Trip to the States

I'm going to a research conference next week in Baltimore with my group! It's an international conference held every three years, rotating between the US, Europe, and Japan, called Fundamentals of Adsorption. (Adsorption is basically the adhesion of atoms or particles to a surface. I study adsorption of hydrogen on microporous materials.)

From our group, the PI, a researcher/lecturer, and three other grad students are attending, as well as our experimental collaborators in Oviedo (northern Spain). I'll be presenting a poster at a poster session, and otherwise attending other talks, poster sessions, dinners, etc.!

Afterwards we're spending a couple of days in Washington, DC, with the entire group, and then the three other PhD students and I are going to New York for a few days. This will be my first time in Baltimore and DC, and the first time in the US for all the other three students, and for one of them his first time out of Spain. I'm looking forward to being a guide and seeing what they think of the US, after having spent all year with them in Spain! It will also be a little weird, being in the US more as a visitor/tourist, and being out of Spain for the first time in 4 months.

In any case, I'll be back in 2 weeks, at which point I will update you on my trip and on my final month in Spain!!

Day in Córdoba

Last Saturday I took a day trip to Córdoba, one of the other major cities in Andalucía, less than two hours away from Sevilla. I've been meaning to go all year!

This weekend the Patios (courtyards) festival was going on in Córdoba. For this festival, families and institutions decorate the courtyards of their homes and buildings with tons of colorful flowers, fountains, birds, etc. Viewing the patios is free and open to the public, and the best-decorated patio wins a prize.

I went with two other Fulbright girls (one researching frog ecology in Sevilla and the other researching immigration and public health in Granada) and one of their friends who's working temporarily in Sevilla. We saw a few patios (see pictures below!), the famous mezquita (mosque), the Palacio de Viana (palace that has 13 patios), and the synagogue (built in the 1300s).

You can probably tell from the pictures that it was perfectly sunny that day. It was also pretty hot - summer has most definitely arrived here in the south. Highs have been regularly in the upper 80s - hot! But people here are quick to remind you that in July and August in Sevilla, it easily gets up to 50 C (122 F)!

One of the patios in Córdoba - flowers everywhere! and tourists.

Inside the mezquita (mosque)

Salmorejo - a soup originating from Córdoba, made of tomatoes, bread, olive oil, vinegar, and garlic. Similar to gazpacho but thicker.

Fulbright friends

Watch

I've been wearing a watch ever since 1st grade or so, and whenever I forget my watch or it runs out of batteries, it's pretty disrupting to me. A few months ago, the chain on my watch broke. For the first few days, it was awful. But for the rest of the months since then...I've realized I haven't missed my watch at all. Not one bit. A lot of the reason is probably that I'm on the computer at the lab all day and have the time right there, and in general I have fewer appointments than usual. But I feel like part of it is adopting some of the laidback Spanish culture where people aren't rushing to places and jam-packing their schedules and micro-managing their time, and where things just happen when they happen. Of course, that's a big overgeneralization, but I think my watch habits are indicative.

Day trip to Jerez

Last Wednesday I had the day off for Día del Trabajador (Labor Day), so I met up with my friend Lauren (Fulbrighter in Cádiz) in Jerez de la Frontera, a little city in the province of Cádiz between Sevilla and Cádiz city.

We saw the alcázar, a Moorish fortress/palace dating from the 11th century. There's an Alcázar in Sevilla, and the one in Jerez looks like a little play-size one in comparison. :)  We had a nice lunch at a random little restaurant on a plaza: gazpacho (cold tomato-based soup) and cazón (dogfish, a type of shark), cooked with a tomato and pepper sauce. We also took a tour of the Tío Pepe bodega (winery), the best-selling brand of sherry wine in the world. Jerez is famous for its vino de Jerez (sherry wine) - a type of white wine with versions ranging from dry and light to dark and sweet. The microclimate around Jerez is such that this small region of Cádiz is the only place in the world where sherry wine can be produced! We saw the grounds and also got to taste some wine: one really dry and one really sweet.

At the alcázar in Jerez de la Frontera

Tío Pepe bodega - vino de Jerez (sherry wine) aging in American oak barrels

Wine tasting

In any case, it was gorgeous weather and a very carefree day and trip. I have a feeling I'm going to miss days like this next year! I'm trying not to count down, but I have less than two months until I go home, and I'm starting to get to the point where I don't want to leave Spain!

Learning Spanish, part II: more musings

This is now by far the longest I've been immersed in the Spanish language, and I'm loving it. I have enough time here that I can make the same mistake 30 times before I finally get it right, and that I can learn a really random word one day, and it comes in handy in a different situation months later. Phrases and grammatical structures come out of my mouth that I didn't realize I had learned. A few months ago I felt like I had hit a roadblock and wasn't improving at all but now...I feel like I'm flying. Most of the time, that is.

Mostly I'm getting a ton of oral practice, with my roommates, at the lab, and with friends, since most of my friends here are Spanish. I almost never write in Spanish though, and as for reading, I usually read the newspaper on the metro (I buy actual newspapers at the stand outside the metro stop haha) and a book in Spanish at night. I love running into words and phrases I don't know and having to pick them up from context, since that really rarely happens in English. And again, I have enough time here that I can incorporate those new words and phrases into my speech.

