A day out with Spainards!

I finally got some time to go out and explore the towns outside of Huelva, in the province.  Some of these towns aren’t too easy to get to without a car because the bus schedule is terrible, with having only one bus out in the morning, or having a few buses but with times tables that only give you about 2-3 hours in the town.  While granted, you don’t really need that much time in the small towns, it’s still nice to have a little bit more time to explore and not having to rush right now.  So, I was blessed with the invitation from my coordinator Belén, to come out with her one Saturday and go explore some stuff with her and her friend Rafa.  So, a couple Saturday’s ago me and my friend Camille got ready to head out “early” at 11 to go see some cool local things with Belen and Rafa.  Yea…leaving to go out for the day at 11 is apparently early for Spainards.  When we were leaving the Dolmen de Soto I commented about how many people were there now, at around 1:30 and Belen goes “yea, well Spainards don’t like to get up early, we left early”.  hahahaha okay, if you say so. 

So what did I do with my day!?  First, we went to the Dolmen de Soto which is in a little town called Triago (I think?).  Apparently there are 200 Dolmen’s in the province of Huelva. And they are essentially underground burial chambers that have been found.  They are under a little hump of ground, kind of looks like a small hill, but it’s circular and clearly very calculated.  Usually when they find the, they find bodies, and drawings all over the stones to depict what’s inside of them.  It was really cool, and in this one, they found a woman and 2 children’s bodies, and the drawings on the rocks depicted women, and stars and other cool stuff. They are pretty small, and not very deep, but there’s rocks that form the chamber, so it’s really interesting to think about how they got these really big rocks standing up and how they form a ceiling and everything.  It’s kind of like Stonehenge, but not really, and it’s underground.  The big rocks are arranged in a way that it forms a small hallway that leads to a “large” (relative to the rest of the space) area where the bodies were found curled up in the fetal position. 

So the first picture is the entrance, the second is the “hallway” sort of thing that we walked through, the third is the large main chamber area and the last picture is of one of the drawings that was on the rocks.  I think it’s supposed to be the symbol for a woman, but I’m not quite sure.

Oh, also, when we went to this tour of the Dolmen de Soto (which was free and amazing) we saw our dear friend who gave us the haunted tour!  It was really funny, because Camille and I were just standing around waiting for the tour to start, and all of a sudden some guy walked up really close to Camille and said “do you remember me?!”  It took both of us a minute to process what he said, becuase of course it was in pretty fast Spanish, then we stared at him and went “OOOOOOHHHH” to which he laughed and said “yea, I don’t have face paint on so I look different”.  Then he proceeded to explain to the group of people who were now staring at us why how he knew us and laughed about how he saw us the other night as well.  It was really a fun experience and we realized that he works for this company that held the two events we went to.  We wanted to get a picture with our new friend after the tour, but he was in middle of his own tour when we finished, so we couldn’t get a picture.  Hopefully next time we go to an event sponsored by this company we’ll see him again and become excellent friends! haha

Next stop, El Rocio!  Now, this city is gorgeous and very different from any other place I’ve been to in Spain.  El Rocio is actually very famous in Huelva Province, and pretty famous in all of Andalucia because of the uniquness of their town and the feria that they have on Pentecost Sunday.  El Rocio is a very small town with very few residents and a lot of visitors.  They are mostly famous for the wild horses that they have, because there are very big wet lands.  When we went we could actually see the horses, which is rare because if there’s not a lot of water they are out further.  But it’s been a pretty wet fall so there was enough water to see the horses from a far.  It was really cool!  El Rocio is also famous for the feria they have on Pentecost Sunday, when they carry La Virgin del Rocio through the streets.  The Cathedral there is absolutely gorgeous, and when we went inside La Virgin del Rocio also happened to be there!  Apparently she doesn’t live in Rocio, she lives in Almonte, so she’s not always in El Rocio.  That explains why there were so many people visiting the Cathedral that day, and why it’s such a big deal.  Let me tell you, it is a gorgeous statue!  It’s pure white, and there’s not words to express how pretty it is.  The figures around the statue are obviously part of the church itself and the statue is on a platform that sticks out.  Also, apparently it’s really well guarded because one day someone stole it to start the procession early or something like that.  I was explained all of this in Spanish so I might have misunderstood some things, but I’m also positive that she’s well guarded for that reason.  It wasn’t a malicious robbery, just something that shouldn’t have happened. 

