Sagunto, October 22

It has been a while since I have written, yes, but I figured it would only bore you to hear of how little has been going on here. However, I've had a few randomly interesting experiences over the last two weeks. One of them was the surreal experience of going all the way back to San Francisco just to pick up my visa because of a consulate difficulty--at three days in the air and three there, it earned the dubious distinction of the shortest trip to the US in the history of the school.

Another has been teaching this conversational English class to high schoolers three afternoons a week. Each of these classes is entirely different, and they're all very curious about the US, California in particular. Lucky them, that's where I'm from. What's amusing is that two of the groups just want basic vocabulary on how to not get lost in a city, etc--the other very specifically wanted to know everything there is to know about having fun in Los Angeles and Hollywood. That group also had really random questions about where "Springfield" is. With my roughly hand-drawn map on the chalkboard, I felt the need of a good US map terribly. I may buy one in Carrefour this Friday.

We had our first choir performance this last Sabbath, to kick off Week of Prayer. The speaker took so long first service that by the time it was our turn to sing, we didn't do nearly as well as we could have. The teacher, frustrated, managed it so that second service, we sang before the sermon. It sounded much, much better.

That afternoon, I did something really stupid. Bored and curious about the castle that had been staring down at us the entire time here, my friends Jenny and Lillian went with me to explore the castle which crowns the town of Sagunto. Why was this stupid? Because only an idiot would not recognize that the looming dark gray clouds meant rain. This registered on a very theoretical level, but we were too eager to have fun to pay it much mind.

We had a great time exploring the castle. It is a beautiful old thing, a mixture of Roman and Gothic architecture, and surrounded by cactus, oddly enough. We took all kinds of pictures, enjoyed the view, and then. . . came the rain. It came lightly at first, merely refreshing. Then it fell in great drops, slickening the path so that Jenny fell and twisted her knee. I had prepared for rain, but she had not--I lent her my umbrella, as I had a good rain coat, but I had left the raincoat's hood way back at the dorm.

Pretty soon, all three of us were waterlogged, stopping in a supermarket to dry off. Lillian got a plastic bag to cover her head, but it did not do much good. Shivering, cold, and wet, we could hardly see the way back over the bridge to the road that led to the school. Much to our profound joy, someone from the school was driving along and that road, saw us, and took us back up to the dorm, making us vow to put on dry clothes and never try to go to the castle in the rain again. No argument there--that is burned in my brain as something I will never, ever do again.

Since then, it's been a fairly routine round of classes, though today we had the fun of performing Spanish folk songs in Folklore class. Much to my consternation, both my group and another picked the same song, Mar y Cielo, but it turned out all right in the end, when the teacher had us combine to teach it to everyone. The video of that is online--we certainly had a good time with that.

Please pray for me to learn patience. I have become frustrated with two things: the rain, and the habit my deans have of locking the doors of the dorm during the Week of Prayer meetings. I would go to worship even if the door weren't locked, but it just makes me irritable to feel like they don't trust me enough to do this on my own. It tempts me to spend the worship hour somewhere else on the grounds writing just to make a point, even though I know in my head that would be counterproductive. It's a part of Adventist culture I've had the good fortune to avoid so far, but is just a part of the way things work here.

At the very least, I'll have a week to cool off from this as myself and the other ACA students travel to Andalucia starting this Monday. We will see all kinds of things I'd always dreamed about seeing in Spanish class back in the states, like Seville, Granada, Cordoba, and even a small bit of Morocco. I hear there's lots of sun in Andalucia; I certainly hope so, as the unseasonable rain here is really starting to get me down. When I saw the sun yesterday, I nearly cried, it was so beautiful.

Hope life is treating all of you well, with lots of sunshine and good music.

Valencia, October 4

That's right--I've decided, since I'm going to be here so long, to dispose of this whole "Part 1, 2, 3" business. On Thursday I had the pleasure of my first trip into Valencia, and wow, it was amazing. . . my pedometer read 26,000 steps at the end of the day, but the tiring effort was well worth it.

Valencia is a feast for the lover of architecture. I'm not just talking about the Gothic, Baroque, and Neoclassical buildings dotting the place (which are incredibly awesome, but scattered all over Europe, after all), but some of the amazingly streamlined modern buildings of the city as well. They have a concert hall, for example, that looks like a spaceship suspended over a crystal sea. It's in the middle of a complex of beautiful, futuristic buildings which oddly mix well with the well-tended gardens next to them. It reminded me, for some reason, of the Ghetti Museum in Los Angeles.

