed back to the hotel to upload the 408 photos I’d taken that afternoon and recharge mine, and my camera’s batteries, for La Feria.

Once again in my stylish high heels (It just never quite sinks in), we trekked over the river and through the...city to get to La Feria de Abril which means “The April Fair.”  I love the spanish word for fair because it sounds almost like “fairy” and implies something whimsical, magical, ethereal, and in some cultures, extremely dangerous.  What I experienced in Sevilla fits this description pretty well.

The fairgrounds is really made up of two parts.  There’s your typical “fairground” area with rides, games, etc., which I didn’t see but only from a distance.  Then, there’s the main part which is just streets and streets and streets lined with red, green, and white tents, called casetas.  The casetas are all privately owned by wealthy families, corporations, small businesses, brotherhoods, trade associations, and political parties so each one has a security guard at the door and you need to be invited in to attend.  Luckily for me, my host parents are awesommeee and know everyone in Spain so we had a caseta to call home for two days.  

Before we could really buckle down for some serious socializing, we had to witness one of my favorite parts of La Feria which is the lighting of the gate (it’s different every year) and the lights of the streets.  This happens at midnight and is the official start of the party.  Pre-lighting, everyone is leisurely strolling through the darkened streets.  Post lighting, everyone comes to life and it is party time!  Those who are not in a caseta line the streets and dance, drink, and get crazy.  Those in a caseta really do the same thing, you just have a nice place to sit and socialize when you’re not dancing.

Here is a video I took of La Luz, the lighting of the fair at midnight.

So I keep referencing dancing at La Feria.  I’m not talking about the robot, or the sprinkler, or even just your normal hip shakin’ get-down.  This is Sevillanas.  Baile por Sevillanas is a popular flamenco-style dance that has four parts.  High school students in Sevilla take classes in Sevillanas and you can find dance schools all over Spain to learn this.  It’s absolutely beautiful.  So all over La Feria, there are men and women, and many times just two women, following the same motions to this beautiful, upbeat music.  It was like being in the middle of a musical where everyone somehow intrinsically knew all the choreographed dance moves.   Here's the link for one of my videos of some people in our caseta dancing Sevillanas and you may also find a couple quick glimpses of me learning the first dance.  I’m determined to learn the rest, which means I’m going to have to teach one of youuuu back home to be my partner!  Who’s it gonna be, huh?

After arriving home in the wee hours of the morning and getting some limited sleep before another day out in Sevilla, my camera and I were just buzzing with excitement about the day ahead.  As Monday night is the official start of La Feria, every day after that for the next five days is a display of color and culture.  Beginning on Tuesday, the men all wear suits, the women all wear flamenco dresses, and together they ride in horse-drawn carriages through the streets of the fair.  After Amparo and I both each bought a new pair of shoes (that’s five pairs for me since arriving in Spain, in case anyone’s counting) which would not kill our feet, we found our way back to the fairgrounds and were welcomed back into the caseta for lunch.  I can’t really describe how beautiful the fairgrounds became on Tuesday.  It’s like you are almost stepping back in time if it weren’t for the tourists (like myself) not wearing flamenco dresses and snapping photos.  And again, of course, there is eating, drinking, and Sevillanas.  

Here is the link to a short video I took of one of the intersections of the small streets of La Feria, just to show you the activity.  Horses and carriages, caballeros (cowboys), and beautiful dresses everywhere.

And here are a few of my favorite photos from Tuesday at La Feria:

After another night of La Feria, we were all ready to head home on Wednesday.  On the way back to Alicante, we stopped in Granada for lunch.  On a little stroll we were passed by 5 or 6 black Mercedes and a bunch of police officers on motorcycles.  After we speculated who that could have been, we walked a short distance to a street overlooking Granada and it’s two most famous landmarks: the Alhambra and the Palace of Carlos V.  

We were greeted there by a crowd of people and this group of gentlemen.

They included this man playing what I thought was a giant potato.

Turns out it was a pig skin.  A pig skin instrument.

And those Mercedes?  Eh, it was nobody.  Just the Sultan of Dubai.  

You can watch a video featuring the musical stylings of pig skin instrumentation here.

Thanks for reading and Happy Mother’s Day Mom,

Alicia

After this week's trip to Sevilla with a pit stop in Granada, and the subsequent 825 photos taken (not kidding), I decided that I would start a Flickr account to help share some of my favorites with all of you!  Of course, this is all part of my master plan to increase my online presence and completely rule the internet.  And since I know many of you aren't Facebookers and it's very difficult to post a lot of pictures to the Blogspot website, Flickr was the best option.  I'll still include pictures in my blog posts, as well as add to my current Facebook albums, but now you have more options to follow La Chica Americana in Spain!

You can view my photos on Flickr here.

And you may have noticed that I started a YouTube channel as well!  I'll post videos from my trips there as well.