A little bit more than your normal jetlag

Sábado, el 24 de enero 2009
“These habits are so hard to break, and they’re so easy to make”

So, seeing as I have no internet at my house, save for the rare weekend where I can steal someone else’s unprotected wireless connection, I’m just going to stick to keeping you guys posted from an offline standpoint. Deal? Good.

As part of our homestay deal during the semester here, we get a bus pass included with the program so that we can get to and from the school from the various barrios de Toledo. I’ve actually figured out though that by walking, I live only 25 minutes away from el Casco. Granted, it’s a bit more with the walking distance to la Fund from Plaza Zocodover, which is the main plaza in the center of el Casco. Walking seems to help with absorbing the fact that I’m really here in the historical capital of Spain. But, no matter how many times in a day I walk to and from el Casco, it all just still seems so surreal. Just thinking about it all seems so bizarre. I essentially walk up the mountain that Toledo is built on, and, trust me, I’ll have the thighs to show it, it’s a bit of a climb. I cross el Río Tajo, the longest river in Spain, and meander up towards the main entrance through the walls that have surrounded Toledo for more years than the U.S. has existed. The main road takes me past all sorts of buildings that were at one point inhabited by the Muslims, Visigoths, or any of the other groups that held Toledo at one point or another over the past hundreds of years. Even today, just walking around in the Casco, seeing where the roads can take you, there’s so much history to the city that it’s almost beyond a single person’s grasp. Which makes everything SO bizarre.

While I still can’t seem to wrap my head around it, I can almost tell that I’m starting to get really comfortable with where I am. And while that is a good thing, it kind of makes me worry a little bit. I just have the irking feeling that I’m going to lapse into a comfort stage where I’m somehow going to lose the drive to go through all the planning to travel the world. I don’t want to settle in to a comfortable situation and fall into old habits of following a routine. I know I’m here to study primarily, but I wish I could just pick up and leave to see what else there is to see over here. Just pack up my backpack, catch a train and hit the road. There are so many places to see that have personalities like Toledo, many with even more history than this city.

Domingo, el 25 de enero 2009
In the early morning rain
With a dollar in my hand
With an aching in my heart
And my pockets full of sand
I’m a long way from home
And I miss my loved ones so

It always kind of bothered me how I never really tend to get homesick. You always hear tales from so many people about how hard it is to be away from home, how every time they talk to someone from home they start sobbing, or how they just can’t seem to get into a mood to do anything because they’re in too much of a funk for missing home. Don’t get me wrong, I miss my family and all you guys like none other, but I just don’t find myself pining away every second of every day. There are just the couple moments where I remember how it is to wake up in the morning in my own bed, to look out the window and see the tops of the trees in the backyard. Or maybe something happens that makes me wish I were with someone from home who would be able to appreciate it with me more than I can on my own. And, so, I guess it was something about waking up this morning to the rain falling on the tiles of the roof outside my window that just made me remember Early Morning Rain by Gordon Lightfoot. It’s one of those songs that my mom always listened to when we would just hang out in the house on rainy days up in Wisconsin back in the wee days of my childhood. When something sensually provokes a memory it just makes the emotions feel so much stronger. So while you won’t catch me bawling my eyes out anytime soon, it’s days like today, with the rain falling outside and the smell of coffee brewing, where I wish I could just plop down in my mom’s room on her bed with her and my brothers and watch a movie or maybe some addictive crime show – or just curl up in a blanket on the futon in the dorm with everybody and just watch some Alfred Hitchcock or some horribly cute chickflick. Or just head over to Luna for a honey latte or some tea to just hang out and look up good music online or “do homework.”

So now, due to all the walking, I’m sitting on my bed at home halfway unable to move my legs. I guess part of it might also be the fact that we were kept up last night til 6 in the morning at a discoteca by some of our Spaniard friends that Jess and Becca befriended on Friday. So due to whichever, or both, of these reasons, my walking shoes and my fabulously-not-so-fashionable dancing shoes are hung up for the day. I think I might just sit back and watch the raindrops fall outside my window and spend some time catching up with my ol’ buddy Rick Steves to see what he has to recommend for my travels of Spain. Or there’s always the homework that needs to get done for class, but whenever I start thinking about it I also start thinking about how I don’t have class until Tuesday…procrastination at its finest? The truth of the matter is that my classes are all actually interesting, made even better by the fact that none of them have anything to do with education. I know I totally sound like a nerd or what have you, but these all just seem fairly intriguing: Theology of Spanish Mysticism – Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Art of Toledo – Cultural Heritage of Spain – Politics and Society in Latin America – Ethnology and Folklore of Spain

Moral of the story: I’ll catch all you tios y tias mas luego because Ricky and Platón (better known as Plato to you English-speaking folk) are both fighting for my attention. And I’ll leave you with a little thought of Spain, thanks to my old bud Rick: “Spain’s relative isolation created a unique country with odd customs -- bullfights, flamenco dancing, and a national obsession with ham” (which I can attest to, as on our visit to Madrid we encountered more Museos de Jamon than I can rightly recollect.