Visit Spain

Salamanca

~ mjparman ~ Leave a comment

and longing, and grad school, and falling in love

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Salamanca, an old university city, was the second study abroad program-led trip I went on.

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As if, at that point (early March 2015), I didn’t want to return to the US already, the university town made the longing to stay even worse.

An architecture fan’s wonderland, I was falling fast down the rabbit hole of love.

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The city has two super famous cathedrals, several historical noble residences, and more beautiful moldings than a girl could manage to be anything but dazzled by.

There is a library of forbidden entrance on the city’s famous university campus, filled with books so old they cannot be handled in normal air, the handlers wearing respirators, gloves, and lab coats. The library’s door has a room of glass built around it, so only a few people can step in and look at the library at a time, unable to truly enter. It sparked my curiosity something fierce. I daydream about being allowed to look closer at those books. What would I have to do to don a pair of latex gloves and touch one?

That very desire, to stay and look closer, called so loudly ¡MIRANDITA, VENGA! Run away to Salamanca.

I’ve been looking into grad school lately, and as I scroll through the admissions pages of Kansas University and Boston College, I keep thinking about the room on the Universidad de Salamanca campus, draped in red, housing antique chairs with plush cushions and wooden arms, where master’s students presented their thesis. I can’t do anything but want to be a part of something so grand, knowing full well my Spanish isn’t that good, and I could Never afford it.

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Then there was the chapel in the uni with the illuminated altar. Imposing and alluring. Catholicism, so fascinating to a mouthy girl who grew up an Evangelical Christian in a small West Texas cow town, beautiful in it’s demand for reverence. Here it was dark and striking on the grounds of a university I was salivating over.

The chapel just deepened the STAY message ticker-taping through my brain. A chapel that students, former and current, get married in. A chapel students have been attending services in for longer than my family has been in the United States. The history and drama as intoxicating as the Caterpillar’s smoke. I truly felt like Alice, so lost in this strange land, but I had no desire to make it home. I wasn’t being taught a lesson about being content. I was being show a bright world where there had been queens, and knights, and grave consequences for dalliances with the local ladies of the night*. I was falling in love with a country that felt like home, where I was engaged and lit up. I wanted to follow the white rabbit of fascination around forever in Spain. I’ve been thinking about that a lot again.

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*this ancient edifice, an entry to the university, is a 1500s code of conduct for the university. It forewarns students against using the services of the only women really in the city at that point- prostitutes. I’ll have to do a whole post over this someday, it was wild interesting.

Toledo by morning

~ mjparman ~ Leave a comment

There it was.
The Hapsburg double-headed eagle.

I have spent most of my life enraptured in the opulence and tragedy of the story of Marie Antoinette, and as I got older and my reading options expanded I started digging through the story of her family– the Hapsburg emperors.

The Hapsburg family was so large and powerful, there ended up being two ruling branches of it- the Spanish and the Austrian.

Toledo was my first adventure outside of Madrid with my study abroad program, ISA. There was the seal of the Hapsburgs, the double headed eagle, staring back at me from everywhere.

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The city had been the royal seat and the Spanish capital under the Hapsburg dynasty, and their seal is everywhere– now the city seal, the double headed eagle regally marks where you find yourself now.

I was awed, standing ahead of my group, having unknowingly come along to a place full of a history so dear to me.

Then there was the cathedral, San Juan de los Reyes.

I was enthralled with the patio, full of citrus trees, the columns and walls carved incredibly: unicorns, dragons, centaurs hidden amongst the stone vines.

I could have stayed in that passage way for hours, just finding all the little quirky carvings. I hope to someday be able to do just that.
This was the trip where my character introduction line (like Superman’s “Its a bird, its a plane!”) was begun: “¡Mirandita, venga!”

I lulled to the back of the group. I kept quiet. I soaked in the detail, lingering over art and architecture- running my fingers over mythical figures that had been carved before even the Spanish set foot in Texas- until the last member of my group exited the room, then scurried after.

That is the overarching feeling I have in/about Spain: I just want to stop and watch. I am not a quiet person, but when my attention has been caught, oh lord, let me watch.

 

Good, good Toledo.

 

The Time I Drove

~ mjparman ~ Leave a comment

So, one of the, like, five times I missed something from home while abroad it was driving. Where I live in the US I commute back and forth to work 30 minutes everyday, and I miss public transportation (namely the metro) All The Time.
However, in Spain I just sort of craved getting behind the wheel sometimes. Some nights waiting for my line to come just took to long, or I wanted to dart somewhere real quick without seeing anyone, or just turn up the music real high and go exploring.

So, in February on a spontaneous trip to the Shangri La that is the island of Mallorca, my roommate Emma and I rented a Fiat 500 from the most casual rental place along the beach in the Arenal part of the island, and I got to live the fantasy of being a Fiat owner for a day. That’s a dream my friend, and I got to live it.

Now, if you had Emma tell about this day (namely, my driving) it would probably be a lot less rosy than my version, but stay with me here.
We took that sweet baby car and drove it up into the mountains through some of the twistiest roads I have ever driven on. I drove faster than my counterpart may have been comfortable with. ::Coughs:: It was like the most beautiful parts of New Mexico and Colorado, but warm and beyond the mountains– not plains but blue, a wild blue, the sea.
(If you want to see the wild blue https://www.instagram.com/p/zODwIxHIlG/?taken-by=neverneutral)

09 Terraced olive tree fields
In Mallorca, along the thin line of highway, they have terraced fields full of bright colored flowers, olive trees, and many of the villages on the highway up to this big look out point have citrus trees filling their back yards, all of which were in bloom… in February.

The scent filtering in through the air vents, a feeling not unlike lust starting to make my brain swim. Before I left to study abroad, so many people told me I’d fall in love in Spain, and I did– again and again, with Spain itself.

Driving through the itty bitty little ancient streets of Sóller, that were never intended for the unfathomable automobile, weaving through residentials peeking into tiny back yards so full of citrus trees it was like something made up in a writer’s fever dream.

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Getting stuck in a circle of one-way streets when all we needed was the high way, and then driving down a TERRIFYING glorified foot path of a street with a 40 foot drop to one side into a swiftly moving creek, up a steep incline: it was great.I took a picture of that teency road just in case we lived, to prove I had done it. Survive Sóller 2015 √

(the foot path here)

We took the big, major highway home: much straighter and punctuated by a very hot toll booth worker. I’ll take it.

We’ll have to do a recap of my whole trip to Mallorca sometime, it was pretty magical. I would say my best vacation ever.