As a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar living in Barcelona, Spain for a year, I was searching for a service project to give back to my new community and fulfill one of my duties as a scholar. Only a few months after arrival, I was contacted by my scholarship coordinator about the Wulf family needing economical housing for their one week visit to a special doctor in Barcelona, Dr. Martinez founder of the Manuela Martinez Foundation (www.martinezfoundation.org). The Ronald McDonald House, where the family usually stayed, was full at the last minute and couldn’t accommodate them. They were arriving from North Carolina in just a few days. A hotel wasn’t an easy solution because of its high cost for the visiting family of three for a week and also that they needed a kitchen available to prepare special food for the patient. I quickly went to the first Rotary meeting I could and luckily found an assistant governor of the district. He emailed my request for housing to all the clubs in the Barcelona area and within a day I had located a Rotarian’s apartment for the family.
The Foundation was created for the research, diagnosis and treatment of children with peroxisomal disorders and other lipid diseases. After speaking with the Wulf family, a trustee of the Foundation, and various others, I learned that Dr. Martinez is the only doctor in the world successful in treating this rare disease and that is why she has patients flying in with their families from all over the world. Dr. Martinez doesn’t charge for her services and has been working for the Foundation for a few years without a salary because there is little money and awareness for the rare disease and she is so passionate about her work and helping her patients.
From that point on, I have continued to find housing for patient families, developed a relationship with the Wulf family and Dr. Martinez, organized a benefit dinner for the Foundation, and spoke about the Foundation at all my scholar presentations. I have helped raise more than 800 euros for the Foundation just from Rotarians and Rotary clubs in Barcelona. I have also raised much needed awareness for the relatively young Foundation and given hope to Dr. Martinez and her patients. I am currently preparing a brief summary of my work this last year and suggestions and contact information for the three future scholars to Barcelona so that they can continue this worthy project. My work with the Foundation, I believe, has made the largest difference in people’s lives during my Ambassadorial Scholar year.
June 30, 2005
June 17, 2005
Waitlisted to 3 Law schools in the US for Fall 05
Dear readers,
This is sort of a weird idea but I guess I just wanted to get it out there.
I am currently waitlisted to Duke Law, UNC Law, and on the shortened waitlist to Northwestern. If anyone knows of ways to get off the waitlist and get admitted, please let me know.
Thanks,
Ruby :)
This is sort of a weird idea but I guess I just wanted to get it out there.
I am currently waitlisted to Duke Law, UNC Law, and on the shortened waitlist to Northwestern. If anyone knows of ways to get off the waitlist and get admitted, please let me know.
Thanks,
Ruby :)
June 16, 2005
May Update: Speeches, prom, and a fairy tale castle
June 16, 2005
Dearest Friends, Family, and Rotarians,
My Rotary Scholar year is nearing its end. I am just in the ‘closing up shop’ phase where I am saying my goodbyes, sending out the pictures people requested, selling my furniture, and making sure I have done everything in Barcelona so I don’t regret having missed out on something later.
In summation of May, I kept up with my normal rapid pace. I presented to Rotary audiences 5 times including at the District 2210 Conference in Segovia (Spain). My sister visited for a week and my brother moved in to our place. My former college roommate/bridesmaid visited me from the States. I kept busy between hosting my guests, maintaining my English classes, promoting the Martinez Foundation Dinner, which was held on the 9th of June, and also putting the finishing touches on the Americans for Informed Democracy conference that was held June 3-5.
As I turn 24 years old today (June 16th) and also need to write up the final report for my scholarship year, I am in an introspective mood trying to summarize what I have learned, how I have grown, and what I will take away from this wonderful experience.
For more details and photos, continue below, and check out my website at:
http://www.powersprep.com/rubypowers
The Full Update:
May 1st was a crazy day. I was finishing the last day of my Camino experience. Another scholar (Christanne) and I went the wrong way and walked in the dark in the woods for about an hour with just a small flashlight guiding us. (We started the day from where we had ended the night before instead of just following arrows around the city which we didn’t see that morning.) We had left extremely early so that we could make it to the Cathedral on time for the pilgrims’ noon mass. We learned of our mistake when fellow pilgrims who left 30 minutes to an hour after us actually caught up with us early in the walk. This last leg also included a large uphill climb, and it rained most of the 4-hour walk. Because the other pilgrims had caught up with us, and we were all rushing to make it to the noon mass, we didn’t want to stop and take a break. In the end, I think I walked without a bathroom or any type of break for at least 4 hours going uphill in the rain.
Reaching the Cathedral was great knowing that I had walked 120 kilometers of the Camino. Some say that arriving at Cathedral is the goal of the Camino. But although there is a destination to reach, it is never the reaching the destination that makes you fulfilled. It should be the journey that you have learned from and appreciated that makes you walk away more complete and happy that you did it.
It was a bit anti-climactic to arrive to a large Cathedral filled with a lot of people all crowding around for a place to sit or stand before the mass started. We arrived just before noon. We had walked 120 kilometers, and we didn’t even have a place to sit. And for some pilgrims, they could care less about going to the mass. I didn’t like how the Camino had become a secular thing to do. I guess everyone has his/her right to do it, but minus my own personal reflection time, I did not like the lack of devotion to Christianity.
I walked away with a sense of accomplishment, the appreciation for nature and ‘roughing it,’ having had plethora of reflection time, and the continued realization that is all about the journey, but not the destination.
May 2nd I wanted to start walking again in the morning, but my schedule said that I had to catch a train to catch a bus to catch a plane back to Barcelona. When I got to the airport in A Coruna (near Santiago), I just walked around the parking a lot as I waited for my plane; I could not stop walking! I was going to miss walking the Camino.
