The Riverlands

So, having been here a week now, I figure it´s time to tell you guys a bit about Spain.

The flight was short and rather uneventful. It´s only six hours from Boston to Dublin; I´m going to have to remember that doing a trip to Europe in two stretches instead of one long one is much, much easier. The most exciting things that happened was barely having time to catch my next flight in Dublin (I don´t know why but they were being extraordinarily thorough at security–almost hilariously so. The guard actually felt the need to make me open my moneybelt and rifle the pages of my passport to see if there was anything stuck between them. I´m like, what exactly do you think I might be hiding in there? A bomb? A letter from bin Laden? What? I really wanted to ask, but, of course, you don´t antagonize people with the power to ruin your life.

Then, the customs guy in Spain for some reason felt the need to give me a hard time. Holding my passport in front of him with “United States of America” stamped firmly on it, he´s like, “So, where are you from?” Which of course, could just mean, “What state are you from?” and isn´t that weird in and of itself, although I´ve never had a customs agent bother to ask me that before, but I misunderstood it as, “Where are you going?” and told him Segovia, which made him laugh at me and then proceed to tell me I couldn´t enter because the visa wasn´t dated until the 28th. Now, I had called the Spanish Consulate when I had to move my trip back a week, and they assured me I could enter on a tourist´s visa, which comes automatically with an American passport and is good for 90 days. After that, the student visa would kick in. So I proceed to explain this to him, thinking that he should have known it already. And he just gives me this long look, and is like, “So where´s the tourist visa?” And I´m like, IT´S AN AMERICAN PASSPORT!!! Not in so many words, of course, because like I said, you don´t antagonize people with the power to ruin your life, but…let´s just say I was very relieved when he finally rolled his eyes and stamped the thing and let me through, still very obviously amused with himself for putting me through the ordeal.

But after that things went pretty smoothly. I took a taxi to the bus station, bought a ticket, and nearly missed the bus because I had to carry my luggage (I have four bags, two of them very heavy) down three flights of stairs to get to the bus and, this being, Spain, nobody stopped to help until like the 25th person. I knew to expect that from the last time I was here, but I´ll admit I got a bit peeved when my arms and back were killing me and I thought I was going to miss the bus and people twice my strength were still breezing past me like I didn´t exist. At the last minute, thank God, some boy–I think he was the bus driver´s son, actually–stopped to help and I got on all right.

The bus was about an hour to Segovia, which I spent just sort of in a daze from all the travel, and then I was able to take another taxi to my youth hostel. I got chewed out by both taxi drivers for travelling with so much luggage, but I´d also expected that. I´ve noticed that when it comes to Americans and their baggage, Europeans are very short on comprehension, although in England they seem to find it more amusing than exasperating, as they do here.

I should pause here a moment and add that, while Spain is still never going to be the friendliest country I´ve ever been in, people have been generally much better-natured on this trip than I remember from the last time. Maybe it´s the weather–there´s been a nice sort of snappy chill in the air with plenty of sun, like late November in Tucson–whereas it was sweltering last time, which never improves people´s tempers. Or maybe it´s that I´m dealing more with people my age and people used to dealing with people my age (i.e., university employees.) I´m really not sure, but it hasn´t been that bad at all, luggage and a few other faux pas not withstanding.

Anyways, the next day I was able to move from the hostel into one of the dorms–not the one I´ll be spending the year in, which wasn´t opened yet, but temporary accomodation. It was actually very nice because there were only two other international students and me in the whole building, which made it very quiet and spacey.

I only have about ten minutes left, so I´ll try to write a little about the other international students in my “intensive Spanish” class (which was four hours a day last week and lasts through this week as well, which is also the first week of regular classes.) At the start there were nine of us: two French girls, two Polish students, two Belgian students, two Italians, and me, as far as I can tell the only American in Segovia. All of them are very nice and we seem to be hitting it off fairly quickly. All being foreigners together helps, although as the only non-European I seem to be a little more lost than the rest of them, and I´ve found myself wishing on occasion that there was a Japanese student or something here as well. But oh well, it´s probably healthy. The French girls are named Gaelle and Louise, the two Belgians are Jonathan and Lisa, the two Italians are Ricardo and Giovanna, and the two Polish students are Maciek (that´s a guy´s name, btw) and Justyna.

