Translating for the Customs Agent in Chicago O'Hare

Upon my arrival to the O'Hare airport, I had the great pleasure of acting as translator for the very flustered cutoms agent. There was a couple that were arriving from Madrid, on their way to Toronto, that had a connecting flight in Chicago. They thought their bags would be directly shipped to Toronto (because that is what it said on their baggage slip). However, apparently they had to get their bags in Chicago, and re-check them in after they had been approved by cutoms.

Unfortunately, this couple's flight was leaving in about an hour, and the customs agent was going to make them go get their bags, go back through customs, and then from there they would have to find their flight. Who knows how far away their gate was, and if they actually made it on time. I felt really bad for them, and it seems silly that they have to go through cutoms if they are just getting a connecting flight, and not staying in the States.

I was the next in line, and the agent flagged me over, asking if I spoke Spanish, and if I could act as translator. And of course I did. During the conversation, he asked me to tell them this was not his first rodeo. Obviously I did not translate that.

However, since I helped him, he didn't hassle me at all, and let me pass through when it was my turn. They didn't check my bags at all, which was nice because if they tried unpacking them, I have no idea if I would be able to get everything to fit again.

On my Flight Back and Other Notes

I am currently watching the Big Bang Theory on the plane. I am so excited to get back, but I still have to get on the connecting flight in Chicago. Ugh. But at least the long flight will be over.

I've met a lot of cool people on my trip. It all started off in Marquette, where I met Diane. She was great and gave me a book to read (which unfortunately I never finished). She is a biologist and travels between Marquette and California. She has to travel because he husband can`t find work anywhere else. She has family in Benzie county, and one of her sisters actually works in one of the banks in the area. My mom probably knows her. Another one of her sisters is a teacher at Benzie High. 

I met lots of other travelers in hostels. I can't believe how popular it is for people to go traveling for a year throughout Europe. I met a lot of Canadians in Spain. I have no idea how people can afford to go traveling for so long. Also, traveling is so mentally and physically jarring, I don't know how people can always be on the move like that, and actually enjoy the places they are seeing. My weekend trips from Salamanca were super tiring for me. 

I met a lot of people in my classes at the University. Actually, I am now friends with Saki and Monica from my elective class. Really nice people.

I met Sandra in the Madrid hostel. She is from Austria, and finished school for Tourism. She is working a little bit outside of Madrid for a company for 3 months. She is only going back home once. She had to find a place to live next to the train station in Madrid for work. She ended up finding one, but the landowner lives in the flat, and talks a lot. She also has a lot of weird rules about the house that made Sandra slightly confused. I added her on Facebook too :) I hope she does well. She seemed really nice.

On the walking tour I met an Argentinian, named Adiel. When I first met him, I spoke to him in English, and then he asked me to speak slower because his English isn't that good. But his accent didn't sound like a spanish accent. And when I asked him where he was from, I couldn't understand him. But I soon found out he spoke Spanish, and we continued to speak in Spanish for hte rest of the trip. He works as an editor of a tv channel in Buenos Aires. But right now he is on vacation for a month, so he is seeing Spain, France, Germany, and England. He said he's a little worried about navagating in France, because he doesn't speak French, and apparently the French do not like to help with directions and do not speak English or Spanish a lot. 

Anyways, on the walking tour I felt kind of cool because we were the only ones speaking Spanish. Everyone else was from Canada or the states. So we spoke in Spanish with the guide. One thing that we learned that was strange is that in Argentina, they mandate that everyone in grade school must read Don Quijote, but in Spain they don't. 

I'm so ready to be home!!!! I wish I was there already.

Back From the Prado

So now it is five o’clock, and I have nearly reached all of my goals for the day. I have done my walking tour, gone to the Prado, gotten my magnet, and now all I have to do it go to the Parque del Retiro.

My thoughts on the Prado?

Honestly it was not as exciting as the Reina Sofia. Everything was exactly how I expected it to be. There was the Goya paintings, the Velazquez paintings, the El Greco paintings… I guess that makes me sound really spoiled and ungrateful, but there was no wow factor to the Prado. I guess the fact that I was kind of tired and hungry added to this unimpressed attitude. By the end I was pretty ready to get out of there. But maybe it was just because I was hungry and tired.

Something I did appreciate is that the Prado has captions by all of the paintings. The captions not only comment on the artistic value of the painting, but they also comment on what is going on in the painting. For example, there were several medieval paintings where a “surgeon” was removing a stone from someone’s forehead. But apparently this was a trick that people did to get more money? Like, there wasn’t really a stone in their forehead, they just said there was. Honestly, I didn’t understand it entirely, but it gave me a little bit of background, something to go off from.

I really liked the walking tour, but our guide was a little wacky. He took up through all of the city, and I go to see the first restaurant (ever supposedly), and the Royal Palace, the Plaza de España, the Plaza Oriente, the Puerta de Sol, I don’t even know what else. Unfortunately we did not go to the Templo de Debod, but that’s ok… I’m so tired. I’m so ready to go home. I’m ready to get on the plane and go home. Tomorrow I’m going home. I can’t wait to have a little bit of control in my life. I feel like the whole past month I haven’t been able to eat what I want, do what I want when I want, I’ve been living around other people for too long. Being around other people and trying to be courteous and work around them, and their daily actions. It’s always too cold, or I can’t find something I want to eat, or I can’t relax and do what I want because I’m always around other people. Ugh.

