A Purim service led by nuns and other cultural mash-ups

Palabra del día: constipado
Translation: congested
This is an example of a "false friend," or a Spanish word that sounds like an English word but has a different meaning.  However, every time I use the word "constipado" to describe the cold I am currently suffering from, I start laughing just a little bit... I've decided to stick to the synonym "resfriado" instead.

Comida del día: Hummus
Last week, my Moroccan housemate Nabil and his sister Mariam decided to host a Moroccan dinner in our piso.  The menu included chicken topped with olives and dates that almost made me break my vegetarianism (I resisted, but afterwards wondered why).  It was accompanied by salad, bread, and homemade hummus.  I made sure to watch Mariam as she made the hummus, and now I'm going to share her recipe with you!

Ingredients:
Lots of chickpeas
A little bit of tahini, but since tahini is hard to come by in Spain she substituted a spoonful of Greek yogurt instead
A clove of garlic
A squirt of fresh lemon juice
Salt
Paprika (she used the sweet kind, but if you like spicy things you can use the spicy kind)
Olive oil

Instructions: Combine chickpeas, tahini/ Greek yogurt, garlic, salt and lemon and blend together (in Spain they use handheld blenders to mix pretty much everything, but a food processor would work as well).  Spread hummus on a serving plate and cover with paprika, then drizzle olive oil on top.  The paprika and olive oil are the trick: not only do they make it taste good, they also make it beautiful.

Foto del día:

A view of beautiful Toledo from the tower of one of its many historical churches.

The Moroccan dinner was just one example of the many multi-cultural events with my housemates and other friends that have continued to overwhelm my social life.  At that dinner there were four countries represented: Spain, Morocco, the US and Mexico.  I use the word "overwhelm" because recently this highly active social life has been a bit too much of a good thing.  After getting sick with two colds in the past three weeks, I've decided it's necessary to slow things down a bit and I'm planning to hide in my bedroom with only the company of my four instruments for the next week (I'm still elated to have a bedroom after living without one for six weeks!).  I keep making a joke with my friends that without fail, I always get home six hours after I think I will.  For example, last weekend I went to play in a band concert on Sunday morning (our third band concert in three weeks!).  I was planning to come home afterwards, but instead ended up going out for tapas, going on a walk to enjoy the beautiful weather and discover some of Granada's secret spots, going out for more tapas, and finally going to my friend Silvia's house to celebrate her birthday.  So instead of getting home at 3 pm, I got home exhausted at 11 after a very fun, busy day.  For this reason I need to hide in my room for a while, because once I leave there's a high chance that Spain's social culture and my many new friends will never let me return.

Speaking of instruments, I'm still loving living in an apartment with other musical people.  My friend Silvia's birthday was last week and we surprised her with a serenade that involved four instruments: piano, French horn, clarinet and cello.

In other news, I've just returned from a trip to Madrid and Toledo.  The purpose of the trip was two pronged: first I went to see two friends from WashU, one who is studying in Madrid this semester and the other who was visiting from studying abroad in Florence.  The other purpose was to see Toledo, since it is right next to Madrid and I had heard that it's worth seeing (it definitely was!)

Madrid was a lot of fun and it was nice to see people from home and talk about WashU to people who know what I'm talking about: it's been such a long time since I've seen anyone from home!  We ended up doing many of the same things that I did the last time I was in Madrid, including going to three of the same restaurants.  This wasn't on purpose and it probably would have been good to try some new places, but they were all good the first time and the second time as well.  Here is the only photo I took in Madrid, with my friends Emily and Caroline in front of this great vintage cafe that I went to last time and had to go back to:

I only have one photo because I lost my camera on my winter break trip somewhere in between Budapest and Vienna, and although I've been taking photos on my iPhone, if someone else has a camera I usually let them do the honors and hope they will share them with me later.  The problem with this is that then I have to wait for my friends to upload the photos, so I promise to share more photos from Madrid whenever they get around to it!

In addition to eating, we also went to the Caixa Forum, a museum in which we saw a photography exhibit with the theme of conservation that contained beautiful black and white photos of nature from every continent.  We also rented row boats in Retiro Park (another fun repeat of my last trip) and went to the modern art museum to see Picasso's Guernica:

On Saturday morning I left Madrid and met Silvia to spend a day in Toledo.  We saw four churches, two synagogues, and a mosque, and had a lovely two hour picnic by this river:

 We lucked out with gorgeous weather for our day in a gorgeous historical city.

