Wednesday, June 3

I am so glad that everything worked out for me going last night. Remember when we ran into Sr. Masschioni and the neighbors in Italy and then had lunch with them and it was surreal and was an experience that stands apart form the others in Italy? Well, this night was exactly the same. It was like Tara and I were invited in to see what life is REALLY like because we met up with a huge fraction of her host mother’s family and everything was in Spanish and happening at the same time.

It was fun to talk to her mom because she teaches flamenco for a living and she explained the different palos (styles) based on form and music. Then, we went to her “casa de pueblo” which is her house from her village. It was gorgeous and had a garden inside a gate with several separate rooms off of the garden. Oh, forgot to mention that Tara’s host mom’s niece came along and she rolled marijuana joints in the back seat while Tara and I were shocked and trying to communicate to each other through eyes only! It’s definitely illegal here but that’s like saying it’s illegal to speed in Italy. Or here for that matter, because it was a swervy and crazy car ride.

When we arrived in Toledo, we met her host mom’s sister, and two married couples but I don’t know how they were related. One man was fascinated with the United States and said he loved watching the travel channel and he was amazed how big or houses are…which is kind of depressing because here they are just adequate. The kitchens are tiny but they make them work. And the outside only serves the purpose of being the outside, and most are white or dirty but it doesn’t matter because it’s the inside that is beautiful and decorated. Because it was the night before Corpus Christi, which is Toledo’s specialty festival, we walked around looking at the pre-festival decorations and the famous decorated patios. Patios are inside the building, so picture a square with its center missing. They used these as air conditioning back in the day (and in some of them even now because AC can’t be installed) and they work because since the building is so tall, the sun doesn’t shine into the center, but its outside. Also, there are deep wells inside for getting water and for maintaining the cold temperature, which is aided by all of the flowers surrounding it because they let off moisture (and oxygen!). Some of them were gorgeous with flowers and traditional decorations and some were just going inside and seeing a patio. There were 48 in all and I think we saw 40, which were spread across the city, so we got to walk and see everything!

We walked down one famous street that the really nice man was explaining to us. Something about a woman who embroidered and sat at the end crying (maybe?) and I think she eventually found a husband? But then the nice man’s wife pointed to a painting of the lady and was explaining something about novios (boyfriends) and counting on her fingers uno, dos, tres so then Tara and I didn’t know what the story was at all!

Then we went to one of the plazas which reminded me of Siena but was even more beautiful! There were colorful flags hanging on all of the buildings (which reminded me of Siena’s neighborhood ones, but these were Catholic so I asked our traveling party what they were for and they said they were Catholic but they didn’t really know anything about Catholicism or about the festival other than actually celebrating in the streets and watching the procession the next day!) and little cafes.

Then we went to the plaza with the church in it (actually, we saw 15 churches, but this was the grandest) where we saw giantes, which are giants made of almost a paper mache? They we made more than 300 years ago and they use them every year! And there is one representing each continent. They were set up because they were part of the procession tomorrow.

After all of this walking, were finally went to a bar, where Tara and I thought we were getting dinner, but really everyone just got drinks. This is at 11:00pm, and Tara and I (and everyone else for that matter) hadn’t eaten since 2:30. So then they wanted to take us by Toledo’s Puerto del Sol, which was so interesting because it was built by the Arabs and had a small window in the top for pigeons to deliver messages. I wish we had really “antiguo” buildings in the U.S. with a 1,000 year old history.

We finally left old Toledo (walking past 4 more churches of course, which actually, I should note that Tara’s mom explained how the Arabs would be building one church and be defeated, so then the Christians would finish in a different style, so it’d be like an Arab mosque inside of a church or next to it) and we made our way to the sister’s house for dinner. Dinner was at 12:30. It was fun to hear them all talking and it felt like we were flies on the wall in a typical Spanish family festival setting.

When we got back it was 2.