But I really appreciate what I’ve been able to do here. I’ve learned Spanish from professors in Spain. I’ve traveled by myself, and I feel a great sense of accomplishment. To add to this, I still haven’t been robbed! (Knock on wood…) Everyone told me that it would happen, but it hasn’t.

I think I’m going to take a long siesta. I really need to reorganize the things in my duffel and figure out how I’m going to return to the airport. Ugh. I hate how heavy my packs are!!!!

Expectations for my Day in Madrid

    1)  Complete the walking tour. I have no idea what it includes, but I know it’s about 2 hours long. I would hope that it includes the Plaza Mayor, the Palacio Real, maybe the Palacio Santa Cruz, perhaps the Plaza de la Villa, maybe the Monasterio Descalzas Reales, and it’s a long shot but I hope it includes the Templo de Debod. The Templo de Debod is a monument that was brought to Madrid from Egypt. It looks relatively close to the center of the city, so maybe if the walking tour does not include it, I can go there afterwards.

2)  Go to the Prado museum. I absolutely have to go. They close at 7pm tonight, so it’s going to be pretty tough to make it. This is the same problem I had with the Pablo Picasso museum in Barcelona. It closed at 7pm and I never was able to make it. Hopefully history does not repeat itself. Because I feel like it’s pretty much mandatory to go to the Prado if you are in Spain.

  
3)  Get a Madrid magnet. It doesn’t sound as hard as it is. I have pretty high standards for magnets now, and I want to get a good one that fully encompasses what I think Madrid is. Like I said, high standards.

4)  I would like to see the Parque del Retiro. Not super-duper important, but I would like to check it out. Especially since it’s not very far from my hostel. Within the Parque del Retiro, there is the Palacio de Velazquez and the Palacio de Cristal.  

It doesn’t get dark until like 9:30pm. Think I can do it all?? I hope so! 

Tentative schedule:

-Walking tour 11am-1pm.

-Prado from like 2pm-4pm? No idea how long it will take. Its further away from the city center so I will have to really book it to get there in a reasonable amount of time.

-Parque del Retiro at like 5pm.

-Find a magnet (probably after my walking tour, since there’re bound to be tourist shops in the city center).

Arrival in Madrid

I arrived in Madrid today. The first thing I did was check in to my hostel. I arrived at about 4:30pm to the airport with Profe Arenillas and Clara, from there I took a shuttle to Plaza de Cibeles. First mistake. Plaza de Cibeles is really far away from my hostel. Not really far away, but with my bags it seemed to take forever. I am seriously considering trying to return Monday via another route. There is a girl from Austria in my room that says she took the train here; I know that you can also use the Metro. Unfortunately there are like 4 line changes if I want to take the Metro. And honestly I would like to sit for the majority of the trip, since my two backpacks feel like they weigh two tons. I also don’t like concerning myself with connecting lines… Anyway, after a lot of sweat and some achy shoulders, I arrived to my hostel. The key system is super weird here, but I think I will get used to it. One thing I will not get used to is the kitchen! The kitchen seems like it would be big enough, but with all the people down there now, it obviously is not. Also, they don’t have any real dishes. Everything is plastic, and I had to cut a tomato with a plastic fork. Obviously, it did not end as well as I had hoped. I think its extra busy downstairs because they are making paella. Also, the wifi doesn’t work in the rooms, so any hopes I had of watching Netflix tonight are dashed.

One thing that really made my night was going to the Reina Sofia Bellas Artes museum. There was a very wide range in the collection. However, one thing that I took from my experience is that I really really do not know Salvador Dalí’s style! I really thought I had a good handle on it. This is not the case. Dalí has soooo many different styles that if you showed me a Dalí, I would probably have a forty percent chance of guessing it right, unless it was one of his more well-known works. I would also like to note that this experience has enlightened my perception of artistic works. I knew that artists went(/still go through) different stylistic periods. But I thought that there was something in each of their works that was unique to that one artist, which let you know it was theirs (other than their signature). But with all the different styles Dalí had in the Reina Sofia Bellas Artes museum, I realized that his art expanded far past that of the surreal. He also painted political paintings. One was about the civil war (named something like Premonition of the War), and other explicitly has an image of Hitler in it. But then some of his art just seemed like it was for fun (for example there are a few works displaying explicit sexual acts that one might consider funny, or just plain strange). I also learned more about Miró. I really like Miró’s work. It’s crazy how well he too mastered many different genres of work. There are works that look almost like Picasso’s, with the Cubism style. There are some that made me think of impressionism styles, and then there were really modernistic pieces. I also learned that I really wished I knew more about art!! I can appreciate it, but I think I would get more out of it if I knew more and if I recognized more pieces.