In the evening, we went to a Purim service in one of the ancient synagogues, since it just so happened to be Purim.  It was by far the most unique Jewish service I have ever been to.  Although it was in a synagogue, the building had been converted into a church after the inquisition, so the decorations included the ten commandment scrolls that are in all synagogues as well as a cross.  The service was also led by nuns, since a Christian organization is in charge of the preservation of the building.  During the service, they explained the story of Purim, sang one song in Hebrew, and then sang sad traditional Spanish songs with the theme of persecution for about an hour.  The service ended on an upbeat note though with an Israeli dance and triangular cookies that were trying hard to be hamentaschen. Although this wasn't your typical Purim celebration, it was nice to celebrate a Jewish holiday, since I've been struggling to do that while in Spain.  I've now seen all three synagogues that remain in Spain from before the Inquisition: two are in Toledo and one is in Cordoba.  Although there are almost no Jewish people in Spain now, it means a lot that people care enough about Jewish culture to organize a service to celebrate a Jewish holiday.

By Sunday morning, I had come down with a bad cold and was more than ready to come home to Granada.  Since being back, my credit card number was stolen, I've possibly broken a toe, and I've suffered all sorts of bureaucratic problems with my Visa, but the good news is that I'm alive!

One more thought about Granada: I had a conversation with a Spanish student a few weeks ago about how the fact that there are so many students (80,000) and specifically so many international students, affects a small city like Granada (240,000 people).  She complained a bit about how the presence of so many international students causes prices of everything to go up, while most Spanish people are struggling with the economic crisis.  She also said it brings a more international feeling to Granada and that parts of the traditional Spanish city are lost.  These comments came as a surprise to me because compared to a big city like Madrid, Granada feels very traditional.  I've also been loving the large student population and the opportunity to meet students from around the world.  I plan to continue to enjoy this opportunity, but at the same time I'm going to keep in mind how my presence affects my surroundings.

I'll leave you with a recording from one of the best-known flamenco guitarists Paco de Lucia, who died just a month ago.  If I keep up with the guitar lessons that I've been enjoying this semester, maybe someday I'll sound like him?  It doesn't hurt to dream about it.

Putting the "study" back into "study abroad"

Note: This is part one of a two part blog post to make up for the severe lack of updates in recent weeks.  In this section I will finish talking about my apartment and then discuss my classes and internship, and in the second part I will focus on a recent trip to Madrid and Toledo and on other random events that I think you might be interested in.

Palabra del día: Chic@s
For months, I kept seeing the words "chicos" or "chicas" (boy or girl) spelled with the "@" instead of the "o" or the "a" and I couldn't figure out why.   Then all of a sudden I figured it out: it's a gender neutral way of writing the word.  In Spanish, if you are referring to a group of both boys and girls, you would usually use the masculine form of "chicos" no matter how many girls there are in the room.  This clearly isn't an equal system, so somebody decided to invent the word "chic@s" to even things out.  The only problem is that this word only works in writing since there is no way to pronounce "@".

Comida del día: lentejas
One of my favorite meals that my host mom cooked last semester was the Spanish version of lentils, which is a delicious soup that also involves potatoes, spinach, carrots, and other veggies.  I have yet to ask her for the recipe, but I decided to try to cook them for myself anyway.  My housemate Alberto gave me a cookbook called My Mother's Kitchen, but the recipe contained very few details and told me to put a whole onion, whole pepper, whole tomato, and whole head of garlic into a pot, add lentils, cover it with water, and wait.  I decided to cut up the veggies instead, which I think was a good call.  In the end they turned out edible, if a bit tasteless.  I'm going to make a point to ask my host mom for her recipe as soon as possible and to avoid Alberto's cookbook in the future.  I know I said I would try to share recipes this semester, but I'm going to hold off on this one for now!

Foto del día: 2 photos! It's finally feeling like spring in Granada, which means sunny warm afternoons and chilly nights, with differences by up to 40 degrees in the same day!  I've been enjoying the daytime weather though by doing some hiking inside and outside of Granada.  On one excursion, we took the bus uphill for an hour to arrive at the Sierra Nevada mountain range (in case you were wondering, the one in the US is named after the one in Spain, not the other way around).  Once there, we did some hiking, sledding and frolicking in the snow.  It hardly ever snows in Granada, but thankfully snow is always within an easy day trip.  I much prefer it to what happened in the US this winter: you can enjoy the snow whenever you have a free day without having to shovel at all!

The very next weekend, I decided to enjoy the sunny Granada weather instead of the snow, so I hiked up to a viewpoint I hadn't been to before.  It's been a while since I've shared one of Granada's beautiful views, but I never get tired of them!

