Pan con pan: comida para tontos (Bread with Bread: Food for Idiots)

The title of this entry has been a joke in the apartment for awhile now, but I don't think I've ever written about it here. So, as you know, I love bread. A lot. I eat it all the time, with everything. If Mayte doesn't put bread on the table, I ask for it. If she says there isn't any, I flip out (jokingly, although behind it all I am a little bit serious). In Spain, there is this saying (see title), and Mayte and Fernando are obsessed with it. Anyway, it stuck with me at some point last semester with Katie, so there are many jokes in our household about Emma, the pan con pan idiot. To illustrate, the other day I had pasta, potatoes, and insisted on having bread. OH, and one day Mayte made bread soup (delicious, she uses old bread and makes it soft and squishy), and I dipped my bread in it. Mayte came into the kitchen and saw me dipping my bread into my bread soup and slapped me on the back of the head. But she can't stop me! O bread, how I adore thee...

I don't have many updates (ha, as you can tell from above), but I wanted to write an entry anyway.

This weekend was a lot of working and catching up. I have several essays to be writing due before and after Feria (another week-long break which is not this coming week, but the week after that), things to be reading, tests to be studying for. This is the usual academic crunch of Cornell, but it feels somewhat out of place to be finding that here.

The upcoming travel plans are as follows: I'm going to Palma de Mallorca this weekend and am meeting up with my friend Caroline who studies in St Andrews, Scotland, am in Sevilla for a few days to see the start of Feria, and then Wednesday night I go off to Paris to visit Lauren, my best friend from high school, and meet up with our other German friend from high school (she was an exchange student), Anne. The scary part is this itinerary sounds almost normal to me at this point. Sure, nothing big, I'm off to an island in the Mediterranean for a weekend and then I'm going to an internationally renowned city to hang out with some of my friends. But that's what my life here has become. It's cheap to fly places, it's easy to get to places where I know people, so the combinations are almost endless. It's a very weird, somewhat uncomfortable bubble to be in for a semester. But I'm going to soak it up as much as possible. It's funny--it was cheaper for Caroline to get from Scotland down to Palma than for me to get over there (although it was cheap for both of us; that's why we're meeting there)! Oh, the UK'ers and their southern vacations...

As for Feria, I am really looking forward to it. I wrote a blog entry a few weeks ago about Sevillanas, the flamenco dance class that I'm taking at the center. That class is to prepare for the Feria, which is basically a week-long flamenco festival (that's the simplified definition, anyway) where people hang out in their casetas (tents), drink a lot, eat a lot, talk a lot, laugh a lot, and dance (flamenco only!) a lot. The Feria can be a tricky situation for a foreigner because you cannot go in a caseta without an invitation and it costs a lot of money to belong to a caseta (normally groups of people rent one out and share the cost), BUT my Spanish friend Cristina has invited me to partake in the festivities with her and her friends! I am going to go with them next Monday night just before midnight to be there for when they turn on all the lights and the Feria officially starts. Cristina gave me all the insider information--for example, you do not wear flamenco clothes (yes, people dress up traditionally!) that first night because the only people who go in flamenco clothes are the tourists, so all the Sevillanos laugh at them--and has just been very welcoming and friendly, generally. Yesterday we went shopping together to find me some Feria-appropriate clothing... I borrowed a lot from her, but I have a pretty classy outfit that I've put together! I am excited to go to the Feria and excited to experience it with Cristina.

So, basically, as you can tell from my enthusiastic skipping ahead, this coming week will be a crammed rut of school work, thesis research, class, teaching English, and being frantic until Friday, when early morning (flight leaves at 6:30am) I will be off to Palma! And from there comes vacation, Feria, vacation, boom. Just like that. And then it's May.

I should say one more thing. Going shopping with Cristina was fun and not awkward or forced. We are very similar and get along very, very well. Neither one of us is materialistic, and we went shopping forcefully and with a purpose (she needed a new dress for the first night of Feria where you don't "dress" (wear the traditional outfit), so we both had things we were looking for). It felt good, normal, easy. I needed the shawl and jewelry that people wear at Feria, so Cristina invited me over to her house at the end where I met her mother and they took out all kinds of things saved from years past. Cristina had outgrown a lot of old dresses, and each time you get a new dress, you have to get new colors that match the dress (this is kind of like Prom, it seems like, but with way more culture and dancing and all ages participate), so I had a lot of stuff to choose from. The colors I ended up with are black, red, and white. Classic, chic. You know how I do.

What I'm trying to say is that nothing drastic has happened since the last time I wrote, just the normal day ins and day outs. But it's these little things like going shopping with Cristina, meeting her mom, preparing for a local festival that make me happy to be here and make my experience feel... well, good.

And the homework? Well, to be honest, not so much. :P