One phrase that shows how far I've come and how long I've had here is the phrase "en plan". It's a colloquial phrase that means something like "in a manner" or "like" or "kind of". It's hard to explain, and that's why it's taken me so long to learn! Here's an example that I just overheard at the lab - one girl was asking another if she had used a certain computer program, and the second responded: "lo he usado pero nunca en plan serio." - "I've used it but never really seriously / but never in a serious manner / but never, like, seriously". I first noticed this phrase this fall because I heard it everywhere, but I didn't even know what people were saying - one word? two words? did it end in n or m? I had an in-depth conversation with my roommates about what it meant, and kept listening for it and hearing it, and have since had a few more in-depth conversations. Anyway, after several months now, it's incorporated into my speech! At least, I'm pretty sure I'm using it right.

A couple of other random observations:

- Really early on (back in September) I started saying the word/noise "huy", which is what people here say involuntarily as a reaction to something unexpected and not good, for example if you run into something, if you drop something, start to cross the street and realize a car is coming, etc.
- I recently played Spanish Bananagrams for the first time, with some people in my group. None of them had even heard of it, and they ended up loving it. Anyway, I thought I was going to be at a terrible disadvantage...but after a few games, I ended up winning a lot of the rounds! I realized my vocabulary's larger than I thought, and also that k and w are incredibly rare in Spanish.

la Feria: one crazy week

I had a blast at la Feria last week. If you recall: Feria is a week-long festival that takes place on the Feria grounds - a big, open space with roads throughout. Around Feria, casetas (tents) are set up along the roads, so it ends up looking like a little village. Each caseta is owned/run by a group of people, and each person pays throughout the year to be a member. During Feria, these people can enter their caseta whenever they want and invite whomever they want. Inside the caseta it's like a little bar/restaurant.

Ana, a PhD student in my lab, is a member of a caseta; the original group of people owning this caseta all worked at the bank where her dad used to work. I was extremely lucky that she invited me to her caseta for Feria!

I first went Monday - the first night of Feria - where everyone dresses up (in normal clothes), eats pescaito frito (fried fish) for dinner, and sees the alumbrá (lighting up of the main entrance way and of the lights throughout the Feria grounds).

Lunes de pescaito, in Ana's caseta, with Ana and Juanjo from the lab and Ana's sister and her boyfriend

Tuesday and Wednesday I went the entire day, from afternoon until early morning. Starting Tuesday, all the women and girls wear their trajes de gitana (Feria dresses), and I got to wear a dress that Ana lent me and that her mom adjusted for me! The days consisted of sitting or standing around tables in the caseta, talking with friends of Ana (from the lab, from school, and her family), and getting up every once in a while to dance sevillanas or to take a walk around the Feria grounds. Basically the way it works is it's really hot, you're wearing a long heavy dress, and you dance sevillanas, so you're thirsty, so you drink glasses and glasses of rebujito (Manzanilla white wine mixed with 7-Up) since that's what you drink at Feria, and since you're drinking constantly, you eat constantly - I had so much Spanish food in just a few days! Pescaito frito, tortilla, croquetas, jamón, queso, aceitunas gordales, revueltos, lagrimitas de pollo, almendras fritas, montaditos...

With people from the lab

Again, sevillanas is the traditional folk dance that everyone dances at Feria. It's danced in partners, and the steps are set (ie you don't need to make up your own sequence of moves). Here is a Youtube video (wait 10 seconds) to give you an idea - it's a really fluid dance, with lots of arm movement, and can be really showy if you want. I had learned the steps from Ana in the lab and gotten some help from another Fulbrighter who's in Sevilla this year studying flamenco, so by the time I got to Feria I knew enough to be able to pick up the rest and dance pretty convincingly I think. In any case, everything came a lot easier in the atmosphere of the caseta, with the music, wearing the dress with the ruffles, with everyone else dancing, and with some rebujito.

Dancing sevillanas with Elena

This is probably the only festival I've been to where the absolute only objective is to have a good time and enjoy spending time with your friends and family, for hours and days on end. I think if I had just gotten to Spain and gone to Feria, I would have found it weird and overwhelming, but now that I've been in Spain for months...it all just makes a lot of sense.

And because you can only take so many days of the intensity of Feria, I went with some other people in the group to Sanlúcar de Barrameda, a town on the coast in the province of Cádiz, for the rest of the week. We enjoyed hanging out at the beach, cooking at home, playing board games, going out, staying up late... so that made for one week of total, complete fiesta! (oh, with a day and a half of work thrown in somewhere in there, in true Spanish fashion. :)

Feria this week

Feria starts this week, on Monday! Feria in Sevilla is a week-long festival. Lots of towns in Andalucía have their own Feria sometime in the spring or summer, but Sevilla's is probably the biggest and best-known.

The bulk of Feria in Sevilla takes place in casetas (tents) located in a big open space in the neighborhood of Los Remedios, which incidentally is very close to my apartment. Each caseta is owned by a group of families or a company, and holders of the casetas invite their friends and family to their caseta during Feria. From what I gather, it's basically a big party with all your friends and family where you eat, drink rebujito (7-Up mixed with white wine), talk, and dance sevillanas, a traditional folk dance from Sevilla.

I'm lucky enough that one of the girls in my lab has a caseta in the family (actually, it's the bank's where her dad used to work), and she invites the people from the lab every year. So, I'll get to experience Feria from the inside! She's also lending me a dress (a typical Feria dress - brightly colored with polka dots, form fitting with lots of ruffles at the bottom) and all the accessories (shawl, flower for your hair, jewelry). For the past week she's also been giving sevillanas lessons to me and another labmate after work, and I've gotten some help also from another Fulbrighter here in Sevilla who's studying flamenco here (and used to teach sevillanas classes in New York!)

Basically I'm super excited for this week. Stay tuned for details. :)