Today in my cine class we watched the rest of the movie 1492 which is about Christofer Columbus. It was really interesting but because it was based off of a journal written by his son, it portrayed him in such a positive light (very holy, never violent) and I wonder how much of that is actually who he was. A lot of the movie was violent though with the wars between the indigenous people and the Spaniards. But after that I came home for lunch with Puri and Tomo. We had veggie soup and veggie/tuna lasagna which were both tasty. Lasagna here is made with white sauce, not red which is interesting. Then I had to leave to meet the group for a tour of the Jewish quarters of Segovia. There is an old "barrio" that has original (or recreated) buildings from when the Catholics made the Jewish people live segregated. Their neighborhood was blocked off by walls and doors and then eventually the Jewish people were fully expelled from the city. We got to visit the inside of a convent (the church part) where the sisters are cloistered (they NEVER leave). They had to slip the key to us through a series of doors so that we could get the key yet not go inside the actual convent and so that they didn't go outside. They don't accept tourists but they let us in because we are students. This church used to be a synagogue before the problems with hating Jews started. This church produced a lot of anti-jewish propaganda to help support this banishing of the Jews. There was a story of how a Rabbi wanted a host so that he could torture it and humiliate it. Just as he was about to throw it into boiling water, it flew away to the convent at our school and into the hands of a priest. There is a hole in our school's church which is supposedly where the host entered the church. The day this 'happened' is still a holiday here in Segovia which one would think would be protested by Jewish people. The story is just a legend, however, it was created to make people hate Jews. The celebration of it seems a little rude.
On my way home Brooklyn and I explored the library. We got forms to apply for a library card and were gonna fill them out there but it was overwhelming! I had no idea what any of the fill in the blanks were so we ran away. I'll figure it out eventually... I hope. They had Dan Brown's the lost symbol in spanish which I would love to check out. After a failed attempt at the library we went to get a pastry (chocolate covered elephant ear) which made my day better. It was then time to go home and I got to Face Time with Luke for a while until he was silly and his computer died :p That was really fun though. A good end to the week! Puri left to go to movie group, and after hanging out for a while I went upstairs to get Tomo so that we could eat the pizza that Puri had left for us. We ended up eating dinner and chatting for 3 hours! I learned so much. He taught me that there are three alphabets in Japanese, in middle school they learn our letters and they can write their words using our letters which I think is really cool, he taught me how to say my name is Erin, how to write my name in Japanese, and much more. We talked about sports, how dumb it is that people get tattoos in Japanese who don't speak Japanese (often times they say weird things), and I learned a lot. I am at an advantage learning Spanish because it has some similarities to english with cognates and some sentence structure. Tomo had to learn a new alphabet, a completely new words, and a new sentence structure (in Japanese it is subject, object, verb). But in some ways he is at an advantage and I am at a disadvantage: understanding temperature in Celsius, weight, measurements, distance, etc. We spent a lot of time discussing the height of basketball players and trying to figure out how to communicate using different ways of measuring. Then we talked about customs in our countries and what average heights are, what people think about tattoos, Japanese comics (normal to read there, loser if you read in the US), and the stereotypes we have heard in our country about the other person's country (he said in Japan they think of Americans as tall, blonde, blue eyes, and can't find Japan on the map- I fit most of that stereotype... whoops haha). But the point is that I learned a lot from him and it was so very interesting to talk to him. We come from such different places and talking was very fascinating. But now it is really late and I have an excursion tomorrow, so off to bed!
Songs:
The kill- 30 seconds to mars
Wheels- Cake
Stand up- Flobots
Where Would I Be?- Cake
The Start- Roe
Words:
cigüeña- stork (they are all over here, including the roof of our school. Their nests are HUGE!)
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