¡torpe!

My first post actually in Spain. Arrived last Thursday and, after groggily getting through a day with my host family, went off on a week-long trip through the southern province of Anadalucia. On the first full day we left Madrid at 8 am and made it to Granada, home of the famous Moorish castle called the Alhambra. It is an incredibly beautiful complex of middle-ages Muslim architecture, with lots of patios, water, and intricate decorations of geometric designs and calligraphy of Arabic verses from the Koran. Then a few days in the resort town of Nerja, which is pretty dead except for a bunch of old British tourists. Most nights consisted of finding the only bar open on a given night to be totally dead and enlivening it slightly with the entrance of our entire 40 person-strong program. A day trip to Malaga had us visiting Pablo Picasso's birthplace and a museum of his work that was fairly barebones, but, as with almost anything concerning Picasso, interesting and fun. Another trip to Ronda was focused around the Plaza de Toros there, as Ronda is one of the birthplaces of modern bullfighting; today's rules, which make the spectacle more dangerous for the torero, were first developed in Ronda. Hemingway also famously gave Ronda a shout-out in one of his books (our guide said that it's in For Whom The Bell Tolls, but I don't remember reading about Ronda when I read that book). After those three days it was on to Sevilla where we visited a cathedral (one of many more to come this semester, I'm sure) and went on a horse-driven carriage ride through the city. The highlight was probably an awesome dinner at a restaurant right on the river that runs through the middle of the city. Tapas, steak and flan - pretty perfect. The final stop was in Cordoba, which is home to the famous middle ages-era mosque, which was then converted to a cathedral to represent the Catholic domination over the Muslims. Cordoba is also the birthplace of Maimonides aka Rambam, who is memorialized by a statue in the Jewish area of the town. Now I'm finally in Madrid for more than just a few hours. More about that later once I begin to get settled.

The group itself seems like a good group of people with at least some who I can see as wanting to do the kinds of things I want to do in the city/country. Getting to know people has been unlike any other experience I've had getting to know people, as the program has a rule that everyone must speak only in Spanish. So not only are you trying to get over the normal awkwardness involved in getting to know new people, but you're dealing with the continued awkwardness of speaking in a foreign language that you only kind of know. As we came to say in what is really a bad translation of the word awkward: ¡torpe! (it's meaning is closer to clumsy than awkward, but it works). I have to admit that I occasionally experienced the same kind of fear I had when I first arrived in Barcelona in the spring of my senior year to live there for three months. Not knowing anybody in an environment that is in many ways alien can be pretty terrifying, but at least I've done it before. I think I generally feel more comfortable with myself than I did then (a lot of that confidence came from that trip, I think), so the fear was a lot less acute and lengthy than three years ago. However, I would be naive if I didn't expect that emotional experience to be ongoing.

From a cultural historical point of view, given that I've just visited a number of important sites of cultural clash in Spanish history, the representation of this history seems in flux. Nowhere is this more clear than at the mosque at Cordoba. While the official literature at the site refers to it as the Cathedral of Cordoba, everyone else refers to it as either "the mosque" or "the mosque and cathedral." Given the general liberalism of Spain, this might seem anachronistic Christian paternalism, which it is, but I suppose it makes sense in that this country is only 30-odd years removed from a Catholic, fascist dictatorship. Of perhaps deeper concern should be the general rhetoric of the Catholic-Muslim clash in Spain. Words like the Catholic "reconquista" (reconquest) and the Muslim "invasion" are loaded with understandings of who is actually Spanish and who is an outsider. Based on my readings and experiences in the country now and three years ago, racism is a big problem here. In Nerja I spoke to a young Morrocan who had been living in Spain for five years. When I told him that I was going to be studying in Madrid, he responded, "Don't go there. They're all racist there." Not that I'm taking him entirely literally, but his point of view does seem to resonate with everything else I've heard or seen. Like most of Europe, Spain is dealing with the difficulties of the immigration of a poor and often darker-skinned group of people. Given Spain's history, however, the way people discuss its history (and particularly the terms they use) likely has particular resonance for this modern social and political problem.

Alright, that's enough for now. Coming soon: my host mother's theory on the March 11, 2004 bombings in Madrid, first impressions of Madrid, spending all my money on Spanish guitars...