Blogs from Cáceres, Extremadura, Spain, Europe

BLOG 4 Tuesday 8 May – Halleluiah, we have sun!! We left you last time earlier today, in overcast skies, at a McDonalds in Caceres trying to Skype Tom (with no luck). Whilst one of us dealt with computer matters the other did a big shop at Carrfour (bless him!) We then drove for just under an hour, along a mostly motorway road with reasonable but very flat landscape to Trujillo. Once again you could see it in the distance – a magnificent walled castle town atop a big hill. This time it REALLY lived up to expectations – the best place we’ve been to so far.....AND by the time we got there the sun was well and Trujillo out – his vest and both coats were abandoned and having parked up near the town, we ... read more

For my last weekend in Spain, my Spanish friend Claudia invited me to her pueblo in Eljas. My first thought was “YES! I have achieved total integration! I have succeeded in befriending the locals!” Then my excitement quickly turned to nerves as I contemplated a weekend away where I would have to speak only Spanish. But that’s what I came to Spain for right? I ought to know enough by now! And as final exams were fast approaching, I decided to treat this opportunity as the last, real world test of how much Spanish I’d learned abroad. Chupao. (Piece of cake). We left Salamanca on Friday afternoon and headed towards a tiny village in rural Extremadura, a region close to Portugal. It was only a two hour drive by car, and Claudia and I talked about ... read more

Excuse any missed punctuation, this program seems to dislike apostrophes Im just now finally getting this blog together after being here in Caceres for a month. I decided it would be much easier to have this point of reference for everyone to follow my trip rather than responding individually to everyone and feeling as if I was missing bits and pieces each time I told the same story to someone new. So here it goes! I arrived here in Caceres the night of September 18th. All fourteen of us spent almost 24 hours travelling from DTW to Amsterdam, then Madrid, and finally to Caceres by bus. It was such a new experience for me. I was getting to know some of the people in my program because we were all together for the entirety of a ... read more

After chocolate in Brussles, Dionne and I headed south to meet up with fellow ISU Spanish major Kyle in Paris. We didn´t have the best of weather in Paris (it was quite windy the whole time and on and off rainy) but apparently the wind wasn´t nearly as bad as in central Europe: trees downed across rail lines, semis blown off highways, really crazy stuff. Had we planned on leaving Prague a bit later, we might not have been able to. We thought we´d take a quick look at the Louvre museum. This is impossible! We spent maybe 4 or 5 hours there and only made it through Italian Renaissance painting, Greek and Roman cermaics, a bit of classical sculpture and Mesopotamia. We went through most of Egypt on accident to get to Mesopatamia (we were ... read more

Two weeks ago our fantastically amazing Advanced Grammer & Composition professor, also known as Javier, gave us a special lecture on Tauromaquia, the art of bull fighting. He is an afficianado and wanted us to leave Spain knowing a bit more than we did about this important Spanish tradition. The lecture started with a bit of history and the importance of bull fighting in Spanish culture. There are two types of bull fighting, rejonaer (when all the matadores are on horseback) and the more widely known type where the matadores are on foot. We learned the parts of the traje de luces (the bullfighters outfit) and that yellow is a bad color and is avoided because of superstition. We also discussed the running of the bulls in Pamplona and the best places to run, if one ... read more