Later on in the week were joined by a third Italian student, a girl named Ilaria, another French student named Jeremie, a fourth Italian whose name I still haven´t figured out (he just got here Friday afternoon,) and a Czechoslovakian named Petra. (I don´t know if she´s Czech or Slovak, because she said she was from the Czech Republic, but later told me that her family “lives” in Slovakia, so I´m not sure what that means.)

As I said, they´re all very nice and we´ve been hanging out together a lot outside of class, going out for sangria and things like that. Today we actually had a picnic in the park. Maciek is hilarious, Jeremie asks interesting questions, and Gaelle and Justyna are particularly sweet and friendly. Jonathan and I had the fun experience of being locked out of our dorm together Wednesday night and having to spend it at Gaelle´s and Louise´s hostel (they hadn´t found an apartment yet,) which was not exactly fun, but a good bonding experience.

So this is way overdue but I know I promised pictures of Longfellow’s house, and besides, I have to say something about it, it was so incredible. But I’ll try to keep it brief and move on to Spain stuff.

This is a picture of Longfellow’s house as it faces the street and the park and river beyond:

I’ll admit it doesn’t look spectacular from the front, your average if, of course, pretty, 19th-century East-coast house. But then you follow the signs and walk around back to…the gardens. Aye. Take a glimpse:

All right, so already I’m getting carried away with the pictures. But it really was beautiful. It helped that it was an absolutely gorgeous day. I’m beginning to get the idea that September is a really beautiful month in most parts of the world. Crisp and clear and clean and…kind of like November or December in Arizona. Cold, though. (I’ve been getting teased a lot by my European fellow students for wearing gloves. “What are you going to do when it gets cold?” they ask me. To which I can only answer, of course, “Curl up and die.” They suggested buying a coat as an alternative. I really do need to look into that.)

So I got there not realizing it was a museum–I thought I’d just look at the house from the street and walk away. But it is a museum, run by the National Park Service, actually. I got there about ten minutes after the last tour of the day had started, but they let me come in late. The park ranger giving the tour was pretty nice, even though flash on my camera kept going off when I thought it was turned off and it wasn’t. I missed the dining room with the portrait of his three daughters, unfortunately, but in the sitting room–the women’s parlor, I gathered–was a portrait of his two sons on one wall and of his wife on another, with her bust under it. She was apparently very much his muse. And it’s amazing how many of his children grew up to do extraordinary things. One son became an artist–they had a sketch of his from when he was eight years old that I couldn’t hope to do in a year–and the other a traveler who spent two years in Japan and sent back crates of Japanese art he bought there, which you saw throughout the house. His oldest daughter, Alice, was the one responsible for conserving the house, which is why we have it today. He actually bought the house because it had been the headquarters of George Washington during the siege of Boston, and Washington was something of his hero, and he wanted to preserve the house and insisted it be known as his, not the famous poet´s, but the house where Washington had lived. Of course, his stuff sold “like Harry Potter” as the guide put it, and plenty of people came to see it for his own sake as well. So when Alice inherited it, she preserved it for both their sakes. But of course most people know it as Longfellow’s house today. Anyways, here’s the sitting room (the portrait you can see in this picture isn’t the one of his two sons, don’t worry–that’s actually a girl wearing that dress. But you can see the bust of Frances to the left):

This next one is a picture of the front hall, where they kept a bust of Washington–since, of course, it was primarily for his sake they were there. It’s hard to tell from these photos, by the way, but the walls in every room were covered in paintings, some of them really beautiful.