Today


So then I had to wake up and be in the Puerto del Sol (Madrid one) by 9. Of course though, not everyone showed up on time. By 10 everyone was there. Mass had invited us to go see a trail of Cervante’s (author of Don Quijote) places, and since Tara, Micheal, Eric, and I wanted to go originally, Mass rented a car for us to travel in. After finding out that they couldn’t go to the beach (4 hours away) for a day, a whole bunch of other people wanted to come, so they took the bus to the first city only, Alcalá de Henares.

On the way to the small city, Mass told us car people all about Cervantes and his life, including exile, fighting in war, being held prisoner in Africa, dropping drama because of Lope de Vega (who wrote 1,000 plays, which is 960 more than Shakespeare), and finally writing Don Quijote, the single most famous book, claimed to be the first novel, and an inspiration for many of Shakespeare’s characters and plays.

In the city, we visited the Cervantes museum, where we could see his record of birth and the basin in which he was baptized along with some artwork. Then we went to Cervantes’s house, where we learned even more about him and Don Quijote from Mass. Supposdely it’s the first novel with framing, use of perseption, metanarrative, omniscient but sometimes absent and sometimes forward narrator, (all of these things are amazing to me because I learned about them in Bob Lamb’s class). We saw copies of the book in Arabic, Chinese, various editions, etc.

Then we saw the town palace, which is where Mass thinks Cervantes saw how the church and money and royalty were associated, and according to various theories, Don Quijote is either a more realistic Christ figure, a Satan figure, just a funny book, a representative of realistic faith, a warning against perfect faith, etc. In the book Cervantes is challenging the church, but it is still unclear if Don Quijote was somewhat of a Bible in code, during a time when Christians were being burned at the stake, or if it was a cautionary tale advising rebellion against organized religion. In one part of the story, Don Quijote gets into a fight with a priest because Quijote is telling the preist about the giants in the hills, and the preist says that there is no such thing as a giant. So Quijote asks, “What about Goliath?” so the priest has to change his mind and agree that Quijote is not insane. Sadly, in the end, the world has changed Quijote and he no longer believes in his dream of being a knight and comes to believe it was a stupid phase of his life, while finally everyone around him misses his faith and his antics. While Sancho Panzas begins as a stupid character, he becomes confident and manipulative, while Quijote also switches. Again, the first story to have a hero be anything but the “definition” of a hero.

After lunch, we car people left the bus people and continued on to the supposed town of Dulcinea, the love of Quijote, called El Toboso. We went to another museum where we saw Don Quijote books signed by famous people, including Eva Peron’s husband, Mussoulini, the President of France, etc. We even saw copies in Braille, HANDWRITING (which means that person copied the WHOLE book!) and CODE (someone made a code for numbers, and then wrote the WHOLE book in code!). Then we saw the church tower that is described in the book, so the same one Cervantes must have seen in his lifetime. Plus it was so cool to see a tiny town in the middle of La Mancha with mostly just locals (who seemed all over the age of 50) and ancient houses. Which reminds me, at one point, we were on a dirt road on which we passed no other cars and was completely remote in La Mancha. Thanks GPS. And it was super bumpy but beautiful, so it was worth it!

Then, we continued to the nearby windmills that must have inspired Cervantes’s to write the windmill scene. Mass said they were at least 500 if not more years old! And it was beautiful. And it felt like we weren’t in Spain at all. Then Mass explained his theory about the windmills looking like a cross when they are up and down, which might be why Quijote tried to spear them. Mass said that they always have the windmills looking like an “X” because it looks prettier (they’re not used anymore) and because of that, only he and one other professor have ever written about the possibility that they could represent a cross. Wow.

Then we drove home and I ate dinner with my family at 10:30. We had some sort of beef fillet and pasta. It was yummy. And my mom packed me a lunch for today ☺ Oh, and of course dessert, which was some sort of pudding but really good. It tasted like vanilla (vanilla), cinnamon (canella), and honey (miel). And I know eat plantains (platanos) on a regular basis!