Of course, the big famous painting in the Reina Sofia is Picasso’s Guernica. Honestly, it struck me how different it was to me in real life. I really had super high expectations for Guernica. I knew it was going to be really big, so no surprise there. However, for some reason from the pictures I’ve seen online, I thought it would be more refined and finished looking. It looked very rough to me. Perhaps this was on purpose; obviously it’s a very rough topic. Another thing that really surprised me is that you can see where he was sketching the outlines for the painting under the paint! You can see where he was going to put the head of the bull, and that he decided to change it and put it to the left a bit more. Also, I’m pretty sure it looked like he was going to put a duck next to the bull, but then decided against it. Accompanying Guernica, the museum had a lot of documents that tell the history of the painting a bit. There are lots of letters from curators of museums that are communicating with Picasso, and other museums, in regards to where the painting should be moved, or not moved. There is even a hand written letter from Pablo Picasso in the display case. I couldn’t really decipher what he had written because I think it’s in French. It might be really bad that I’m saying this, but I actually like the paintings Picasso did in preparation for making Guernica, more than Guernica itself. Accompanying the Guernica exhibit (in addition to the documents) are a room full of paintings Picasso did before he painted Guernica. These ranged from rough sketches, to very detailed drawings and paintings of specific aspects of the painting. For instance, he did a very detailed drawing of the bull, but it had the face of a man. He also did a lot of the woman with the child scene paintings and sketches. Picasso did something very interesting with eyes in Guernica and the preparation pictures. They almost look like sparklers to me, the way that they look like mini explosions or something.

Speaking of sketches, I must mention the extensive exhibit that the Reina Sofia museum has of Goya’s sketches. I did not expect them to be in the Reina Sofia, but perhaps in the Prado, just because of when they were made. But I recognized quite a few of them from Profe Compton’s Spain class. The majority refer to the war. It seemed like a lot of the collections centered themselves around the Civil War, and war in general. There were even exhibits from the seventies that presented opinions on the United States’ participation in the Vietnam War. Also, some that made references to Kennedy’s death.

I also decided that I need to look into Antoni Tápies. He had sooo many works in the Reina Sofia. And of so many different styles! He seems like an incredible painter, with a lot of relevant works. He was all over the Reina Sofia! Anyway, I’ve got to look into him more.

Tomorrow my goal is to do a walking tour, and to go to the Prado. If I can do both of these, I will be happy!

So Many People with Crutches in Salamanca!!

A note before I forget: there are a lot of people with crutches in Salamanca. People of all ages too, so its not just the old people, or not just the young people. The whole month I've been here I've been wondering about it.

So I started asking people, why are there so many people with crutches here?!?

I asked my host dad, Miguel. He was the first one I asked. He told me that its because the people here are starting to get fat like the Americans. He said that hamburgers are getting so popular, as well as the Iberic pork products, that people are getting fat and their bones are getting bad. Interesting idea.. However, I would like to note that I have eaten more pizza and hamburgers in Maria and Miguel's house this month than I would eat in the States. Unfortunately, I think they chose to make food that would be more familiar to us. So they made food that they think all Americans eat. They made pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries, fried bologna, lots of soup, and lots of rice dishes. I tried to run every day to make sure I didn't gain a lot of weight, but I'm pretty sure it happened anyways haha. Anyway, Miguel's hypothesis was a bad diet.

I also asked my professor at the university, Charo. She said she had to idea why. She said she actually never really noticed it. I asked her if she thought it might be a problem of malnutrition, or if there was some type of sickness in this region. She said that the only person she knows that is wearing crutches is her aunt, and that's because she fell and broke a hip or femur or something. Other than that, she has no idea why a lot of people would be using crutches.

I asked Maria, my host mom, and she said that she never noticed people with crutches, so she has no idea.

Adios Salamanca

I'm leaving Salamanca today with Profe Arenillas and her daughter, Clara. Its been a great stay, and I am so glad I was able to do this. While some are saying they would rather stay in Spain, or at least Europe, I'm actually pretty excited to get back home. I'm taking a super awesome biology class in Marquette, and trying to complete my Capstone. I also will be able to start work again. I'm not super excited about dealing with the summer orientations, but it should at least be an interesting experience. And maybe it will be fun, who knows. I will also be really excited to see my boyfriend, Joe. I haven't seen him for this whole month, and I haven't been able to talk to him a lot due to the time difference and his work/clinicals schedules.

Today we leave for Madrid. While in Madrid, I want to definitely see the Prado museum, and I really want to see the Reina Sofia Bellas Artes museum. They are both super close to my hostel. I also want to do a city tour. I love walking city tours because, even though I never can remember everything, I really like learning a little about the history of the streets. Specific things that I can say I know about a place that most people can't find on the internet.

However, getting to my hostel is going to be a pain. I'm getting a bus to the airport, but I have to navigate back into the city through the Metro system. I will have to change lines a lot. Yikes! Also, even though I have a medium sized duffel and a backpack, everything weighs a lot. A LOT. Because, expert packer as I am, I was able to pack everything I brought with me into these two bags. However, that means they're super heavy. Just walking from my house to Profe Arenillas' house was a pain. Ughhhh.

Ok, no more complaining. Its a beautiful day in Spain, and I'm ready to see a small part of Madrid!