I can be a bit crazy sometimes. I realized this when I also read that the same day I was returning to Barcelona from the Camino, I was speaking in another town an hour away from my house at a dinner meeting. As soon as I made it home, I put on my suit and headed to Sabadell to speak to the Rotary club. I had to crash at a friend’s house that night because the trains stopped when the meeting was over. Note: Rotary dinner meetings in Spain start at 9pm and usually don’t completely end until around midnight. Hence, every Monday night I come home at midnight from my local Rotary club’s meetings.
The following day, May 3rd, I had another speech. I presented to the first Rotary club in Barcelona, which was chartered in 1922. I met a wonderful member, the first woman member of the club, and have kept in touch with her ever since then. She is originally from Switzerland, but has lived in Barcelona for 40 years.
On the 5th, I held a Texas Exes meeting and met a friendly Texan in town and his Spanish girlfriend. Burak and I had a great time getting to know them, and I am actually having my birthday party this weekend at his place near the beach.
From the 6th to the 10th, an old Belgian friend whom I met in Texas when I was 16 at a RYLA conference visited us with his fiancée. We all spent some evenings together and went out for dinner. They had a great time touring the town and it was nice to see a friend that I have kept in touch with internationally for 8 years.
May 9th and 10th I subbed 6th grade at Burak’s international school. If I ever teach something besides at the university level, I really like 6th grade. They are young enough to respect you, but old enough to be responsible, like mini-adults.
On May 9th, I did something most Rotary scholars probably aren’t allowed to do. I invited a friend (30-something-year-old from Barcelona who works for the UN) to my Rotary club in Barcelona as a potential member. Normally only members can invite potential members. Anyway, she has been attending the meetings for the last month and is interested in joining, so I de facto sponsored a new Rotary member without being a Rotary member myself!!
On the 14th, David, my 22-year-old brother, arrived from the States. Within about 20 minutes of this arrival, Burak and I had to leave to be chaperones at Burak’s school’s high school prom. It was crazy timing. So we hooked David up with a friend to go hang out with for the night and lent David a cell phone. We welcomed him, gave him a set of keys and the phone, and wished him luck for his first night in Barcelona. The Barcelona soccer team won the Spanish League so it was a fun night to be in town.
The prom was great. I had the chance to go to prom with my husband! We were two out of the six chaperones for about the entire high school. Since it is such a small school, one class per grade, they invited freshmen through seniors to attend. The great thing about this prom was that I was young enough to recognize the songs and dance with the group and old enough not to care what they thought. You know how at that age you are always making sure you ‘look’ cool because you have to protect your image? It was a great chance to be a ‘kid’ again.
On Monday (a holiday), all three of us went to a local park. The park has a small lake, a huge fountain, and lots of walkways. We rented a boat and went under a very low bridge a few times, took a lot of photos, and left David on a small island so that he could get a funny picture. We also rented a 3-person bike and took turns pedaling all our weight around. It was more of a workout than a leisure activity. It was a lot of fun to be with my brother and husband doing silly stuff.
The next day, Emily, my 20-year-old sister, arrived from Texas. It was her first time in Spain as well. She came for a total of one week so we tried to make the most of the experience with us all being together for the first time in a year.
As timing would have it, I had previously booked my flight to Madrid so that I could speak at the District 2210 Conference in Segovia (2 hours by train from Madrid). I suggested that David and Emily go to Madrid and meet me there once I was done with my speech.
Segovia is a beautiful little gem of a town. I had never heard about it before. It possesses a large Roman aqueduct in the heart of the town, an alcazar (palace) that inspired Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and a beautiful gothic cathedral. I arrived the night before I was presenting so I used the time to relax, explore, and prepare for my speech. To make an embarrassing moment public, I ordered a sandwich (bocadillo) for dinner at a place I had just decided to eat at since I was too tired to search for something better/cheaper. When the waiter brought me two small bite-sized sandwiches, one containing ham, I told him I had ordered the vegetarian sandwich. He told me that it was just the tapas to go with my wine and my sandwich was still on its way! I felt like an idiot. I decided to just enjoy my time alone in Segovia by calling a lot of friends and catching up while I sat in a tranquil plaza with a fountain.
The next day was a bit ridiculous, I am not sure when people say they like my stories if they want to hear all of them. Basically, the hostel I stayed at wouldn’t let me store my things between check out and when I planned to leave town for the hotel of the conference (only about 2-3 hours of time). Therefore, a scholar who had met up with me that morning and I carried our luggage up and down hills (I felt like I was on the Camino again!) until we had seen most of the sights in Segovia and took a cab to the hotel.
In a few hours with all my luggage on me, I saw the Alcazar, a 12-sided church built by the Knights of Templar to hold a piece of the cross Jesus was crucified on, and about 7 monks singing at mass at a monastery.
We checked into our hotel room at the conference and took a break from the heat and carrying the luggage. Another scholar met up with us, and we rehearsed our combined 15-minute speech. We were nervous to speak in front of the 300-400 people in Spanish, but we tried to keep each other calm.
I started the speech by saying thank you to the Rotarians for their work and the opportunity to have this scholarship. I then briefly spoke about myself and what I had done over the year in Spain. At the point where I was to say I will return to the States and move to North Carolina to hopefully study law this fall, I froze and couldn’t speak. The realization that I would have to leave and the emotion that that evoked overcame me, and I couldn’t continue, but just had tears in my eyes. I mustered whatever I could find in me to whisper in Spanish over the microphone to the presidents and secretaries of all the Rotary clubs in northern Spain, ‘ I don’t want to go back.’
After the two other scholars finished their parts, we were given a standing ovation. We loaded on buses and traveled to a small medieval village for dinner. On the bus ride there, the district governor told my fellow scholar that our presentation saved the beginning of the conference with its genuine emotion and sincerity. We added heart to the opening session, and he was extremely grateful. I was glad to hear that they realized that it wasn’t that I was nervous about speaking, but it was that it actually HIT me that I wouldn’t be able to live as a scholar for much longer in Spain.