Oh yea, and did I mention that Pope John Paul II celebrated mass here one time! Yup, JPII celebrated a mass, and seeing as I love JPII, I was psyched when I found out.  They have a plaque on the inside of the church that explains when he came to El Rocio, in 1993, and they also have a plaque on the outside of the church, that depicts him kneeling in prayer, on the balcony where he celebrated mass.  It was so cool!  They also have a bust of his head on the boardwalk type area where you can see the wild horses.  Basically I was really excited.  The church was gorgeous and La Imagen de Nuestra Señora del Rocío is so beautiful that I could have spent so much more time in that church than I did.  I’ll put pictures in a photo album so you can see more of them.  There’s too many photos I want to share of this adorable pueblo than I can fit on here. 

Oh yea, and did I mention that the whole town is covered in sand….yup.  All the streets are made up of sand, and they have posts outside of houses and stores to tie up your horse.  And during the Feria you’re not allowed to have a car, only horses and carriages are allowed on the street.  If you live in Rocio you have to have a special permit to park somewhere else during the week of Feria, and in general families are only allowed one car in the town.  Yea, it’s pretty awesome, but it makes for messy shoes when you leave, shoes full of sand. 

So our last stop was in Niebla, after having eaten the most delicious spinach croquetas ever in Almonte.  Belen and Rafa took us to Niebla for the Medieval fair that they were having, which was like 10x better than the little fair that was in Huelva.  While I wish I could have been at the fair all day rather than just a few hours, it was still so much fun.  Niebla has an actual castle that you can go and visit.  And while it’s mostly ruins, it was still really cool to see.  They had events going on inside the castle, so we paid for the entrance and walked around and on the walls of a super old castle where battles were probably fought and where noble people walked.  It was awesome.  Then, outside of the castle there were little vendors selling chachki’s and sweets and crepes and all the things I wish I could buy.  Also, there was a cute old church that was pretty much destroyed by the great Lisbon earthquake that pretty much destroyed everything in it’s vacinity.  A lot of Portugal and a lot of the region in Andalucia where I live had really big damage done to it.  So when Belen and Rafa took Camille and I to see the old church it was missing….pretty much everything, haha.  There were no walls, no ceiling, just a remnant of what once a doorway, and then the space where the alter should have been, where there was a cross and some pieces of the building left.  It was actually really cool the way they preserved it.  Niebla doesn’t have too much to offer other than the castle and the old church, but it was a cute town and I had a lot of fun.  Camille is a great photographer so we spent a lot of time just taking pictures and taking in the scenery. 

 

Overall, the day was really great, it I was so tired by the end.  I’m so happy I was able to spend some time away from Huelva and also spend some time with my coordinator.  She was so nice to offer me and Camille to go with her, and I need to find a way to repay her some day for her kindness.  Till my next post, on Granada!  Much love. <3 Besos

 

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Full of Apologies

So now it’s time for me to say I’M SORRY WORLD! I have totally let time pass without my noticing that it’s been almost a month since I posted an update. Since my last update a number of things have happened, which included Halloween, a day trip to some surrounding towns in the Province and a trip to Granada.  Oh, also, in that time I’ve officially booked all I need for Christmas traveling. :) But I’ll give you a recap little by little, I’ll post a little bit each day to keep you in the loop until I’m caught up. 

Halloween!  Yea….that’s not so hot here in Spain, it was really disappointing.  In college I really got into the Halloween spirit because my friends and roommate got into the spirit and decorated, while we searched for the best costumes starting when we arrived in August.  Yup!  We thought about it that early, haha.  But here in Spain it was a little lot different.  For starters, no one really seems to care about Halloween until literally like 3 days before.  At the start of October I tried to look in the stores for some Halloween things and found minimal options.  So I decided to wait a bit and looked again around mid- October, when you would think it is perfectly reasonable to start putting costumes out, FALSE!  For Spainards it’s not important, actually, many of them really despise Halloween and the older generation really hates it because they think they are becoming to Americanized.  It’s viewed as a very American holiday and the older generations want nothing to do with it.  But the younger generation is starting to grow up with it and have gotten into the spirit of dressing up.  And that’s what leads me to different number 2.