The Valencia Cathedral was really cool, too, though. The first part of it was built in the 300's--it blows me away to think that there's really churches that old that have been worshiping continuously for such a long time, and still do. I soaked in the mix of Gothic, Baroque, and Neoclassical styles, and climbed the tower of Micalet. Wow, that's a lot of stairs, and I feel really sorry for whoever had the job of ringing bells there before they were all mechanized (talk about mixing athleticism with musicianship), but the view from the top was well worth it. To take the trip with me, check out the video on the website.

At the cathedral door, we got to witness the Council of the Waters, where anyone with a water dispute can come to the judges there, and they will deal with it on the spot. They do this every Thursday, and anyone can come. No one had a water complaint this time out, and no wonder--if they do this every week, they must be very efficient at dealing with it.

After that, we saw a very old Gothic-style bank, the best-preserved in Spain, and then got turned loose on the city to enjoy all kinds of free time. I had the joy of trying Spanish horchata for the first time, which is nothing like the US version--it's much thicker, much richer, and made from almond, not rice. And it's GOOD. We also had some gelato, and went shopping--as in looked in all the shops without buying much.

We had Friday to recuperate from this and go to class, and Sabbath morning to enjoy church, then we had another fabulous adventure. At the bidding of our Folklore class, we walked all the way to Sagunto to see the Fiesta de Moros y Cristianos.

Okay, we have parades in the States, but nothing like this. When our teacher said it was a relatively short parade, I didn't expect a 2-hour spectacle with hundreds of participants, all kinds of amazing, glittery costumes (which unfortunately didn't photograph well in the poor light), and all kinds of marching bands. And this parade was only the first half of it, where the Moors come in to conquer the city--this morning (which I missed) was when the Moors and the Christians are supposed to fight, and the Christians win with the help of St. James. Just seeing the half I did, though, was absolutely amazing. The marching was far more precise than almost anything I've ever seen in the States, and there was dancing as well--they used a lot more people just walking and showing off their costumes than they did parade floats, though there were a few of those, too.

There were all kinds of instruments, some of which even after a life time of hanging out with a music teacher, I can't identify. All in all, I have to reflect--they do spectacle way better as amateurs than Disney does as a professional company. Go figure.

Anyways, as you can imagine, I slept a solid nine hours after I got back. Between the festival and the trip to Valencia, we've all certainly had an interesting, and a physically exhausting time of it. Hope life is treating you well, and that you've had as good a time this weekend as I have.

Justin Day 2008

To those of you who are new to Jillian's Journeys this year, every now and then I take a break from the travelogue posts to mark a special occasion or to honor something or someone who has made a difference in my life.

This post is dedicated to my brother Justin, who would be 22 today if he had not died a little over four years ago in a hiking accident in Peru. I started celebrating Justin Day, as I now call it, last year on his birthday; there are many ways to celebrate, some of which I listed in the following post:

http://jilliansjourneys.blogspot.com/2007/09/justin-day.html

Today I celebrated by wearing all black save for a pair of boots, a caribiner, and a portrait of him given to me by a family friend around my neck. I went down to the Bocasteria, a place here on the Sagunto Campus where they sell food items, etc., to us students, and drank a cup of coffee in his honor before writing the following poem. It's not the smoothest or most beautiful poem I've ever written, but I thought I'd share it with you today:

A cup of coffee I raise today
For the man with the hair of fiery red--
To honor all those who've crossed his way,
To honor the words he has said.

"No fear!" he said--
Let courage be your guide.
Go wherever you think God has led
Your way across the ocean wide.

"No regrets!" he added, with a grin--
Don't let the past be your chain.
For we were all long freed from sin,
And will come home again.

"No holding back," he finished, smiling--
Be bold, live all the life you can.
For what use is it to waste life whiling
Your time away where you began?

So, a cup raised high from foreign land,
I drink to the man with hair of fiery red--
Forever to celebrate his words, which stand
As wise and great as the day they were said.

No fear, no regrets, no holding back.

Thank you for bearing with me for this out-of-the-ordinary post; the next one will be more fun stuff about Spain. After all, not much of interest has happened around here over the last few days--I single-handedly flooded my floor of the dorm on Sunday (that was exciting; for an explanation of how this is possible, go to the website and check out the video), helped register immigrants for Spanish classes, and started Choir--other than that, nothing particularly interesting has occurred. Tomorrow I get to go to Valencia, which will provide all kinds of interesting pictures and whatnot, and this weekend I'll get to see my first Spanish fiesta in Sagunto. I hope life is treating all of you well, as always, and wish you a very happy Justin Day!

In my prayers,