"The Future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."
- Eleanor Roosevelt
Cold. Lots of work. Stress. That can only mean finals are approaching. They're the first week of December, so they come a little bit earlier than they do at Wesleyan, but we do get a nice month off! That's pretty much what I've been telling myself, not that classes are overwhelming or are not entirely enjoyable, but I tend to freak out a little bit once this time comes. I'm trying to get ahead and start getting all my finals stuff done early. As of right now, I'm only doing an okay job at that. It's easy to tell that motivation can be very hard in Spain sometimes.
This is probably going to be a fairly boring post, as I haven't been up to much lately other than preparing for finals and a few trips.
The weekend was nice, though. Most of it was spent relaxing -- Friday was my super productive day, having finished the majority fo my short story final (just need to finish it and do my write-up, and also get it checked). Other than at night where I went to go visit Trinity for a little bit, I pretty much sat in my room and tried to get some work done. Given the results, I say I faired alright in that department, at least for Friday. I really need to get my butt into gear in the next two weeks.
Saturday, we took a small and cheap trip to El Escorial, a small city not too far from here that has La Valle de los Caidos (Valley of the fallen). We really only did two things that day, and that was visit el monastario and the Valley. The Monastary was quite impressive! It was similar to many of the other palacios and churches I've been to, but it kind of had a unique feel to it because of all the art that had it had. It was as if it was another art museum, with a royal feel to it 00 it had so many paintings that were literally everywhere, on the walls, canvas, etc. The construction was almost as nice as any Palacio I've seen. And what is it with Spain and amazing ceilings? How do they manage to get such beautiful works all the way up there?! Seriously. Las Catedrales (e iglesias), los Palacios, y ahora el monastario have shown me such amazing ceilings. I continue to be amazed at the Spanish art. The monastary had a huge library, too, and apparently it has one of the largest collections of older books. I think what was most impressive though was la basilica, where religious activities would take place. It wasn't exactly like a catedral since it lacked the sophisticated architecture and sculptures (and stained glass windows), but it was beautiful in its own way, with once again some amazing artwork on the ceilings. The art under the dome was particularly interesting, in the sense of...how do you get that up there?! Once again wasn't able to take pictures inside, but it was definitely worth seeing! We didn't even get to explore the gardens del monastario, because we had to catch a bus up to the valley!
So, after running out of the Monastario, we took a bus up the small mountain to La Valle de los Caidos. There is absolutely no way that any picture of this place could do it justice, and I'm not necessarily talking in regards to beauty (it was gorgeous, though), but simply the size. The monument was enormous! You don't realize just how small you are compared to it until you see it and stand next to it. The cross on top of the mountain is 152.4 meters tall (tallest one in the world). Inside the shrine, in other words inside the mountain beneat the cross, is really neat -- to think that all this could be constructed inside a mountain. These people must have been dwarves or something (who if you don't know, live and build their societies within caves), or we could just say that Francisco Franco was a psycho. It had some really cool sculptures and tapistry (all very, very religious). The crypt was a bit eery, very well constructed, but eery, for obvious reasons. We didn't see anything grotesque, but thousands and thousands of victims lie there, so it did kind of have a silent tone to it. We saw where Franco was buried, too. But they were awfully strict about taking pictures in there. They seriously had this one woman literally patrolling everywhere! Her eyes were almost everywhere at once. I was actually quite impressed, even though I obviously wanted to snap a few shots.
So other than that little excursion, I haven't been doing anything too exciting. I've got a trip to Granada coming up this weekend, and with the weather strangely turning nicer (and Granada supposedly have fantastic weather right now), it should be a nice trip. Maybe I'll even get to go swimming!
I've gotten my housing situation for IWU settled already. I don't know how we lucked out in this, but Chenna, Hannah, Abbie and I managed to grab a quad in Harriett. Magically opened up for us just in the nick of time. I'm really excited for this living arrangement! It's the nicest dorm on campus, and a good half of our suite from Dodds will be reuniting!
My English is getting really, really bad. When I'm writing/typing anything in English, there's about a million typos I have to go back and fix because of incorrect spelling, mixing it with Spanish occassional (I'm doing okay at that, though), and I'm confusing myself by trying to remember simple English rules. Like 'to, two, and too'! And 'there, their, and they're'! I can't even do that anymore! It's sometimes frustrating, because I'm usually pretty good about my grammar.
Probably won't update until after Granada, unless something uber cool happens! But I'll most likely be in my corner, studying and writing away...ha!
Hasta Luego!
~ LSquared
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