For beautiful pictures of my time in Segovia, click on this link or copy and paste it to a new window. You will see a short slideshow of my time there.
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2125296372&code=16633080&mode=invite&DCMP=isc-email-AlbumInvite
The next morning, I left for Madrid. It was a difficult choice. I had my brother and sister in Madrid, but I had worked so hard to go to the District Conference. I wanted to use that time to promote the scholarship so that this district would start offering the scholarship in the near future. I figured I did my best to both parties. I arrived where my brother and sister were staying, and we started our family reunion in Madrid.
Saturday and Sunday, we ran around to tourist sites and took a lot of photos. When we got bored, we would just start taking funny pictures. We got really good at taking pictures of us jumping in mid-air with people, museum, palaces, fountains, lakes, etc. in the background. Basically, we spent almost no money, but had fun just being together and possessing almost a thousand dollars worth of camera equipment to capture all our (silly) moments. Here are some photos:
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2125177862&code=16636633&mode=invite&DCMP=isc-email-AlbumInvite
It was sad to see Emily leave after the week passed by so quickly (just like this year). We had a great time, and she got inspired to study art in Europe in the future.
The very next day, I was subbing high school by day and had to present the Martinez Foundation Benefit Dinner at the monthly meeting of all the presidents of all the Rotary clubs in Barcelona at night. The president of my club told me that he would present the benefit dinner (my Scholar project) for me, but he must have forgotten all about it because I found out he was in Turkey for two weeks at that time. I called a president of a club I had presented to before and found out when and where I would find the meeting so that I could present it myself.
I came in a suit (of course) and was quickly recognized by the attendees since most had seen me speak in Segovia just a few days prior. I planned on just presenting the dinner, but I was invited by one Rotarian to stay and before I knew it, I was joining them all at the dinner table.
There were about 16 people at the dinner in the end, and I was one of the two females. They were very nice, and a couple of them reassured me that I was welcome there so I shouldn’t be nervous speaking to them. In the end, I presented the Martinez Foundation, the upcoming dinner, ways to donate if they couldn’t attend the event, and also got in contact with the clubs I hadn’t yet presented to. It was extremely successful.
Later that week, Ann, my college roommate and bridesmaid, was traveling through Spain with a friend. They stopped by in Barcelona to see me that weekend. It was great having an old friend come visit me and pick up our chats as if no time had passed.
At the same time Ann was in town, I was hosting from afar the Wulf family (Matthew Wulf, 7, is a patient of Dr. Martinez) that was in town for a week of treatment staying at a Rotarian’s apartment. I helped this family find housing last November and that is how I learned about the Foundation. We had dinner together one night and talked about the upcoming Benefit Dinner. We will be living just 3 hours away from each other next year in North Carolina.
The next day, I spoke to Rotary Club Barcelona Diagonal at lunch and updated my club, RCB Millennium, at dinner. I was running a public relations campaign to get awareness for the Benefit Dinner and the Foundation in general.
On the 31st, I had the joy of subbing kindergarten for my third time. I love those little rascals.
I know June is half way over, but you will soon learn why it took me 2 weeks to write this update.
June’s events will include / have included:
- The Americans for Informed Democracy Barcelona Conference (3rd – 5th)
- Martinez Foundation Fundraising Dinner (9th) and raising more than 800 euros from donations alone
- Rotary/Rotaract speeches to 5-7 clubs in the Barcelona area
- Finding out that I am on the shortened waitlist at Northwestern Law, the waitlist at UNC Law, and still waiting to hear from Duke Law
- Finishing my year-long English class with the 4- and 5-year-olds
- Starting a new English class at Wrigley’s (the gum company) in BCN
- Hosting 8 people from Germany, France, and the US.
- Birthday dinner and party (Tapas dinner - 16th and Beach party - 18th)
- Selling furniture and packing some stuff up
- Celebrating 3 years of marriage (June 22nd)
- Going to Mallorca for a couple of days as a second honeymoon
Hope all is well, take care of yourself, and keep in touch.
Ruby
Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar 2004-2005
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Dearest Friends, Family, and Rotarians,
My Rotary Scholar year is nearing its end. I am just in the ‘closing up shop’ phase where I am saying my goodbyes, sending out the pictures people requested, selling my furniture, and making sure I have done everything in Barcelona so I don’t regret having missed out on something later.
In summation of May, I kept up with my normal rapid pace. I presented to Rotary audiences 5 times including at the District 2210 Conference in Segovia (Spain). My sister visited for a week and my brother moved in to our place. My former college roommate/bridesmaid visited me from the States. I kept busy between hosting my guests, maintaining my English classes, promoting the Martinez Foundation Dinner, which was held on the 9th of June, and also putting the finishing touches on the Americans for Informed Democracy conference that was held June 3-5.
As I turn 24 years old today (June 16th) and also need to write up the final report for my scholarship year, I am in an introspective mood trying to summarize what I have learned, how I have grown, and what I will take away from this wonderful experience.
For more details and photos, continue below, and check out my website at:
http://www.powersprep.com/rubypowers
The Full Update:
May 1st was a crazy day. I was finishing the last day of my Camino experience. Another scholar (Christanne) and I went the wrong way and walked in the dark in the woods for about an hour with just a small flashlight guiding us. (We started the day from where we had ended the night before instead of just following arrows around the city which we didn’t see that morning.) We had left extremely early so that we could make it to the Cathedral on time for the pilgrims’ noon mass. We learned of our mistake when fellow pilgrims who left 30 minutes to an hour after us actually caught up with us early in the walk. This last leg also included a large uphill climb, and it rained most of the 4-hour walk. Because the other pilgrims had caught up with us, and we were all rushing to make it to the noon mass, we didn’t want to stop and take a break. In the end, I think I walked without a bathroom or any type of break for at least 4 hours going uphill in the rain.
