El Prado, Aceitunas, y Los Niños

It’s been difficult keeping this blog up to date, especially when my internet access is unreliable and, when it does work, I’m in a room with my Spanish brother and mom, who are usually watching American movies dubbed in Spanish and would probably prefer not to hear the clicks of typing. But I’ll try to recap the last week…

We had our first art class. We toured the different colleges (facultades) of the university. We went out to bars. We picked olives off the tree and saw an olive oil factory. We had a botellón. I went to my host nephew’s 2nd birthday party. And we watched the Superbowl.

The professor who took us on our tour of Toledo’s sights, Arturo, teaches our art class. He speaks slowly, sometimes painstakingly so, but it’s better than the alternative. He seems genuinely concerned with our understanding of the course material, which is refreshing. And this class requires bi-monthly trips to Madrid’s museums to see the works we’re discussing in class. I was going to take a theater class, but to take an art history class that requires us to go see the originals in museums was an opportunity I wasn’t going to pass up on.

Going into Madrid is quite a long process, and even though it isn’t overwhelming, it’s not something I want to do more than once in a day. On Friday we took a brief tour of the Prado, one of the big three art museums in Madrid. It was a bit disappointing to only spend an hour and a half in one of the best museums in Europe, but at least we’ll have more chances later in the semester to go to the other exhibits. We saw lots of Velazquez and Goya, and compared the two, which was interesting, but our tour guide was much too concerned about finishing the tour rather than making sure we understood everything or had enough time to admire these priceless works of art. She almost sprinted from one painting to the next, and looked pissed off if we didn’t answer her questions promptly. I feel as though tours with Arturo will be much more interesting.

Saturday we visited an almazara, or olive oil factory. It’s our tutor, Jorge’s, family’s almazara, so he took us around the orchard. We gathered around a tree, and Jorge handed us long sticks, and demonstrated the ancient method of de-olive-ing the tree by whacking at the branches. We all had a shot at beating the tree down with all our combined might, and by the end, its broken limbs lay lifeless at our victorious feet, and we gathered all of its fruit into large sacks (called sacos, conveniently enough) to take back to the almazara.

The factory itself was like any other refinery: you clean the olives, then heat them, then extract the oil, the refine it again and again and again, then age it. The best part was tasting the crude oil and comparing it to the refined stuff. The crude, opaque oil burned the back of my throat, and the refined extra virgin oil was smooth and delicious. We had aperitivas after the tour, with chorizo and manchego and plenty of vino. But we were lucky to have two Spanish students come with us, and I got to talk to one of them, Estela, about her favorite music, hobbies, and palabrotas (curse words). It was quite an education, since, as she said, you aren’t fluent until you know how to use the language’s curse words.

Botellón: a public gathering, usually in a park, during which young people drink wine and socialize.

And it’s fun. But the nights have been too cold to really enjoy walking around late. But we went to a bar afterwards and met Estela and her boyfriend, Norberto. They were incredibly sweet to us clueless Americans.

It was my host-nephew, Alan’s, birthday party yesterday. He turned two, and his friends and cousins all came to his house to play, so I felt right at home with the kids. I spoke a bit to some of Pilar’s brothers-in-law and other random family members, but I spent most of the time eating olives and jamón and making funny faces at the kids. Alan is a sweetheart, and it took him no time to warm up to me. He ran to his room numerous times to show me another of his favorite dinosaur toys, but there was a lot going on, so we didn’t really get to know each other too well yet. There was a little 6 year-old girl there (her name was something like Calatina…not Catalina…I forget…) who was laughing at my broken, awful Spanish, but was surprisingly helpful. She was a smart girl, and for a few moments I thought she knew more Spanish AND English than I did. But being around kids reminded me about my similar position. They probably don’t really understand their parents, and they might have a difficult time expressing themselves. I’m a Spanish baby, delivered by those Alcalá storks, just getting used to life in a new place with fast-talkers and later bedtimes.

And I still don’t know who won the Superbowl. It started at 12:30am last night, and we couldn’t make it past the halftime show. But The Boss was pretty sweet.

Also, I’ve only Skyped twice. Whoever is reading this…let’s set up a Skype/iChat/phone date.