In my last post I wrote about how fun it has been to live in an apartment with friends, and that continues to be the case.  I also want to discuss some other aspects of the apartment that are very different from apartments in the US and caused me some serious confusion at first:

1. To light the stove you have to turn on the gas and manually spark a lighter next to the burner, and then hopefully there are flames.  If you are like me and have never had a reason to use a lighter before, usually there aren't any flames, the kitchen ends up smelling like gas, and I end up with some very amused housemates.  I struggled with the stove for longer than I'd like to admit, but thankfully after 6 weeks I've finally gotten the hang of it!

2. To get hot water for a shower, you have to flip a switch in the kitchen to turn it on.  The water is heated by a gas tank which runs out about once a month, hopefully not while I'm in the shower!

3. There is no clothes dryer (this is very normal in Europe).  To dry clothes, we do it the primitive way on clotheslines and a drying rack on the porch.  On a sunny day, clothes dry in a couple of hours through the sustainable energy of the sun, and no one ever has problems with shrinking!

5. There is no heat.  This was rough for the cold month of February, but now things are starting to warm up.  Although Granada doesn't tend to get colder than 40 degrees, that's still a cold temperature to be without heat! We do have radiators/ space heaters that we can turn on, but electricity is extremely expensive in Spain so we try to minimize using them.  Instead, we wear layers and walk around the house looking ridiculous in fuzzy purple bathrobes.  Since it is so much warmer here during the day, there are also blind/ shutter type things on the outside of windows that you can put down as soon as the sun goes down to trap in all of the heat.

4. There is a dishwasher, which I like to brag about to my sister since she always complains about not having one.  It's half the size of any other dishwasher I've seen, but it definitely does trick.

In addition to enjoying the sunny weather and spending time with friends, I've also been going to classes and doing an internship.  This may be hard to believe since a third of the semester has gone by and I haven't mentioned one word about any of that, but I will try to make up for that now.  My course load this semester includes two classes at IES: Contemporary Spanish Theater and Women in Mediterranean Literature.  For the theater class, we get to go to nine theater shows in Granada throughout the semester, and I've already been to three.  The most interesting one was in a style called "micro-theater," in which we went to three mini shows that were 10-20 minutes each.  In between the shows, audience members hang out at the tapas bar across the street that's associated with the theater, and since the shows run every 20 minutes it's a very relaxed way to spend an evening.  The most interesting part of the shows is that they take place in tiny rooms with about 12 audience members and two to four actors, and at times the actors made very deliberate eye contact or acknowledged the presence of the audience so that the play almost felt like real life.  Apparently micro-theater is a new trend in cities like Madrid and Chicago, and this theater  in Granada is a first attempt to see if it can gain a following in a smaller, economic-crisis plagued city.  I for one enjoyed it and would definitely go back.

My other class at IES, Women in Mediterranean Literature, is actually taught in English.  It's been nice to be able to do the reading a bit more quickly and to remember how to write in English twice a week, plus we have some great class discussions.  I'm also doing one class in the education school at the University of Granada about elementary school music education.  It's a big improvement over my class at UGR last semester in which I spent four hours per week copying powerpoint slides and worrying about the final exam.  So far in this class, we've played a lot of fun rhythm games, and the professor is very welcoming and flexible which is also a nice change from last semester.  Since the class is more focused on group work than lectures I've been able to meet some of the other students, including a girl who is studying abroad from the Czech Republic and just so happens to live in the same building as me.

I'm also doing an internship this semester as a teaching assistant in English and music classes at an elementary school.  So far, I've mostly been assisting the teachers and observing, but I'm planning to start teaching more for the second half of the semester.  The music classes have been a lot of fun, especially since I've been able to directly apply many of the activities and ideas that I've learned about in my music education class.  The English classes are a bit more difficult because I am required to speak in English the whole time and the youngest kids can barely understand anything that I say.  I know that the only way to learn a new language is to be exposed to it as much as possible, but my job would be a lot easier if I could explain activities in Spanish.  However, this goes both ways: I've found that young kids are also for some reason really difficult for me to understand when they speak Spanish, probably because of a lack of annunciation.  Despite the lapses in communication, everyone usually ends up on the same page eventually (or at least within the same chapter).  Last week I taught "The Hokey Pokey" to a first grade class that was learning body parts.  They absolutely loved it, and hopefully in addition to learning a silly dance that American kids do, somebody will remember what "left hand" means