Reaching the Cathedral was great knowing that I had walked 120 kilometers of the Camino. Some say that arriving at Cathedral is the goal of the Camino. But although there is a destination to reach, it is never the reaching the destination that makes you fulfilled. It should be the journey that you have learned from and appreciated that makes you walk away more complete and happy that you did it.
It was a bit anti-climactic to arrive to a large Cathedral filled with a lot of people all crowding around for a place to sit or stand before the mass started. We arrived just before noon. We had walked 120 kilometers, and we didn’t even have a place to sit. And for some pilgrims, they could care less about going to the mass. I didn’t like how the Camino had become a secular thing to do. I guess everyone has his/her right to do it, but minus my own personal reflection time, I did not like the lack of devotion to Christianity.
I walked away with a sense of accomplishment, the appreciation for nature and ‘roughing it,’ having had plethora of reflection time, and the continued realization that is all about the journey, but not the destination.
May 2nd I wanted to start walking again in the morning, but my schedule said that I had to catch a train to catch a bus to catch a plane back to Barcelona. When I got to the airport in A Coruna (near Santiago), I just walked around the parking a lot as I waited for my plane; I could not stop walking! I was going to miss walking the Camino.
I can be a bit crazy sometimes. I realized this when I also read that the same day I was returning to Barcelona from the Camino, I was speaking in another town an hour away from my house at a dinner meeting. As soon as I made it home, I put on my suit and headed to Sabadell to speak to the Rotary club. I had to crash at a friend’s house that night because the trains stopped when the meeting was over. Note: Rotary dinner meetings in Spain start at 9pm and usually don’t completely end until around midnight. Hence, every Monday night I come home at midnight from my local Rotary club’s meetings.
The following day, May 3rd, I had another speech. I presented to the first Rotary club in Barcelona, which was chartered in 1922. I met a wonderful member, the first woman member of the club, and have kept in touch with her ever since then. She is originally from Switzerland, but has lived in Barcelona for 40 years.
On the 5th, I held a Texas Exes meeting and met a friendly Texan in town and his Spanish girlfriend. Burak and I had a great time getting to know them, and I am actually having my birthday party this weekend at his place near the beach.
From the 6th to the 10th, an old Belgian friend whom I met in Texas when I was 16 at a RYLA conference visited us with his fiancée. We all spent some evenings together and went out for dinner. They had a great time touring the town and it was nice to see a friend that I have kept in touch with internationally for 8 years.
May 9th and 10th I subbed 6th grade at Burak’s international school. If I ever teach something besides at the university level, I really like 6th grade. They are young enough to respect you, but old enough to be responsible, like mini-adults.
On May 9th, I did something most Rotary scholars probably aren’t allowed to do. I invited a friend (30-something-year-old from Barcelona who works for the UN) to my Rotary club in Barcelona as a potential member. Normally only members can invite potential members. Anyway, she has been attending the meetings for the last month and is interested in joining, so I de facto sponsored a new Rotary member without being a Rotary member myself!!
On the 14th, David, my 22-year-old brother, arrived from the States. Within about 20 minutes of this arrival, Burak and I had to leave to be chaperones at Burak’s school’s high school prom. It was crazy timing. So we hooked David up with a friend to go hang out with for the night and lent David a cell phone. We welcomed him, gave him a set of keys and the phone, and wished him luck for his first night in Barcelona. The Barcelona soccer team won the Spanish League so it was a fun night to be in town.
The prom was great. I had the chance to go to prom with my husband! We were two out of the six chaperones for about the entire high school. Since it is such a small school, one class per grade, they invited freshmen through seniors to attend. The great thing about this prom was that I was young enough to recognize the songs and dance with the group and old enough not to care what they thought. You know how at that age you are always making sure you ‘look’ cool because you have to protect your image? It was a great chance to be a ‘kid’ again.
On Monday (a holiday), all three of us went to a local park. The park has a small lake, a huge fountain, and lots of walkways. We rented a boat and went under a very low bridge a few times, took a lot of photos, and left David on a small island so that he could get a funny picture. We also rented a 3-person bike and took turns pedaling all our weight around. It was more of a workout than a leisure activity. It was a lot of fun to be with my brother and husband doing silly stuff.
The next day, Emily, my 20-year-old sister, arrived from Texas. It was her first time in Spain as well. She came for a total of one week so we tried to make the most of the experience with us all being together for the first time in a year.
As timing would have it, I had previously booked my flight to Madrid so that I could speak at the District 2210 Conference in Segovia (2 hours by train from Madrid). I suggested that David and Emily go to Madrid and meet me there once I was done with my speech.
Segovia is a beautiful little gem of a town. I had never heard about it before. It possesses a large Roman aqueduct in the heart of the town, an alcazar (palace) that inspired Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle, and a beautiful gothic cathedral. I arrived the night before I was presenting so I used the time to relax, explore, and prepare for my speech. To make an embarrassing moment public, I ordered a sandwich (bocadillo) for dinner at a place I had just decided to eat at since I was too tired to search for something better/cheaper. When the waiter brought me two small bite-sized sandwiches, one containing ham, I told him I had ordered the vegetarian sandwich. He told me that it was just the tapas to go with my wine and my sandwich was still on its way! I felt like an idiot. I decided to just enjoy my time alone in Segovia by calling a lot of friends and catching up while I sat in a tranquil plaza with a fountain.
The next day was a bit ridiculous, I am not sure when people say they like my stories if they want to hear all of them. Basically, the hostel I stayed at wouldn’t let me store my things between check out and when I planned to leave town for the hotel of the conference (only about 2-3 hours of time). Therefore, a scholar who had met up with me that morning and I carried our luggage up and down hills (I felt like I was on the Camino again!) until we had seen most of the sights in Segovia and took a cab to the hotel.
