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Communicating in Spanish

I’ve been in Madrid for a week, visiting friends and living my life in museums. I think most people think I’m crazy, but I really like art and architecture, so I plan my days around what museums I’m going to visit. I spent four hours in the Prado last week. I find it comforting to see the Velazquez, Goyas, El Grecos and others that I’ve seen before. I actually started to cry when I saw the original of a painting that my father had hanging above his dresser my entire life and I had memories of my great Aunt Lola, seeing some of the Goyas she used to have in her apartment in Riverdale, NY.

A Goya. I always thought the guy with the red coat with his back to the scene was some sort of scuba diver.

A Goya. I always thought the guy with the red coat with his back to the scene was some sort of scuba diver.

When I’m not at museums, I’m hanging out with friends. We eat together, I drag them to museums, we’ve gone to plays and tomorrow there’s a party.

Drinking sangria with my amigas

Drinking sangria with my amigas

We laugh and I try my best to still be amusing in another language. I’ve lost so much vocabulary and my verbs are pretty much focused around present, past and future tenses, but thank god, I’m in a country rich with gestures, so I can make myself understood most of the time. As it is, I speak with my hands a lot anyway, so picking up on some important Spanish gestures helps. I told my friends here that one of the things I’ve noticed on this trip is that the Spaniards tend to speak with their shoulders. They hunch inward and shrug to express consternation and annoyance. It’s a very exaggerated movement and it’s comical to watch. I once saw a bus driver who was highly frustrated with traffic tap the horn, then perform this highly exaggerated shrug twice.

For a quick lesson for your next trip to Spain, take a look:

At this point, my trip is starting to wind down. I fly out to the east coast of the US in less than a week where I’ll visit family and friends before heading back to the rainy hinterlands. It is bittersweet. I miss my friends, but am going back to work uncertainty. For now, I’ll just enjoy more churros and do my best to walk off the calories.

A little snack between museums of churros and cafe con leche

A little snack between museums of churros and cafe con leche

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Italy. It ain’t just art!

My trip is so busy and is going so fast that it’s been hard to catch up. I spent about 2 weeks in Italy, part of the time traveling with a Seattle friend and part of the time visiting a friend I met (and haven’t seen) for 12 years.

I left London and landed in Florence (where I stayed in a 16th century mini palazzo of one of the former ladies in waiting of the Medicis), then onto Siena, San Gimignano (the towers there pre-dated Manhattan’s by a few centuries), Pisa, Lucca, Manarola and Vernazza in the Cinque Terre, Santa Margherita and Portfofino and my friend Fiamma in Genova. Little tastes of a lot of places and of course, a lot of good food.

All of the art is in Florence. I finally got to stare at David’s perfect butt for as long as I wanted and it’s hard to get enough of the tiny, twisting medieval streets of Italian cities.

Someone else's 15th century butt. It looks like my big marble hand going to grab him, but alas, I couldn't reach, just admire from afar.

Someone else’s 15th century butt. It looks like my big marble hand going to grab him, but alas, I couldn’t reach, just admire from afar.

It’s almost overwhelming to describe the beauty of Tuscany. There is art everywhere you look: frescoed onto walls, stuck in the corners of buildings and mosaiced on the streets. The buildings themselves, in burnt oranges, with rising towers, and if religious, in bands of black and white made me always keep an eye out for tiny details. You could spend your life in a city, it seems, and never find all of the art.

Picture perfect Lucca

Picture perfect Lucca

After wandering around Florence and Lucca, a city bequeathed to the sister of Napoleon, who decided that the city’s ancient wall should be a thoroughfare to walk, bike and course around, we headed to the Cinque Terre. I admit, I had never heard of this part of Italy, but, apparently the tourists (and Rick Steves) have. Regardless, this grouping of 5 tiny towns clinging to cliffs that overlook the Ligurian Sea were the purest type of beauty. Rugged and tiny, it was hard to stop gaping once we arrived.
What possessed them to build there?

What possessed them to build there?

After venturing toward a final stop in Santa Margherita, we decided to walk over to Portofino, vacationland for the rich and famous. After arriving and taking a bunch of photos of this pretty little town (because there’s nothing else to do) we looked at the bus schedule and realized we’d missed the 8:20pm bus by 10 minutes and the next bus didn’t leave until 11:15pm. Slightly deterred, due to the reputation of Portofino’s expensive clientele, we had no choice but to venture to a restaurant on the harbor to eat, drink (water only) and be merry. All told, our meals weren’t outrageously expensive (pizza and pasta for 15 euros each is doable) but we were shocked to discover that a bottle of plain water in Portofino cost 10 euros, as did a small basket of bread and breadsticks.

I happily ventured from there to Genova (we say Genoa) to visit a friend I met in Mexico 12 years ago, who has twin, 3-year old boys. Three nights left me so confused. The kids don’t quite speak, but manage Italian and their own personal language when they do. (one twin loves motos, and his word for fast is a verb he made up that sounds like brrrrrruuumay. The other realizing I didn’t understand Italian decided to teach me all of the words he knew by pointing around his room saying “aquell la porta, aquell el cavallo (that is the door, that is the horse), I spoke to my friend in Spanish and her husband in English, so needless to say, sentences came out sounding something like “Quieres mangiare a little pizza, today?”

I am now near Santiago de Compostela visiting my cousins and am on my way to Madrid for my final stop in this 3 country tour (a 3 country tour).

Look at me! I'm in Italy!

Look at me! I’m in Italy!

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