back in santiago--for a few days at least

After almost two-and-a-half weeks of traveling around Spain with my parents, I am finally back in Santiago--until Friday morning, that is.  My parents left early yesterday morning and are now back in the United States (word on the street is that they are exhausted and glad to be home).

Two weeks of traveling is a long time--I think that that's the longest I've ever traveled in my life.  And with my parents.  We tried to cram as many museums, monuments, parks, cathedrals, former mosques, synagogues, and pagan sites of worship into the first week or so as we could, which, much to the chagrin of my mother, didn't leave a lot of time for souvenir shopping.  By the time we got to Seville, my mother threw up her hands and pleaded, "NO MORE MUSEUMS!!!"  The rainy weather had gotten to her (I think it had gotten to all of us), so we spent our last two days shopping for gifts.

When I last left off we were going to Guernica.  We visited Guernica, where I did not hear anyone speaking Spanish, only Basque, and took a swing by the famous tree of Guernica (a famed tree under which the Basque parliament met in the Middle Ages, reduced to a stump by a 19th-century fire), the Peace Museum (where you walk into a room and experience a bombing; it was a very politically-charged museum), a tile mural of Picasso's Guernica, and a church where the stone is still marked from the fires that burned after the bombs were dropped.  We also ran into a woman that gave us a kind-of weird vibe who had been on our tour of the Guggenheim the day before; she asked us a lot of questions about where we were going and where we were staying and didn't give any information about herself and kept going on and on about how she had wanted to visit the museums in Guernica but found a wonderful farmer's market and spent all of her time there.  

The Basque region of Spain is an interesting place to be on the Day of the Constitution because there were a lot of protests, both in Guernica and Bilbao, owing to the Basque separatist movement.  I am glad that we left Bilbao when we did because the day after we left, the police captured even more members of ETA, and while I'm sure there's nothing to worry about, I saw a lot of separatists out and about.  

After Bilbao, we headed to Barcelona.  I really loved Barcelona but I think that we crammed too many activities into our first three days so that by our final day, there wasn't much left to see.  I know that that's probably impossible, but my parents were museumed out.  Here is a review of the things we did and saw in Barcelona:

Parc Guell--Pretty cool.  A lot of walking; a lot of mosaics--we entered from the wrong end which was almost deserted; it wasn't until we went to the bookstore and saw the postcards that we realized all of the interesting things we had missed and turned around.

The Sagrada Familia--Antoni Gaudi's unfinished cathedral, in progress for over 150  years, which they expect will be finished by 2026 (though, as the tour guide explained, "it's not the finishing that is important, it is the homage to Gaudi").  They are currently working on the roof.

Picasso Museum--Fairly self-explanatory, but I learned that the Picasso family spent two years in La Coruna, a Galician town about forty-five minutes away from me, and that several of Picasso's early paintings were of Galician fishermen.  The two most famous native Galicians are probably Franco and Fidel Castro's father (one of the students in my Spanish class asked our teacher, Elvira, if Franco was indeed from Galicia and she got really embarrassed and said, "yes."  However, the fact that he was from Galicia didn't make Franco any kinder to the region, and the Galician language/culture was also repressed under his regime).

Temple Roma d'Agusti--The four columns that remain from a former Roman temple, enclosed within a building in the "Old City" for the past 700 years.  Use your imagination.

The Call--Barcelona's old Jewish quarter (Jews were forced out of Barcelona before 1300), but in the late '90s a historian discovered that an electrical storage warehouse used to be a synagogue and the site was excavated in the early 2000s.  You can now visit the synagogue, which is still occasionally used as a site of worship; after the Jews were expelled a family lived in the building who dyed fabrics and you can see the stone basins where they kept the dye--several years later, they were accused of being "secret Jews" and killed in the Inquisition.

Museum of the History of Barcelona--This was actually a pretty neat museum because extensive Roman ruins are housed under the museum in a climate-controlled environment (i.e. no walking outside in the rain/cold); however, the audio-guide ends once you leave the Roman history section and all of the other exhibits are in Catalan.