In a few hours with all my luggage on me, I saw the Alcazar, a 12-sided church built by the Knights of Templar to hold a piece of the cross Jesus was crucified on, and about 7 monks singing at mass at a monastery.
We checked into our hotel room at the conference and took a break from the heat and carrying the luggage. Another scholar met up with us, and we rehearsed our combined 15-minute speech. We were nervous to speak in front of the 300-400 people in Spanish, but we tried to keep each other calm.
I started the speech by saying thank you to the Rotarians for their work and the opportunity to have this scholarship. I then briefly spoke about myself and what I had done over the year in Spain. At the point where I was to say I will return to the States and move to North Carolina to hopefully study law this fall, I froze and couldn’t speak. The realization that I would have to leave and the emotion that that evoked overcame me, and I couldn’t continue, but just had tears in my eyes. I mustered whatever I could find in me to whisper in Spanish over the microphone to the presidents and secretaries of all the Rotary clubs in northern Spain, ‘ I don’t want to go back.’
After the two other scholars finished their parts, we were given a standing ovation. We loaded on buses and traveled to a small medieval village for dinner. On the bus ride there, the district governor told my fellow scholar that our presentation saved the beginning of the conference with its genuine emotion and sincerity. We added heart to the opening session, and he was extremely grateful. I was glad to hear that they realized that it wasn’t that I was nervous about speaking, but it was that it actually HIT me that I wouldn’t be able to live as a scholar for much longer in Spain.
For beautiful pictures of my time in Segovia, click on this link or copy and paste it to a new window. You will see a short slideshow of my time there.
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2125296372&code=16633080&mode=invite&DCMP=isc-email-AlbumInvite
The next morning, I left for Madrid. It was a difficult choice. I had my brother and sister in Madrid, but I had worked so hard to go to the District Conference. I wanted to use that time to promote the scholarship so that this district would start offering the scholarship in the near future. I figured I did my best to both parties. I arrived where my brother and sister were staying, and we started our family reunion in Madrid.
Saturday and Sunday, we ran around to tourist sites and took a lot of photos. When we got bored, we would just start taking funny pictures. We got really good at taking pictures of us jumping in mid-air with people, museum, palaces, fountains, lakes, etc. in the background. Basically, we spent almost no money, but had fun just being together and possessing almost a thousand dollars worth of camera equipment to capture all our (silly) moments. Here are some photos:
http://www.imagestation.com/album/pictures.html?id=2125177862&code=16636633&mode=invite&DCMP=isc-email-AlbumInvite
It was sad to see Emily leave after the week passed by so quickly (just like this year). We had a great time, and she got inspired to study art in Europe in the future.
The very next day, I was subbing high school by day and had to present the Martinez Foundation Benefit Dinner at the monthly meeting of all the presidents of all the Rotary clubs in Barcelona at night. The president of my club told me that he would present the benefit dinner (my Scholar project) for me, but he must have forgotten all about it because I found out he was in Turkey for two weeks at that time. I called a president of a club I had presented to before and found out when and where I would find the meeting so that I could present it myself.
I came in a suit (of course) and was quickly recognized by the attendees since most had seen me speak in Segovia just a few days prior. I planned on just presenting the dinner, but I was invited by one Rotarian to stay and before I knew it, I was joining them all at the dinner table.
There were about 16 people at the dinner in the end, and I was one of the two females. They were very nice, and a couple of them reassured me that I was welcome there so I shouldn’t be nervous speaking to them. In the end, I presented the Martinez Foundation, the upcoming dinner, ways to donate if they couldn’t attend the event, and also got in contact with the clubs I hadn’t yet presented to. It was extremely successful.
Later that week, Ann, my college roommate and bridesmaid, was traveling through Spain with a friend. They stopped by in Barcelona to see me that weekend. It was great having an old friend come visit me and pick up our chats as if no time had passed.
At the same time Ann was in town, I was hosting from afar the Wulf family (Matthew Wulf, 7, is a patient of Dr. Martinez) that was in town for a week of treatment staying at a Rotarian’s apartment. I helped this family find housing last November and that is how I learned about the Foundation. We had dinner together one night and talked about the upcoming Benefit Dinner. We will be living just 3 hours away from each other next year in North Carolina.
The next day, I spoke to Rotary Club Barcelona Diagonal at lunch and updated my club, RCB Millennium, at dinner. I was running a public relations campaign to get awareness for the Benefit Dinner and the Foundation in general.
On the 31st, I had the joy of subbing kindergarten for my third time. I love those little rascals.
I know June is half way over, but you will soon learn why it took me 2 weeks to write this update.
June’s events will include / have included:
- The Americans for Informed Democracy Barcelona Conference (3rd – 5th)
- Martinez Foundation Fundraising Dinner (9th) and raising more than 800 euros from donations alone
- Rotary/Rotaract speeches to 5-7 clubs in the Barcelona area
- Finding out that I am on the shortened waitlist at Northwestern Law, the waitlist at UNC Law, and still waiting to hear from Duke Law
- Finishing my year-long English class with the 4- and 5-year-olds
- Starting a new English class at Wrigley’s (the gum company) in BCN
- Hosting 8 people from Germany, France, and the US.
- Birthday dinner and party (Tapas dinner - 16th and Beach party - 18th)
- Selling furniture and packing some stuff up
- Celebrating 3 years of marriage (June 22nd)
- Going to Mallorca for a couple of days as a second honeymoon
Hope all is well, take care of yourself, and keep in touch.
Ruby
Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar 2004-2005
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
June 15, 2005
Festivals in Spain
You know I think a writer of an article regarding the Running of the Bulls basically captured the essence behind most of the festivals in Spain when he was describing San Fermin in Pamplona, 'shear madness.'
