Alcalá de Henares

On the first Friday of May, Susan and I had made plans to go to Toledo, as I'd never been. We got up somewhat early and headed to the Atocha train station. Although we arrived around 9:00, we quickly found out that all of the trains until 3:00 in the afternoon had already been reserved. We decided to change our destination and instead headed to Alcalá de Henares.

I'd only heard of Alcalá de Henares when Susan mentioned it a few times before when we were discussing day trips near Madrid and on an ad for a museum exhibit entitled La cuna de la humanidad, which I really wanted to see. Apart from that, it does seem strange that I wasn't very aware of it, because it is the supposed birthplace of Miguel de Cervantes (author of Don Quixote) and has one of the oldest universities in the world (or at least the building).

We arrived and grabbed a coffee at a little coffee shop and I watched some Spanish news. It is always fun to watch how other countries portray the United States' interactions with other countries. They were showing Obama's recent meeting in Japan and also covered the South Korean ferry sinking. One of the things I've noticed from my limited viewing of Spanish television is that there seems to be pressure to have pretty women in news and commercials, but men don't necessarily have to be good-looking (though it may just be due to my limited sample size).

Greece, Part Two (Delphi)

This is a continuation of my previous post here.

Susan and I awoke at some ungodly hour of the morning in order to get our stuff together and hike back to Syntagma Square and grab a taxi. Our ultimate goal was to get to a bus station and head to Delphi, but for some reason there is no direct way by bus or metro to get to said bus station. The Athenians really thought that one through. There are all sorts of well-meaning wikis and how-to's online for ignorant foreigners, but I don't think I found a single one that made much sense. We just skipped the whole process and asked a nice cab driver to take us straight there. And that he did, for less than $10, which was surprising.

The bus station wasn't much to look at, but then again, I don't guess a bus station really needs to be extravagant. However, I would kindly request that, in place of a glorified hole in the ground, they get some actual toilets. And perhaps those toilets could be equipped with a toilet seat, unlike most of the ones I found in Athens. The beautiful exception was this jewel we found at the Olympic Stadium:

We ended up on the 7:30 bus to Delphi, on which Susan immediately passed out. Unfortunately, I wasn't made for sleeping in just any old place, so I stayed up and listened to music and watched as the landscape transformed. One of the most surprising features of the farms that I saw along the highway was that they contained entire fields of solar panels. I thought that was quite progressive and would later ask Christos about it (our CouchSurfing host and some sort of alternative energy engineer). Apparently he hates the solar panels (or at least the way they were implemented), as no one can afford them and now the country is in debt in yet another way because of it. Oh well. There were a ton of olive tree farms along the way, too. It's amazing how abundant olive oil is around Spain, Italy, and Greece. You can get gallons of it for a few euros. Even our canned tuna was sitting in olive oil instead of water. Talk about amazing.

Greece, Part One (Athens)

I cannot emphasize enough the contrast between my first welcome to Spain and the one I received this time around. Whereas I first arrived in Spain in September 2011 with two large suitcases (one of which was missing a wheel for whatever reason), with a limited knowledge of Spanish, and with no idea where I was supposed to go, this time I was greeted at the airport by Susan and Dani and got a ride by car directly to the apartment. Along the way, we talked in both English and Spanish, and I even got to impress/insult Dani with an elaborate Spanish blasphemy that I had learned in my wonderful profe's class last year. Although the weather was grey and wet, the welcome I received this time around was a warm cup of hot tea compared to the sweaty, sun-burnt, exhausting lack of a welcome Madrid first gave me.

To be honest, I was somewhat worried about living in a bigger city too. I've never spent more than a week or so in a big city, so the prospect of spending the next three months here was somewhat terrifying. I'm typically a fan of smaller towns, even if they lack as many options for gluttonous activities. Fortunately for me, Susan has been living in Getafe, which is a much smaller barrio of Madrid. So, as it turns out, although Getafe is just a few train stops away from the city center, it's tranquil and uncrowded here. Plus, this is the view from our terraza:

Susan and I had a very enjoyable anniversary weekend the weekend after I arrived. We took a stroll through the nearby park, Los lagos, and made a trip to Sol, in the city center. We cooked a delicious meal of salmon and rice on Saturday evening, where we learned that sometimes companies use cashews when making pesto, and are much less likely to make that abundantly obvious here. Thankfully, my allergic reaction was extremely mild and, from what I could tell, entirely external. On Sunday, we ate at a nearby Japanese restaurant in Getafe and got some sushi that was overpriced but riquísimo.

Adventures in Archaeology!

I think I'm going to add archaeology to the list of things I want to do when I grow up. Monday, I went with Ricardo and his archaeologist friends to visit some excavation sites and hike around the area surrounding Rubielos de Mora. It's an incredible area to look at and we picked a beautiful day to go hiking.

We visited three different spots in the region - a ruined lookout fort, a mine, and a canyon full of caves where Islamic people lived in refuge during the Christian reconquest of Spain. The ruined lookout fort was constructed sometime during the period of Islamic rule in Spain (the professionals told me sometime around 1100-1200) as a way to lookout for enemies and to have a point from which the nobles could rule over the peasants below. A couple of centuries later, the Christians constructed a small "ermita" which is, from what I understood, a Christian temple of sorts to one saint or another. It's reminiscent of Greek and Roman temples to various lesser gods, with the lesser gods being replaced by a saint that provides some form of protection against something (storms, bad harvest, etc.). The group of archaeologists had been working on excavating this site for a while but had to temporarily abandon the project because of the weather in December. 

Part of the ruined wall.

Ermita from afar.

Inside the ermita.

The site from afar.

Next, we headed to a site that Ricardo had been looking for. I'm not sure where he found out about it, but there was supposed to be some kind of ancient copper mine and he was excited. We actually found the mine, but I'm not sure why he acted as though it was supposed to be some sort of legendary expedition:

I honestly thought we were going to have to pull him out by his feet because there was barely enough room for him to crawl in there. The region was quite deficient in copper deposits, so I assume whoever mined this hole in the wall was disappointed and left after digging for a few minutes. We spent an hour or so hiking around the area looking for pieces of pottery and copper. We found a few small pieces but nothing special. The view was gorgeous, though:

The third site was where the archaeologist team was actually working at this point. I got to meet the little team and watch them dig around. It was interesting, albeit tedious-looking. This site is down in a canyon where there are a lot of caves that Islamic refugees were hiding in during the Christian reconquest. The team found several graves of smaller children from that period and some ruined stone walls. I hiked around a bit and looked at the caves up in the rock faces. If people were actually hiding in these places, they had to have had a difficult time accessing the caves (I suppose that's part of the point). 

There is a goat peeing in this picture. It maintained eye contact with me the entire time.

Archaeology seems like a fun way to do historical work. I'm sure my entirely theoretical history degree would allow me to get a job digging around like Indiana Jones someday. But sitting in a library reading generally means you avoid snakes, so I suppose it depends on how adventurous I'm feeling.