Segovia and Toledo

I think I might regret not writing sooner because many things I think I may have already forgotten.  Like usual here in Spain, I have done a million and a half things that were very new and interesting.  Last weekend I went to Joy, which is a night club (unfortunately mainly american) that is in a theater down by Sol.  Saturday and Sunday I went on day trips and during the week I tried to survive class.  This weekend I'm trying to save money and get ahead in class because I'm going with my roommates Rob and Andy to Paris.

So Saturday I went to Segovia.  Pretty cool small town that's only about an hour from Madrid.  There are three main things in Segovia:  a cathedral, a castle and a roman aqueduct.  I've been spelling that last word wrong for the last week and spell checker's been harassing me so I finally looked up how to spell it.  By far the coolest thing in Segovia was the Roman aqueduct.  It was really impressive to see how ingenious the engineering was behind it and how large it was.  The castle and the cathedral were also impressive, but I did not care for either as much as the aqueduct.  The cathedral was quite large and had some cool organs, but I felt it was very threatening on the outside, maybe a sign of the time it was built.  The castle did not feel like what I think of when I think of a castle.  However, that I attribute to it being a Spanish castle and most of the ones I think of are probably French or English.  Even though the castle or cathedral were too impressive, the views were.  We went on a cold cloudy day, which seems like it would be bad, but as it cleared up in the afternoon, we had great views of the surrounding hillsides with cloud shadows and rays of sunshine streaming across the fields.  One thing that cannot be forgotten about Segovia is there pig.  Not just any pig, the cochinillo.  Cochinillo is the Spanish word for suckling pig.  Now that freaks me out a bit, thinking about the whole pig being laid out for you to eat.  However, I told myself I had to do it.  That is until I found out how expensive they were.  Then I ended up settling for another place and eating cochifrito, which is the same thing, but cut into smaller pieces.  I liked it, but not enough to go out of my way to find it, or even order it again for that matter.  It was just for the novelty.  For those of you who want to know what it was like, keep reading, others, just skip to the next ridiculously long paragraph.  It was cut into small pieces that could be separated from skin and meat.  However, the best part was the skin, crispy yet leathery, so it was best to eat them together.  The process of eating the pieces was quite a hassle because there were so many little bones you had to watch out for.  I missed most of them, but probably not all of them.  Also, I got a treat and so did my roommate.  Rob got one side of the jaw and I got a little white gland shaped like a kidney.  Your guess is as good as mine as to what it was.

Sunday I went to Toledo.  I was looking forward to seeing the difference between Toledo, Ohio and Toledo, Spain, and I must admit, they were quite different.  The city is on one hill (at least for the most part and it is really only the old part of the city) and it is surrounded by a river and a wall.  There are four bridges I believe, all of which are centuries old, to get from the surrounding hills to the center of the city.  I have some nice pictures on Picasa of course which you can look at at your leisure.  The city was very tiny and filled with small alleys and old churches.  Apparently at one time there were something like 30 monasteries that basically made up the population of Toledo, which made many people not want to live there since they would be in constant fear of God watching them.  Again there were many impressive views, but I was not too impressed by the town.  It felt very old and like it was only a tourist spot.  If there had been some other attraction, I could have lived there because it was so peaceful and austere.  Here I decided I needed some cheese before lunch.  The tour guide left us for too long and my brain started getting hungry and making bad decisions.  I went in a store and asked for Manchego cheese.  The woman told me 10 euros/kg.  I was like ok, that sounds reasonable, I can pay 10 euro for a wheel of cheese that will last me a real long time.  Well, turns out the wheel of cheese was 2 kilos, so I ended up paying 20 euro!  I don't believe I will ever spend that much on cheese again (but one never knows).  The church there was also quite impressive, but much more so than the one in Segovia.  It followed the same layout, but this one had a room with a lot of gilded objects and old bibles, a room full of pictures of bishops dating back to the first century, and a lot of artwork by el greco.  El Greco is Spanish for the Greek.  He was named this because he had a name that was almost unpronounceable and he was the only Greek in Toledo.  We got to see one of his famous paintings of someone being buried and I really have never liked a piece of artwork so much.  There was a lot of meaning behind it and I was glad to have the tour guide along to help describe it (this was a school trip and that's why we had a tour guide, the Segovia one was just some friends who got together).

I feel like I had some more to say, but that's about all that happened this week.  Class continued and I got an abono mensual for the metro (monthly pass).  Now all I have to do is get through next week.  Oops, I remembered.  I signed up to teach a section of ESL thinking that there was a teacher and I was an assistant.  Nope.  I'm the teacher and I have to come up with lesson plans for people who don't speak english.  Great.  I'll tell you how it goes.