Several Nice Meals

So this post isn't nearly as interesting as my last one. Sorry. There are pictures, though. Mostly of food.

So after we got back from Xàtiva Saturday we went to the Año Nuevo Chino, by the way, Happy Chinese New Year, celebration that happens in Valencia. I think it would have been fun, and it certainly was an interesting experience, but it was... poorly organized. It only took place on one street and there were A TON of people in that street. I am not sure I have ever been in a place as crowded as that street. I counted a couple of times, and if I wasn't touching six people at a time, I felt pretty lucky. I don't think these pictures quite capture the essence of how crowded it was, but they might give you an idea

You see those people up on the balcony?

We hate those people.

No, so we're sitting here so squished together that I don't actually have to put any effort into remaining vertical, and I can barely see anything. And like 30 minutes after the parade is supposed to have started, we finally hear the performers coming our direction, because we were at the very end of the route, and so then some dragon people come up, and do a little performance, but only one of the dragons comes near us and the other just turns around before it gets to us.

But it was still pretty cool.

And then we saw some people do tai chi

And there was a band, which I don't think had a single person of Asian heritage in it.

                                      

But again, pretty good. Lots of drums. And then they came and sat down at the end of the parade route and just sat. 

And the tai chi people went again. And the Spanish lady next to me (by this time I had worked my way up to the barrier by the street. Only 4 people touching me. Victory!) was yelling at the police officer trying to get him to do something about the fact that none of the rest of the parade was coming our way and the tai chi people were performing for the seventh time, and it was just insane. 

There were a couple of interesting things about the experience, though. First, was that both watching and in the parade, there were more Spaniards than Chinese people. I mean, it was obvious that the Chinese community of Valencia had come out, but there were still more Spaniards. I'm not sure why, but it was interesting. 

The other thing is that I don't think Americans would have been that close. When I went to the Macy's parade in New York, it was nothing like that crowded. Obviously, I think that has something to do with organization and a longer parade route, but I wasn't as close to Mitch at Thanksgiving as I was to total strangers Sunday night. The only thing I had to compare it to was getting on a REALLY CROWDED UGA bus, and then the driver has to yell at people to get them that close to each other, and the Spaniards, while not happy, were not nearly as antagonistic as the Americans were. One thing about Spain is that I am learning a lot about culture, both American and Spanish. I've learned that Americans are loud, which I never really noticed before, but is striking here, and that Americans like their space. We don't do as much physical contact, and we tend to have a much bigger "bubble" than Europeans. It's interesting.

So after realizing that I wasn't going to see much, I went back to the dorm and chilled (wrote a blog post) and went to bed. 

I woke up late Sunday and spent most of the day doing homework and on my breaks I went up to the roof and read Lord of The Rings. 

I finally got done with my essays just in time to go to our Taste of Home Sunday dinner. This is one of my favorite traditions that we've started here in Valencia. Every Sunday we go somewhere for lunch, though I think we're shifting to dinner. It's a different restaurant every time, and we go for food that you don't usually get in Spain, something more American. It's a great tradition to me, because every now and then I do crave more American food, even though I try to experience the Spanish food, and Taste of Home is a good way to get the craving taken care of while having fun and a nice communal meal. 

This Sunday was pizza, and it was especially fun. We met in the lobby at 8:30 and headed to this classy Italian restaurant and got there at 8:40, only to be told that it didn't open until 9. So we waited outside for a little bit, looked at the menu, got told by an old Spanish man that we looked like models, and then finally went inside. 

It was really cool. We went up to the 3rd story of the restaurant and sat at this table all together and a couple of people got wine and we all ordered personal pizzas (ham and bacon and arugala, which apparently some people call "rocket" so that's weird.)

And it was delicious and we just had a great evening talking and laughing and telling silly stories about people and trips and life. It was all very gemütlich, and that's the best I can describe it. 

After somehow eating all of our pizza, we all got desert, because why not?

I went with the cheesecake, which was definitely a good decision, but everybody else got different deserts and we split them, or they shared and I gave them some of my cheesecake. 

But it all looked pretty good

Well, this one wiggled. Seriously. But no one seemed to complain, just laugh a bit.

And so after like 3 hours of dinner we came back to the dorm through the Plaza de la Reina. Valencia's really lovely at night,

and it was a great walk back. And then I realized it was midnight and I still had to learn about Ernest Hemingway and Spain. Whoops.

So the next morning I woke up and went to class. We talked about some news and then all gave little presentations about various "hispanistas" people not from Spain who nonetheless have written and studied about it extensively, which was interesting. They were all interested in different things, but I am kind of jealous of all of them.

Then in Cine class we talked about El espíritu del la colmena, and Jess and I gave a presentation, which I think went fairly well. I hope so anyway. Then we talked about symbolism and the character traits. It was a very interesting film. Very stark, very European, very... tight. It had a purpose and it conveyed it.

After we talked about that, we watched part of the tv miniseries "el pícaro" the pícaro is... the translation you'd get in a dictionary is "rogue", but it's a stock character from literature that I'm much more familiar with as the Fool from Shakespeare. The pícaro is this fascinating mix of a natural fool (what dorks call characters in Shakespeare who are dumb and trip a lot and are supposed to make you laugh and are the butt of everyone's jokes) and the professional fool (someone pays him to sing songs and make jokes). The pícaro is not a professional jester, nor is he wealthy or anything, and he typically has to go through a lot of bad stuff, but unlike the natural fool he is always very clever. He likes to cook up crazy schemes, and he may be poor and lazy, but he's smart. Like Shakespeare, literature, and indeed this miniseries, use the fool or the pícaro to make a point. There's always some sort of social commentary. Professional fools especially are there to speak truth to power, and there's an element of that in the pícaro too, however much he lies. We've been talking about pícaros in lit as well as film class.

So this thing we watched was really interesting. It was very typical pícaro, so lots of gags, lots of stealing, lots of schemes, lots of laughs, but it was also made in the very last year of Franco's reign, when people were getting restless, and the movie really highlighted that. It took this very classic Spanish character that the censors couldn't really object to, and turned it into a way to comment on society under Franco. El espíritu de la colmena had similar thinly-veiled criticism in it, but it was very bleak, while this was funny and accomplished the same kinds of criticism. It is fascinating to me how they can achieve the same thing in such different ways.

So then I came home, ate lunch, and did some homework. In Elena's class we talked about art, focusing on Bosch and some of his stuff. There was some interesting religion since the paintings depicted the seven deadly sins and the garden of Eden. Afterwards we had our weekly meeting, and then I came home and chilled and did more homework.

Today I got up and went to class where we talked about Neoclacisism and how the Spanish King stopped being Austrian and wound up as French, and how they didn't like novels or happiness or interesting plot lines in the eighteenth century. They wrote essays, and listened to Aristotle. Ugh.

Then we came back and went to a paella cooking class. That was awesome. Paella was actually invented in Valencia, and so now I know how to cook it and when I get back I'll try to cook it for y'all.
So we started with this big pan

And some ingredients

And we got aprons

The lady in the background is our teacher.

chicken paella today.

So we got the recipes and the teacher gave us some background and then we started preparing the paella

First, olive oil

Cook the chicken

And then I was stirring for the next part, so I don't have pictures of that, but some green beans, and some other beans and some water later

It looked sort of like that. 

And then there wasn't much left to do so we went to go sit down at a quite nice place where we would then eat the paella

And here's a blurry picture of the finished product!

It was really tasty. And then we had desert and came home and I wrote this blog.
I don't suspect that anything else will be happening to me today, but Thursday I'm going to Toledo, so if nothing else, you'll get a post about that within the next week.

Besos y abrazos!