In my last 10 months, I have been to Zaragoza for the festival of St. Pilar, Barcelona for Le Merce,Valencia for Las Fallaa, Sevile for La Feria de Abril, and walked the last 120 Km. of the Camino de Santiago. In July, I will be apart of the most famous of Spanish festivals, San Fermin 'Running of the Bulls' in Pamplona.
Pamplona: Spain’s morning run
Running with the bulls in Fiesta de San Fermin
In my last 10 months, I have been to Zaragoza for the festival of St. Pilar, Barcelona for Le Merce,Valencia for Las Fallaa, Sevile for La Feria de Abril, and walked the last 120 Km. of the Camino de Santiago. In July, I will be apart of the most famous of Spanish festivals, San Fermin 'Running of the Bulls' in Pamplona.
Pamplona: Spain’s morning run
Running with the bulls in Fiesta de San Fermin
June 6, 2005
May 25, 2005
Found some BCN/Spain websites
http://www.spainexpat.com
http://www.spainexpat.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-spain.php
http://www.barcelona-home.com
http://www.barcelona-home.com/int/work.asp?theme=expatriates&language=eng
http://www.spainexpat.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-spain.php
http://www.barcelona-home.com
http://www.barcelona-home.com/int/work.asp?theme=expatriates&language=eng
May 8, 2005
April's Update:Camino de Santiago and more!
May 6, 2005
Dearest Friends, Family, and Rotarians,
Ten months ago today, Burak and I left the US. We have since lived in Turkey for two months and Spain for eight months. With just 3 months until we have to fly back to D.C., I am trying to pump myself up for returning while continuing to make the most of every minute over here.
In summation of April, I think I did a good job of seizing the moment. I visited Andalusia (southern Spain) and went to La Feria in Seville, spoke to 8 Rotary clubs, subbed high school for a week, hosted 8 people, and walked 120 km of the Camino de Santiago.
Furthermore, I am continuously organizing the Americans for Informed Democracy conference and Martinez Foundation Fundraising Dinner both being held in June in Barcelona.
For more details and photos, continue below, and check out my website at:
http://www.powersprep.com/rubypowers
The Full Update:
On the 2nd, Burak and I held one of our monthly parties. This time we had my Belgian host brother and his girlfriend visiting. We also had two Rotary Ambassadorial Scholars (one living in Basque country and the other living in Italy). That night we learned that the Pope died. It was a sad and historical moment.
That Monday, I had a full Rotary schedule with a speech to Rotary Club Barcelona Europa and my club, RC BCN Millennium. It was fun but draining to public speak in Spanish at both meetings. I think it is sort of funny how I am not scared to speak publicly in a foreign language. I guess I have had a lot of training.
On the 6th, I was asked to speak at Burak’s high school’s Career Day regarding International Relations careers. I was happy to speak about something I enjoy even though I honestly think I have more to learn and do before I can be an expert on the subject. Within that day alone, I found two speakers for my June Americans for Informed Democracy conference. One of those speakers is the Consul General for the US in Barcelona and the other is a Human Rights Officer for the UN in Geneva. I guess when you give, you receive.
On the 8th, Burak and I went to the director of his school’s party. It started at 4pm. I really thought that was a typo because parties don’t start that early over here. It wasn’t. We didn’t leave until 1am or so. I think it is funny how I am at a point in life when I realize the teachers I always looked up to (and still do), are now in my peer group. I am even a high school substitute teacher. It is a weird moment in life when you realize you can be a HS teacher.
So quite tired the morning after the party, we hosted 3 Fuqua (Duke’s Business School) students/alumni at our house for tea and snacks. Two were studying here on a term abroad and one has been living here for a while. We chatted about the school, life in Durham, and job prospects. Only at the end of the time did we realize we had met one of them before on our visit last year to Duke. He was from Brazil and we learned he was friends with our Brazilian friend that hosted us at Duke last May. He was also the person that organized the Brazilian music at the Fuqua Friday event we attended. No wonder he looked so familiar!
That same Saturday, a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar (Pam) arrived while she was on her way back to Spain from a Europe trip before returning to the States. I coordinated a Rotary Scholar Tapas Dinner with the 2 other scholars in town and we all had a blast.
Later that same day, Sabi, arrived. He was an exchange student to El Paso the same year Burak was there and lived with the same host family as Burak. Sabi stayed with us for 10 days and the guys had a lot of beer and catching up to do.
On the 11th, I spoke to Rotary Club Barcelona ’92. They were really nice. It was a little intimidating walking into a meeting speaking to a group of men in my 2nd language, but I am getting used to that as well. They asked me some tough
questions. One was something regarding ‘what do you think about governments that adhere strictly to one religion?’. For example, Spain has had a strong tie to the Catholic church for a long time and has recently had more of a separation between the church and state. I told them that after living in five countries, I like the separation of church and state as seen in the US and I also like having a Christian ideology from our Founders. As a woman in Turkey, although the government is secular, it was difficult because their predominant religion of the country affects the culture heavily which affects the government. Trying to be diplomatic in a foreign language is a skill I am still perfecting.
The next day, I flew to Malaga in the wee hours of the morning (southern Spain) and was picked up my a scholar, Christanne, and her dad at the airport. We then drove to Granada to see the Alhambra, a well preserved, old Moorish-style fortress. For a late lunch we met up with Pam and the other Granada Rotary scholars. We then drove on to Seville where we would stay for the week to enjoy the annual Feria de Abril.
The Feria de Abril is a weeklong party in Seville where the town dresses up in flamenco dresses and traditional suits and drinks and dances until dawn. This is considered a nice break after the seriousness of the Easter week which is just a few weeks before the fair. I arrived with no fancy dress, but within no time, with lots of help from scholars and host moms, I looked the part as I pretended to dance the Sevillano.