This is already turning into a really long post, so I won’t take you through every room in the house. But you should see his study. The first photo shows Longfellow’s portrait (as an old man, of course,) with portraits of some of his extensive literary circle. The one on the wall by the corner is Hawthorne, (you know, the guy who wrote The Scarlet Letter) and I wish I could remember who the statue and the bust and the other portrait are. The other portrait might be Charles Sumner, who was probably the most influential abolitionist of his day and a good friend of Longfellow’s, but I’m not sure. The bust was another really famous writer, I think maybe Oscar Wilde? I could be entirely mistaken. The second photo is his writing table:

After the tour of the house, I went to the cemetery down the road to see his grave. It really was one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen; really and truly peaceful. And so was Longfellow’s grave, oddly enough. I remember crying at Tolkien’s grave but I found it hard to be sad for Longfellow; the whole point of the park ranger’s lecture was that he’d lived this incredible, full life and achieved his greatest desires–to preserve in human memory the events of the American Revolution, and to abolish slavery–and he saw both things come to pass. And there he was buried with his family around him, who also all had these incredible lives, and it was really hard to feel anything but happy, even strangely joyful. This is a picture:

I read a poem–”I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day”–which you should read, it’s really short, and you might recognize the first stanza as a Christmas carol, but no one ever sings the rest–from a book of his poems I’d bought at the museum shop. (By the way, am I the only one who finds it incredible and absolutely ridiculous that there is no complete works of Longfellow in print and hasn’t been since the 1930s? I mean, this is the poet that has probably made a bigger mark than any other on our country–it’s because of him, more or less, that we all know about Paul Revere, and who can’t quote a couple of lines from that poem? But lots of people don’t even know his name. They’ll recognize less influential figures, like Poe or Dickinson–which is good, because they should be recognize also–but not Longfellow. And not even to have a complete volume of his poetry in print? It’s ridiculous.) Then I walked back to Harvard Square. On the way out, by the way, I saw a huge hawk perched on the chimney of the chapel. Allison says it’s an East-coast red-tail. Apparently the cemetery is a prime spot for birdwatchers, they get all kinds there. I got several pretty good photos, for such a small camera. Here’s the best:

Anyhow, that somehow made my day. And I intend to read everything by Longfellow I can get my hands on. I found a used volume of his complete works on Amazon.com.

All right, let’s back off the wild exaggerations a bit: my Spanish teacher looks like a gun-toting Moussad agent. So, I don’t know how many of you have seen the tv show “NCIS,” but there’s this character in the show…named Ziva…who is a kind of trigger-happy Israeli Moussad agent…and she looks eerily like my Spanish teacher. Not even so much just physical appearance–if I showed you a picture you’d say she only looks vaguely like Ziva–but it’s her mannerisms, her facial expressions, the way she moves…it’s just really distracting, you know, when you’re sitting there trying to pay attention to the niceties of conditional perfect verb conjugations, and your teacher tilts her a head a certain way and suddenly you get this flashing image of her looking down a sniper rifle…very disconcerting. Obviously I watched that tv show way too much when I was living in the apartment last year–it’s all my roommates’ fault, they got me hooked on it.

Another thing. I’ve probably said this every single time I’ve been to Europe, but everyone looks a lot more like each other than they do in the U.S. The two Belgian students? If this were America, they’d be brother and sister. Same with the two Italian students. And you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Polish students or the French students were related, either. But as far as I can tell the only connection they have with each other is coming from the same countries…really weird. I’m sorry, let’s be politically correct–very novel.

We had a great discussion on freedom of the press in class today and you will all be pleased to hear that the U.S. still leads the world in terms of what they’ll let you print, particularly about the government. And that France has a worse censorship problem than Poland. (“Liberte, fraternite, egalite…but only on our terms.”)  So if any of you were ever planning to start a Spanish newspaper, just be careful not to print anything “irreverent” about the royal family. It carries jail time. Seriously.