Difference number 2: Dressing up for Halloween does not mean finding cute, sexy or witty costumes.  It means finding a shirt that you can rip up, finding some fake blood and smearing it all over you wherever you think it looks best.  You want to be a vampire for Halloween?  Perfect.  Zombie?  Excellent.  Person who just died?  Great!  But if you want to be Abraham Lincoln you better go find some fake blood and put that on your body somewhere!  You want to be a bride?  Great, now just smear some blood on your veil, put some red lipstick on, and you’ve got yourself a great Spainish costume.  But wearing cat ears or dressing up as a minion won’t cut it, you’ll look strange and American.  You’ve gotta have blood somewhere on your costume if you’re gonna do it the Spanish way!  Or, you can be a witch, just like all the other people who don’t know what to do.  Buy yourself a witch hat and a broom and you fit right in, and you don’t even have to buy fake blood to wear that costume!

But the private academy I work at had a cute Halloween party for the kids.  Now remember how I don’t do kids very well….yea….it went just as I expected it to.  I volunteered to help out and ending up making pasta to dig for candy through “worms” and somehow ended up in the room with the kids who wanted to play games, so I had to entertain them and think of ways to not keep them from getting bored. Luckily Sarah was in there because I was losing my brain and had no idea what to do with the children.  I had a plan, and when that plan didn’t work my brain turned off.  But Sarah came to the rescue since she works at an elementary school here and she figured out how to keep them busy for an hour or so.  Boy was I glad when that hour was over!  But we told the acadamy about wrap the mummy and they seemed really excited about letting the kids wrap each other up in toilet paper.  However, since it’s run by British people who have apparently never heard of this game, they had no concept of how much toilet paper you need for this activity.  Upon hearing that you need a lot of toilet paper I was reassured that “yea, we have plenty!” and then followed my coworker into the bathroom where she pulled out about 4-6 rolls of toilet paper and said, “that’s enough, right?” hahahaha, nope!  But seeing as you don’t seem to want to buy more, we’ll see what we can do with what we have.  Well, needless to say the kids used all the rolls up in one round because who doesn’t want to help wrap someone up in toilet paper!  While it wasn’t a complete success, it wasn’t a complete failure either.  And the kids loved playing with all the toilet paper that was left on the ground anyways.  So all in all the party was a success. We just really acted as chaparones while the kids kind of went crazy and threw the toilet paper around the room for a good 30 minutes. 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

Either way, the kids loved it, and then after my students finished their exams we were able to celebrate Halloween in the classroom.  We read a scary story that I found online from “Scary Stories to tell your friends in the dark” from when I was a kid!  They loved the story and then we did other Halloween educational activities.  It was all in all pretty good. 

Oh yea!  I went on a Haunted tour through Huelva.  Apparently there’s some houses in Huelva that are haunted, so we found this tour on a website used to find out about local events and stuff, so me and my friend Camille went and signed up.  It turned out to be really fun, despite the fact that it lasted almost 3 hours.  The guy that lead the tour was hilarious, and once we realized that we were from the U.S. got all excited and would ask us some questions while telling his stories about if we celebrate things a certain way, or how to say things in English.  It was a really funny tour, and then we saw him the next night when we were out getting tapas with a friend.  He was leading another tour group and he recognized us!  It was really funny, but it was fun to see a familiar face and start to see how familiar faces become around Huelva.  At the end of the tour we ended up at a “real” haunted house in Huelva and entered it with nothing a candle (cue scary bum bum bum music!).  I turns out that it’s the building for youth here in Huelva that I’ve been to before, so I wasn’t scared, and nothing happened.  But it was a bit of fun to be with some odd Spainards and share some scary stories on Halloween night.  If I wasn’t going to go out and be at a party all dressed up then I was at least going to spend the night doing something Halloweeny.  It was fun, but I didn’t grab any pictures, sorry guys!  It’s just in my memory. 

So that’s all for now!  Another update on my trip to Niebla, El Rocio, and the Dolmen de Soto with my coordinator to come!

Much love! <3