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Although all of the travels that I have taken part in have been such a great experience, I have truly been looking forward to these last two weeks of good old Caceres, Spain. I hope to try and soak in every last memory we can of the place we have called home for the past few months.
After Zurich, there were a lot of things to get done in the early part of the week. I had a two part final for my conversation class as well as prepping for the finals I will take next week. This past week of class was a lot of finishing up of topics and themes as well as going over what was to be expected for our finals (although I still have no idea how that will all go down)
It's been a little bit hard with trying to figure out how I have been doing in all of my classes. Its like pulling teeth trying to get grades out of my professors, and I have only seen one letter grade in only one of my classes this entire semester. I am not sure if this is how it is normally done, but it's definitely been a lot different than Iowa State's method of grade reporting. Toni, our advisor, told us not to worry too much over grades and that if there was something to be worried about, she would have alerted us. That came as a relief to many of us, but I still want to make sure to get some good studying in this weekend so I don't have to worry about the final tests I will be taking Monday and Wednesday.
Ginny and I spent our first two days of the week preparing for classes and getting readjusted after Switzerland. I finally had a chance to catch up on my blog from Semana Santa and was relieved to finally get those, along with the pictures, posted on the website.
This week in Caceres there is a big celebration going on for San Jorge. Apparently, the focus of the celebration is to remember the time when Caceres was taken over by the Christians and the Muslims were forced to flee the city. There has been art lining the streets of Caceres as well as a book fair going to celebrate the worldwide day of reading. On Tuesday night, the city people brought the virgin down from the mountain and took her to the plaza mayor. Ginny and I didn't make it into town to watch that part of the celebration, but we did go in for Wednesdays burning of the dragon. That night, the townspeople held a parade where they have dragons that they march into the plaza mayor. There is a mini skit to depict the time when the Christians came, fallowed by the burning of this giant paper dragon. The plaza was packed, and although we didn't know exactly what was going on, it was fun to experience a little piece of their culture. After the burning, there was fire works in the plaza, and Ginny and I left shortly after to try and race home in time to watch the final episode of Acusados. Sadly, we arrived just as the last 5 minutes of the program were on, and the show ended on a pretty sad note. Lots of murder and drama. Ginny and I grabbed a quite bite to eat and then finally got to bed around 1:00.
Thursday we did not have school because of San Jorge so our group took its final excursion to Salamanca. We left early in the morning and arrived just about 2.5 hours later. My favorite art professor, Julio, was not able to come with us so we had to hire an actual tour guide to show us around the city. We wandered through the plaza major, checked out the cities famous cathedral, as well as the medieval architecture that engulfs the cities streets. It was a perfect day out and it was nice to see another Spanish city and learn about its culture and famous university. After lunch, we had about 5 hours of free time, so Ginny, Maren and I, grabbed some food and drinks and ate lunch outside on the steps by the library. Afterwards, we found a nice grassy spot down by the river and enjoyed the rest of the afternoon sunshine and good weather. We left around 6:30 and got back into town at 9.
Ginny and I came home right away and made some supper after getting caught up on emails. We had decided that this would be our last night in together so we wanted to do masks and watch the office for the remainder of the night. It was really nice to just take it easy and actually get some good sleep since I know the rest of this weekend/week will be crazy.
Since it is our last weekend here we have a lot of places that we still want to go back to before we leave. We are going to try and eat at Big House, go to the hookah bar, go out in the old part of town, do a BBQ, and then on Sunday we have a bullfight to attend.
Lots to do in a short amount time, but I am both very excited and a little saddened to know that this is the last weekend I will be spending here in Caceres!
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