I had a bit of an adventure last night and I can’t wait to tell all about it, but I’m starving, so I’m going to find food, and then I’m going to the first meeting of the university choir. But when I get back I’ll try to write more. It’s quite a story…

All right, first of all, I have to apologize for not getting any pictures of Pika House! I kept meaning to, and forgetting, and next thing I knew the taxi to the airport was at the door and that was that. In the end, the only picture I could get was this:

If you’re really desperate to see more, go to:

http://pika.mit.edu/housetour/

I suppose it does a fairly good job of capturing the place.

It’s hard to decide which pictures to choose, but here’s a picture of Boston from the top of the Bunker Hill Monument, which is a tall obelisk on top of the hill you can climb up inside of (294 stairs, but it’s good exercise.) It’s quite a view:

I suppose the next best place to start would be with a few highlights from the Freedom Trail, a line of red bricks through historic Boston and Charlestown, of sites relating to the Revolutionary War. This is a picture from Boston Commons, the large public park in the middle of the city which used to be public grazing land. It’s actually still legal to graze your cows there, but since no one owns any, it’s now mostly the haunt of joggers and dog-walkers and little kids feeding pigeons and squirrels.

This is the Massachusetts State House, which presides over the Commons from Boston’s sole remaining hill. (The others were all flattened to fill in swampland to the south in the early 20th century.) The roof was originally covered with copper leaf by Paul Revere himself; today it’s done up in gold. You can see it from the Bunker Hill memorial, the sun hits it and lights it up like a beacon:

They had free tours of the State House several times a day, which I thought was really cool. I took several pictures, but this is, naturally one of my favorites. It’s from a special room where they used to keep all the Massachusetts military regimental flags after the regiments’ return. The flags are now mostly preserved in a special vault to keep them from deteriorating, but a few special ones are on display in glass cases. This was, of course, my favorite–the flag of the 28th Massachusetts Infantry, part of the Irish Brigade, from the Civil War:

The Gaelic on the flag reads their motto, “Faugh a ballagh!” which means, “Clear the way!”

Back out in front of the State House, there’s the memorial to the 54th Massachusetts and their commander Shaw, one of the Union regiments during the Civil War. If you don’t know anything else about them–you should, but I’m not going to tell you. You’ll just have to watch the movie “Glory” and find out for yourself. But I found it especially cool that they included on the memorial the Latin inscription, “Omnia relinquit salvare respublicam,” which means, “He relinquished all to save the republic” and was inscribed on the highest medal of honor given to ancient Roman war heroes during the Roman Republic. As a Latin minor, I find that an especially nice touch. I know it’s sappy, but I still tear up whenever I see it.

After that, of course, I saw plenty more; the Old South Meeting House where the final plans for the Boston Tea Party were laid, Faneuil Hall and Quincy Hall, old market buildings for late 18th-c. and early 19th-c. Boston, the Old State House and the balcony where the Declaration of Independence was read for the first time…but I have to save room for plenty more pictures on this account, so I’m going to skip to the Old North Church. This was the church where two lanterns were hung on the night of April 18, 1775, to warn riders hiding along the far banks of the Charles River that British troops were coming by sea to seize colonial independence leaders and munitions caches in Lexington and Concord, towns to the north. The riders, including the famous Paul Revere, rode all night and dodged several British blockades (or were caught by them) to warn the Minutemen and the colonial militia that the soldiers were coming. This in turn led to an armed confrontation between the Minutemen and the British soldiers the following morning, in which the first shots of the Revolution (“the shot heard ’round the world”) were fired. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a famous poem on the whole incident, called “Paul Revere’s Ride,” which is an excellent poem and really worth the read, and you can find it here. Anyway, here’s the Old North Church:

