Dondeques

Entroido/Carnaval

I’m way behind on events, here. About two weeks ago (at the same time as Mardi Gras) we had Carnaval (Entroido in Gallego) here in Lugo and Fonsagrada. It was a big freaking deal at school.

I was told it was absolutely mandatory to wear a costume to school, so I scrounged around the clothes I have here and found enough for this costume:

The rest of the teachers were pirates. Classes ended at noon, and everyone went off to prepare their costumes. All the teachers were in the staff room getting dressed and goofing off, and all of a sudden the vice-principal said “wait, who is out in the hall with the kids?” About four teachers ran out. Spain.

They love me.

This is one of the history teachers, by far the best pirate:

And I’m not allowed at all to post pictures of students, but I don’t think this nightmarish image counts as a photo of students:

They made those Simpson heads in art class. The Simpsons is very popular show here, and I just recently found out that America’s Funniest Home Videos is on tv here too. They dub the voices. I need to find it and watch it.

At school, the kids had a costume contest where they each did little skits or dances in their costumes and were judged. The 12-year-olds dressed up as a “really badly behaved class” and did a skit as such. They had to dig really deeply into their wells of creativity to summon the ability to act like a class that threw stuff, screamed all the time, and jumped out of their seats to hit each other. (Did you not the dripping sarcasm? Ok, good.)

The winners were the oldest kids who dressed up as cookies. The Simpsons masks were really well-done, but totally uncharismatic and I think everyone was mildly horrified by them, so they didn´t win.

It was all cute fun at school, but then when we went out dancing that night, there were some extremely horrible and stupid costumes. I would say one of the most popular costumes was a Native American (braids, leather-looking little dress) and one that followed close behind was ¨Black Person¨. I didn’t get any pictures of the Black People out dancing, but here is a picture from the parade of an example of someone in their Black Person costume:

There you go. The worst Black Person costumes I saw were a bunch of girls with that Afro wig, blackface, black long sleeve shirts, and long colorful sleeve-less dresses. I’m pretty sure they had something under their dresses to make their butts look big too. So that was a downside of Carnaval, completely politically-incorrect Spanish people.

But there were some super-great costumes, too! These are from the newspaper article about the parade:

Yay!

And there was some sort of evil carnaval bear or something in one of the nearby villages:

I don’t get it, but there he is. Killing…people…

Also, side note, carnaval is even more popular in the villages of Ourense, which is south of Lugo, and at some celebrations, people take burlap sacks, fill them with ants, sprinkle vinegar on them to get them enraged, and then hit people with the bags. Ants fall out the holes and into people’s clothes and bite them.

I am not making this up. I had people repeat this fact to me about five times because I didn’t believe it. I can’t even be upset about the animal cruelty there, I’m just so flabbergasted as to why anyone would even think to do this as a celebration activity.

A Dufus Goes to A Coruña

I went to A Coruña yesterday, a city on the coast of Galicia—

right there, in fact.

I spent 10 hours there, 6 of which were spent walking, and for 5 1/2 of those 6 hours, I was lost. My feet and legs really hurt today, but I had a really nice time. I will probably go back again soon so I can actually see some things. I went by myself, which was nice because I could wander around and choose places to eat according to my own whims.

The only problem with being a woman walking alone is that sometimes men see you as vulnerable. At about 11am, I was walking down a street and an older man passed me and said “you’re very pretty, aren’t you?” I know that this had absolutely nothing to do with what I looked like, just that no one was with me to possibly object to what he was saying, and one angry woman is a lot easier to deal with than an angry woman and her several angry friends. (Luckily nobody offered me tea in any restaurants, right Laura and Alicia? I guess all of us looked weak and shy and cold that day in Barcelona.)

Also, as I was getting to the bus station at night, an old man who did not seem to be quite with it came stumbling towards me with his arms open and said something, but it was so jumbled together that I couldn’t understand it. I walked by him, and he turned to watch me go and continued yelling and snorting. (I don’t know what it is with snorting, but one time the three Italian girls and I were walking on a main street in Lugo, and an old man walked up to us and snorted very loudly and very purposefully at us. We kept walking, glancing back every now and then, and he had stopped and was staring after us. Very weird.)

Anyway, I took a stupid amount of pictures (14). Here are some of them:

This is the Tower of Hercules. It is basically the symbol of the city. This is a very zoomed-in picture from across the bay. I did not actually manage to see the tower itself.

Feral cat! Actually this was an extremely ugly animal when seen up close, but it was exciting to see a cat!

Seagull splat on the rocks near the cat. Did the cat catch and eat the seagull? Did the seagull wash up onto the rocks? Did the seagull fly into the rocks with such velocity that he flattened himself to death and stuck there? The mystery occupied my mind for 9 of the 10 hours I was in A Coruña.

Man, Ryan is really outdoing himself. He’s got an airline, he’s teaching the world English—what next?! Oh, you think they are not the same person? Well how many Ryans do you know? Yeah, I thought so.

The elevator for men, women, and people who are adamant about not being classified as either.

This is a normal building. Everything about this building is completely, utterly ordinary. There are no vials containing diseases unknown to mankind but a few scientists, no enormous stockpiles of limestone, no monkeys running loose and out of control. Andrew Lloyd Webber is not in here. There is no time portal and there is definitely not a verified-to-be-accurate painting of what God actually looks like. So please go away and don’t tell anyone about the normal building you saw today.

Portomarin, the city they moved when they dammed the river

Well, ok, they just moved the church and rebuilt the city. But still.

Nothing really happened in Portomarin, we just sort of walked around and took photos, so here is a “best of” revue. The river:

That is the old bridge in comparison with the new bridge. The old bridge is usually underwater.

IN PORTOMARIN, YOU MUST NOT BE A RECENTLY SHIPWRECKED MAN CLIMBING ASHORE IN SEARCH FOR WARMTH AND FOOD AND HUMAN KINDNESS.

But you can be power lines unavoidably in the way of my great photo. Stupid.

Intelligent posts about intelligent cultural/feminist things to come soon!

Horse bones

I went to veterinary radiology class with my roommates this morning. The topic was horses and the bones they have. I didn’t learn a damn thing.

Hello, what am I doing here?

And why are all my titles in caps? I don’t know. So the 5,000th person told me to start a blog, (actually, it was more like the 4th person, and some of them might have been kidding) so here I am, blundering around.

I don’t even really know what this blog is going to be about. I mean, I’m an American girl living in Spain (Lugo, Galicia, specifically) teaching English to high school students. I am completely unqualified for this position. So that will probably come up. Also, I am discovering feminism (read: getting super angry about things that I used to think were fine and normal) so so that will also be a theme. I also talk in my sleep pretty much every night and was given the brilliant idea to record what I say and write it down. That’s a bit of a dream, though, as it requires me getting a voice recorder. Signs point to “no”. Signs also point to “stupid, unintentional pun that I could change but won’t”.

But my overall goal is to bore you so much with my first posts that you never come back so I can post things that I’d be embarrassed if anyone knew about. So to start us off, here is a picture that is both boring and embarrassing. Compost-face!