Santiago de Compostela

After spending over 24 hours in airports and airplanes, I finally arrived in Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain on Thursday! We're spending 10 days here for orientation before flying to Madrid for...a second orientation.

Santiago is an incredible city: it's a huge pilgrimage site (it has Europe's most popular pilgrimage route), so people come from all over Europe to see its cathedral and religious sites, but it's also relatively close to the coast and beautiful beaches. And luckily, it only gets up to the high 70s during the day, which is much nicer than Madrid will be, since it's now in the high 90s most days. Ay. We're staying at a university on the outskirts of the city right now, where everyone gets their own single with a bathroom and a daily maid service! Not bad.

This week, we'll be taking two classes for orientation credit: Spanish history, and literature. It's pretty strange to be thinking about school already...it still seems like the summer, but I have to give a 10 minute presentation tomorrow! That's especially hard to think about considering the schedule we've been on for the past few days. We've had monitores (guides in their early 20s) to take us around the city and make sure we don't embarrass ourselves too badly, so we're now attempting the craziness that is Spanish dining and going out. We haven't been eating dinner until 10 or 11pm, then around 12 or 1 we start going to bars. It seems to be popular to switch bars every hour or so, so after a few hours we've been to several bars. After bar hopping, people start going to clubs...and most of them don't fill up until 5 or 6am. I've been coming back around the conservative hours of 4 or 5am, so I haven't fully experienced the discoteca scene yet, but hopefully my sleep schedule will eventually allow me to go out all night. A lot of people don't come back until 7am or 8am here, and I'm sure Santiago is more subdued than Madrid will be. Siestas will definitely be key to my survival in the next few months. Saturday I woke up just in time for the 2pm "midday" meal, after which we toured Santiago with our monitores. Sadly, none of us could make it to the normal dinner time, so one of the embarrassed monitores had to take several of us to get pizza around 8pm...and then we went to dinner again at the more normal time of 10pm.

One of the most typical dishes here is the tortilla española, which is kind of like an omelette (and made of eggs and potatoes). Tapas, raciones, and bocadillos (all small plates of food) seem to be pretty typical for dinner too...the table will just order several plates of them and share. The monitores all got a kick out of watching us try pulpo (octopus), which is really popular in Galicia (the province Santiago de Compostela is in), since it's right on the water and big on fishing.

Today we went to a beach in Galicia, which is half an hour southwest of Santiago, and was really nice. The weather was perfect and the view was gorgeous (although the water was filled with trash and freezing cold). I guess I'm used to freezing water from living in Massachusetts, but I had never seen so much trash in the ocean before! Lots of topless women, too...that will be something to get used to. Afterwards, we returned to Santiago to get something I had been waiting forever for: chocolate con churros! The chocolate is like hot chocolate, but much thicker...it's almost pudding-like, and it comes with fried doughy goodness for dipping. It's apparently a breakfast treat, but being Americans, we had it around 6pm. Eventually we'll learn.

I'm posting all of my photos on Picasa!