Almost Spring Break
It’s hard to believe another week has already gone by and my program’s almost half-way over! This past week was not as exciting as the one before, but still some interesting things happened. On Saturday, a friend and I went up to the Sierra Nevadas for part of the afternoon. I’m not exactly sure what town we were in because the bus ticket just said “Granada to Sierra Nevada” but there were a bunch of little ski resorts and we actually made it up to the snow. The bus ride only took less than an hour. The weather was really nice, not as cold as I thought it would be, and sunny. We just walked around for awhile and found this little area that had a bunch of different activities like a (fake) toboggan ride and ski-biking (which I had never heard of before). We went on the toboggan ride which was just a track up a little of the mountain and around and then we went ice-skating. Yes, that’s right, I actually went ice-skating (outdoors) in Southern Spain. It was a lot of fun.
Sunday in Spain was Election Day, which was kind of exciting. We had talked a lot about the elections in my Social-Politics class and there have been posters covering the city for the past few weeks, so it was exciting to see what actually happened. The Election Day itself wasn’t too exciting, but Carmen got all dressed up in the late morning and she and Miguel went to vote. I thought it was kind of odd that Election Day is on a Sunday, but I guess that means that everyone has time to vote and they have over 75% participation, so I guess it works well. Anyway, they announced the winner late on Sunday night and the Socialist Party that has been in power for the past four years won again. The political system is a little different here in that the Spaniards vote for a party instead of a person and the parties get the number of seats in the congress that corresponds with the percentage of votes that they received. So, in the case of this election, the Socialist Party (PSOE) has the most seats in the congress but they have a simple majority. The other main party, the Popular Party, has only about 15 fewer seats than PSOE and then there are a bunch of smaller parties that have only a few representatives. Since PSOE has the most representatives, their leader, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, will continue to be president of Spain.
The rest of the week was pretty much the same old stuff – classes, homework, etc. Last night our program had a movie night and showed the movie Tapas which was really good, although it was full of slang so it was a little hard to understand at times. On Tuesday night, I went to a lecture at my school about Semana Santa (Holy Week) in Spain. It’s a very big deal here, especially in Andalusia, with processions every day carrying depictions of Jesus and Mary around the town. I’m excited that I’ll be able to see some of it, although I’ll miss most of the days since we’re going to Paris. Only one more class and then it’s Spring Break! I’m really excited for everything that we’re going to see: Sevilla (which has huge Holy Week celebrations), Paris, and Madrid. More on all of that when I get back after Easter!