And now we come to my favorite part of the whole walk, the U.S.S. Constitution, one of our country’s first ships. After we broke with England, see, we had the best merchant fleet in the world, but nobody to defend it from pirates, so we built a few military vessels of our own. The Constitution was one of these. As it turned out, we went to war with the British again a few years later, so these ships really came in handy. They were especially dangerous, it turned out, for two reasons. First of all, we didn’t have the money to build really large vessels like the British had, ships of the line, but we wanted something a little more impressive than a frigate, which carried only about 36 guns. Ships of the line could carry from 60 up to hundreds of guns. So we designed a new kind of bigger frigate, which could carry at least 42 guns–the sailors on the Constitution told us she was designed for that many but actually carried quite a few more. Basically what that meant was, the British had to either send two of their frigates or a ship of the line to fight one of our frigates, and this didn’t sit well with them. Then, as if that weren’t enough, it turned out that because we’d built our ships from live oak, which only grows in Georgia and is one of the densest woods in the world, their cannonballs couldn’t pierce our hulls, either! Hence the Constitution earned the nickname “Old Ironsides,” although real ironclad ships wouldn’t come along until the Civil War. After the Constitution started taking out British ships right and left due to her near-invincibility, most of the rest of the War of 1812 wasn’t actually fought, it was a lot of circling the seas and glowering at each other (because we really scared them) until peace was made again.

So to this day, the Constitution has remained a commissioned ship in the U.S. Navy, the second highest posting an American sailor can get (after the White House.) Every Fourth of July they take her out in the harbor and fire off her guns in salute; I’d really like to see that someday. She’s the oldest ship still afloat in the world, and, as it turns out, the Navy also gives free tours of her several times a day, which is really cool of them as far as poor students like me are concerned. Here’s a picture of her:

Unfortunately the cars parked right in front of her kind of spoil the effect. There’s some good pictures of her out to sail online, though; check out the Wikipedia article here.

Here’s another picture, of one of the sailors giving the tour standing in front of the wheel:

Her tour wasn’t quite as good as I remember the tour being the last time I was there, the summer before my senior year of high school. But then, that might have something to do with the last tour guide’s being a really hot guy. She was still a pretty good guide. One of the other tourists was a retired naval officer, and they rang the bell for him when he left, which I thought was pretty cool.

I’ll end tonight with a picture of the statue of Colonel Prescott’s statue, the commanding officer at the Battle of Bunker Hill, which was the first official battle of the Revolution (Lexington and Concord having taken place before independence was officially declared.) It’s in front of the Bunker Hill Monument, and it’s quite an impressive statue, he looks very fierce:

Anyways, it’s horribly late, I went out for sangria with some of the other foreign students here tonight although I knew I shouldn’t, that I’d end up staying up way too late, so now I really need to go get some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll cover Longfellow’s house and talk more about Spain!

So, I´m sorry I haven´t written, everyone, I got kind of busy those last few days in Boston. As soon as I figure out how to upload pictures, I´ll put some on here. For now, I´ll just say that the U.S.S. Constitution was cool as ever, and Longfellow´s house was AMAZING.

I´m safely installed in Segovia, Spain, now, and taking a class in intensive Spanish prior to regular classes starting. With me are some other foreign students from Italy, France, Poland, and Belgium. They´re all pretty nice. It´s WEIRD to see so many WHITE people though. I think I commented on this last time I was in Spain, but it´s still true. You know, they said a Spanish class for foreign students, and I was expecting at least SOMEONE from Morocco and someone from east Asia, but no…and even around town, I can count on one hand the number of non-white people I´ve seen, not counting a group of Chinese tourists…it´s just…eerie. Strange. Unfamiliar. Like being in a country full of clones. Okay, not quite that bad.

Everyone at the university is really nice and helpful, and the rooms are pretty good, too. I found out that they actually clean your room FOR you once a week, and the rent includes meals, so I´m pretty happy. I don´t even have to buy bedsheets!

So I hope you´re all doing well, I have to go now because I´m on the public library computer and my time´s almost up, but I´ll post more tomorrow when I have my own computer set up. Bye for now!