Organizations, clubs, and companies sponsor these temporary restaurant/bar tents called ‘casetas.’ There are about 1,100 casetas in the fair park and in most cases you can only enter if you are a member or have tickets. At the height of the event, there are 2 million people at the fair.
Christanne, is a Rotary scholar in Seville, and had tickets to the Rotary caseta all week. We would arrive in the afternoon and not leave until the early morning. It was a tough schedule and I had to keep telling myself ‘you don’t get this chance very often in life’ so that I would keep up the pace. In the process, I presented the South Austin Texas Rotary banner to the Seville club and had a great time chatting with the Seville members.
In between going to the fair, I also went to an Arab bath and saw the Cathedral. The Cathedral in Seville made my mouth drop when I walked in (and I have seen a lot of cathedrals!). It is largest Gothic church in the world and the third largest church in general after St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and St. Paul’s in London. It is said to hold the tomb of Christopher Columbus. The Arab bath was fun but a little disappointing after being in a real thing in Turkey. They ultimately recreated an Arab looking bath area and put in a variety of pools with various temperatures. My favorite was what they called the ‘Bano Turko’ which is a ‘Hamam’ in Turkish for bath. But really that bath was just like my wet vapor sauna in my local gym. It was exotic and I had a nice massage at the end. It also made me wonder if North Carolina would appreciate a ‘Hamam’?
Later in the week, a few of my Rotary club members from Barcelona planned to visit for the celebration as well. We had a lot of fun together when they arrived. After going to the fair on Friday afternoon, I returned home on Saturday around 5am, woke up at 8am, panicked, ran out the door with most of my luggage, and made my 8:55am flight to Barcelona. I want to blame my Rotary members for keeping me out so late, but I think it might have been my fault. :)
On the 17th, while our Hungarian friend was still here, we had a friend that I met in the Krakow airport visit me for 24 hours. She is an American studying in England and was on her way from Italy to Spain.
From the 18th to the 22nd, I subbed high school algebra, chemistry, and was a study hall monitor. Considering my last complete math and science class was my junior year of high school, I had to read up a bit on what I was supposed to ‘teach’. In the end, I let them do a lot of independent review of the material. They were fun, but really I don’t know what is harder to manage four-year olds or 14-year olds!
The week I subbed from 8:30 to 4:00pm all week, I was also teaching my adult class twice a week, my kids class twice a week, welcomed three new guests after seeing two leave, and also saw Burak leave to Rome.
On the 19th, I welcomed another American I met in the Krakow airport and two Belgian exchange students for the weekend. I gave them a brief tour since I was going to be busy all week and really didn’t hang out with them until Friday night when I made a tapas dinner for them.
On the 21st, I spoke to RC BCN Centre. The language of the club is Catalan, but occasionally they would switch over to Spanish for me. They were really nice and we had a great discussion. Around 11:45pm at the end of the dinner, the discussion turned to the topic of Socrates. I figured it was too late to listen to a philosophical discussion in Catalan regarding Socrates so I excused myself since I still had to give up early to work the next day.
At the end of the week I couldn’t do anything else. I was TIRED. So I went to the beach with my two Belgian exchange students and we just chilled out and got some sun while talking about the fun and silly experiences of living in Belgium. We carried on a conversation in a mix between French and English since we had all lived in Belgium.
On Sunday the 24th, all the guests left and Burak returned from Rome that afternoon. Minus the Americans for Informed Democracy planning meeting I held that evening, I tried to spend all my time with Burak before leaving him for another week the next morning.
Monday the 25th of April, I flew to La Coruna with just my backpack. From La Coruna I took a train to Santiago de Compostela where I got settled into my hostel and wondered around the small town on my own. That night I spoke to the Rotary Club Santiago. Because of a local holiday, there were only 3 members attending. I decided to forgo the formal presentation and just gave them some highlights of my speech continued by a discussion. I will see some of them again at the District conference in Segovia May 20-22.
The next morning, Christanne (my travel buddy) flew in from Seville. The plan was for her to land at 8:25am, catch the 8:30am airport bus, and rendezvous at the Santiago train station for a 9:04am train to a town where we could take a bus to the start of our Camino de Santiago. When I got the text that she had made it on the bus from the airport, I was ecstatic because our crazy plan was going to work. We had to catch this 9:04am train or we would lose the day to travel because the next train was at 4pm.
The Camino de Santiago has a long history. Basically the remains of James or St. James are said to be in the Cathedral of Santiago. The name Santiago comes from ‘Sant’ and ‘Iago.’ ‘Sant’ is for saint and ‘Iago’ is from Hebrew’s Yaacob. (‘Yaacob’ in Hebrew, ‘Jacobus’ in Latin, ‘Jacques’ in French, and ‘James’ in English)
For more history: http://www.caminosantiago.com/web_ingles/index.htm
Back to our travels on Tuesday: We arrived at the free hostel in Sarria for pilgrims but to be able to stay we had to have walked at least 10-11km. So we had planned to do this already but we decided to start the Camino from Samos which was just 10-11 km away from the hostel. We had to take a taxi there so we wouldn’t waste time waiting for a bus and would be able to still get a spot in the hostel. After a plane, a train, a bus, and a taxi, we finally got to a small town with a monastery, Samos, where we could commence our 120 km Camino. Whew!
As we watched the territory the taxi drove by, we got a little scared to think we were going to have to WALK that distance back. When we arrived, we slammed the taxi doors, said ‘thanks,’ and proceeded to check out the monastery. What we quickly realized was that at 2pm, the monastery and almost everything else in the town was closed until 4:30pm. Then the worry was how to obtain a stamp or a ‘sello’ on our little Camino passport to have proof we had been to Samos while all was closed.
