Blogs from Extremadura, Spain, Europe - page 5

The next stop on our trip was Trujillo. This is a smallish town in Extremadura. I think it is fair to say we are well off the English tourist trail and we do need to use our rather bad Spanish. We are in the nicest hotel so far. It is an old convent that is now a 4* hotel. The conversion has been done well and there are some super modern lights and art work which look really good. The room where we had breakfast used to be a chapel. Impressive! The problem with such a nice hotel is that we tend to stick out. The rest of the guests are well heeled Spanish tourists and don't seem to have the rucksacs, hats and trainers that we have! I think they must be wondering where we ... 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

We traveled to Granada and Córdoba this past weekend. It turned into quite the adventure in many ways... We were stuck outside of Granada for more than an hour in traffic. We missed our entrance time into the Alhambra, the fabulous and enormous Moorish palace at the edge of the city, but after some wrangling and fast Spanish, our indomitable coordinator, the fabulous Toni got us in and we had our tour. My favorite parts of the palace are the gardens and patios. Every patio has a fountain and some with large fountains, cyprus trees and flowers. We ran across half the palace and up a winding flight of stairs to watch the sun set over Granada from the top of one of the watch tours. The spectacular colors were well worth the running. Outside of ... read more

Two weekends ago the Iowa State group traveled to the city of Mérida accompanied by two Erasmus students (one from Sweden and one from France), our wonderful program coordinator Toñi, our last-minute guide (Toñi´s husband Louis) and a few Spanish students. Mérida was the Roman capital of Lusitania, the northwestern portion of the Iberian Penninsula, and has many of the best preserved examples of Roman architecture and engineering. We saw the Roman bridge that spans the river Guadiana (still in use), theater, ampitheater, circus, excavations of houses and the National Museum of Roman Art. The only major Arab remain in the city is the Alcazaba, a large castle-like fort built over the Roman walls that protected the bridge. The walls of the Alcazaba have some odd-looking stones in them, for example, a cylindrical column among square ... read more