Fundacio Joan Miro--art museum of the work of Catalan painter Joan Miro.  Maybe you know his 1925 painting The White Glove.

Dali Museum--He made a lot of stuff.  Probably the most expensive museum we visited (10 euros!!); none of his major works, but some cool drawings.

Montjuic--the site of the 1992 Olympic Games.  I'm sure that Montjuic was a happening place--in the summer of 1992. We saw the Olympic Stadium, which was kind of interesting (a little smaller than Scott Stadium at UVA, my only frame of reference), but I don't think that I watched any of the Barcelona '92 games, so the symbolism was lost.  The area was pretty deserted except for some stray cats and an Israeli tour group.  There is a severe dearth of restaurants atop Montjuic--we walked for an hour before finding a small snack stand and spent 17 euros on stale Mentos and orange juice.  

Also on Montjuic--a castle where Franco imprisoned and executed his political enemies.  I generally don't enjoy touring prisons and sites of executions/mass murders, but I thought that there might be something interesting up there.  Apparently a statue of Franco is hidden somewhere in the castle; I thought that I might see it out of a morbid curiosity but I think that it's inside the military museum, which I had absolutely no interest in visiting, so I wandered around the grounds for a bit.  There were a couple of surly "punk" kids hanging around with a poodle and climbing inside the tanks.  They were creeping me out so we left.

I think that's almost everything from Barcelona.  While we were on the metro, my Mom almost got pickpocketed, which I was super-paranoid about the whole trip because almost everyone I know who has been to Barcelona has been pickpocketed.  The metro was fairly crowded and the three of us were standing around a pole facing the front of the car; I wasn't looking at my Mom and when I looked at her a very well-dressed woman had her hands in my Mom's bag.  Her purse was tangled up in my Mom's (I guess so that she could easily transfer the wallet to her own purse) so I untangled her purse for her and saw that the wallet was in her hands.  I hit her hands and wrestled the wallet out; I'm sure that they get caught all of the time though so my one act of metro vigilantism probably didn't deter her from her life of crime.  She ran away; nothing was lost (my Mom only had 22 American dollars on her anyway) but we were all amazed by the speed with which she unbuckled and unzipped the purse.

We went to Seville, climbed the cathedral belltower, and I showed my parents where Racquel and I lived with Margarita la Loca two summers ago.  I took them to the Mezquita, a beautiful mosque in Cordoba, where, during the Reconquista a few Jesus statues were thrown in (and some paintings, and crucifixes, and altars) and it was rechristened  the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption despite the Arabic writing on the walls and the distinctly Muslim architecture.  

Now it's back to the grind in Santiago.  Ana and Steffie are gone almost all of the time because Ana has a crazy class schedule and Steffie is writing her final exams, so it's mostly me hanging around by myself doing research (tiny violin).  I am almost finished with the torturous process of grad school applications (I just have to mail in writing samples!), though even once they're submitted you have to call the schools and check that they've received your transcripts and writing samples and , if not, scramble to send them in on time.  My friend from C-ville, Maggie, is also going through the same process, so at least I have someone to whine with via gchat.  We have a mental image/dream of the admissions committees in their smoking jackets, sitting around a mahogany conference table reviewing our incomplete files and then throwing out the files exclaiming, "Damn the transcripts!  This woman is a genius!!!"  But that probably won't happen. 

Sidenote (it's 6:30 p.m. and Ana just returned from a Christmas party she went to last night).  Speaking of which, Steffie is home so we are going to make dinner now. In 48 hours I will be back in the U.S., which is pretty hard to believe.  Another sidenote--our friends keep getting deported.  We had one friend who was here living with his boyfriend (they were going to get married) but his visa expired a year ago and the authorities found out and he had to go back to Sao Paolo today; our other friend had visa trouble and had to go back to India)