We asked a restaurant lady and she told us to go to the monastery because maybe the hostel would be open. We quickly got excited and walked over there but found the hostel open without anyone supervising it. Then I saw one person working, the gas attendant, and I asked him when the hostel person would return so we could get our stamps. He said the magic words, ‘ I have the stamp.’ I wanted to kiss him. We were so excited we got our stamps and then I took a picture with him. He felt like a king for being of such importance to us and had a grin from side to side. We had our first stamp and even if we couldn’t see the monastery, we had begun our Camino!
I can’t put into words my experience for the next 5 days where Christanne and I covered 120 km (74.4 miles) in 32 hours and 30 minutes of continuous walking. We stayed for free each night in pilgrims’ hostels. We woke up at 5:30am to start at 6am and walk the 18-27 km for the day usually reaching our destination town between 2 and 4pm. We would shower and change into our clean set of clothes at the arrival of the new hostel. We would then shop for dinner for the night and also breakfast and lunch for the next day. We ate dinner at 6pm and were sleeping by 10pm. We met some really amazing and interesting people and also a couple of really weird characters. I felt like I was on my modern-day Canterbury Tales with various pilgrim characters with peculiar stories.
We would often only see towns with stores at our destination towns and wouldn’t see stoplights, street signs, nor anything of that sort during our walks. We often walked into a village and had a cow or two standing in the middle of our Camino. We almost got ran over by cows during our lunch in a small field. We crossed over flowing creeks and I almost fell because I was balancing my weight and the weight of my backpack (10 kilos/22.2 lbs) on one rock while trying to find the best place to put my next step.
In the end, I learned that I could walk 120 km in 5.5 days with a heavy backpack up and down hills, through creeks, and in the hot sun and rain. I had time to be introspective at a point where I have only three months before I return to my home country again and start a new stage in my life. I learned the joys of not checking my email everyday and not being in contact with the rest of the world. I learned how eating should be about fueling your body. I learned I could walk 4 hours without stopping. I confirmed my belief I have a small bladder. I took joy in finding toilet paper in hostels and café bathrooms. I saw the value of not having much because it would weigh you down on your walk and it is the same in life (I have storages in MD/VA/TX).
I saw a lot of analogies for life on my way as well. Once we entered a part of the Camino that crossed by a creek. On the left side, I saw stone steps that would keep us off of the mud and water. On the right side, I saw these twigs in the mud and I thought why where they there if there are stones to cross on the left? Then I followed the stones on the left with my eyes and realized they only led halfway down the watered path. The least likely path, the one with the twigs in the mud, was the right path because after the twigs, there were stones that led you to the other side of the creek. Ultimately, it made me think that sometimes the most ‘obvious’ path might not be the right one and sometimes rocky and unusual routes at the beginning can still lead you to where you want to go.
We arrived in Santiago on Sunday, May 1st and celebrated with fellow pilgrims that night. On Monday morning I flew back to Barcelona. While I waited for the plane in La Coruna I walked in the airport parking lot because I missed the Camino. That night I spoke to a Rotary club in Sabadell, just 40 min from my place. I managed to pull off a decent presentation even though I was ready to go to sleep when they started eating. Well, more about that all later.
May’s events will include:
- Rotary speeches to more clubs in the Barcelona area
- Welcoming my brother and sister from the States to BCN for a visit
- Going to Burak’s high school’s prom ( :) )
- Hosting 5 guests from USA and Belgium
- Speaking at the Rotary District (2210) Conference regarding my scholarship and experiences
Hope all is well, take care of yourself, and keep in touch.
Ruby
Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar 2004-2005
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Dearest Friends, Family, and Rotarians,
Ten months ago today, Burak and I left the US. We have since lived in Turkey for two months and Spain for eight months. With just 3 months until we have to fly back to D.C., I am trying to pump myself up for returning while continuing to make the most of every minute over here.
In summation of April, I think I did a good job of seizing the moment. I visited Andalusia (southern Spain) and went to La Feria in Seville, spoke to 8 Rotary clubs, subbed high school for a week, hosted 8 people, and walked 120 km of the Camino de Santiago.
Furthermore, I am continuously organizing the Americans for Informed Democracy conference and Martinez Foundation Fundraising Dinner both being held in June in Barcelona.
For more details and photos, continue below, and check out my website at:
http://www.powersprep.com/rubypowers
The Full Update:
On the 2nd, Burak and I held one of our monthly parties. This time we had my Belgian host brother and his girlfriend visiting. We also had two Rotary Ambassadorial Scholars (one living in Basque country and the other living in Italy). That night we learned that the Pope died. It was a sad and historical moment.
That Monday, I had a full Rotary schedule with a speech to Rotary Club Barcelona Europa and my club, RC BCN Millennium. It was fun but draining to public speak in Spanish at both meetings. I think it is sort of funny how I am not scared to speak publicly in a foreign language. I guess I have had a lot of training.
On the 6th, I was asked to speak at Burak’s high school’s Career Day regarding International Relations careers. I was happy to speak about something I enjoy even though I honestly think I have more to learn and do before I can be an expert on the subject. Within that day alone, I found two speakers for my June Americans for Informed Democracy conference. One of those speakers is the Consul General for the US in Barcelona and the other is a Human Rights Officer for the UN in Geneva. I guess when you give, you receive.
On the 8th, Burak and I went to the director of his school’s party. It started at 4pm. I really thought that was a typo because parties don’t start that early over here. It wasn’t. We didn’t leave until 1am or so. I think it is funny how I am at a point in life when I realize the teachers I always looked up to (and still do), are now in my peer group. I am even a high school substitute teacher. It is a weird moment in life when you realize you can be a HS teacher.
So quite tired the morning after the party, we hosted 3 Fuqua (Duke’s Business School) students/alumni at our house for tea and snacks. Two were studying here on a term abroad and one has been living here for a while. We chatted about the school, life in Durham, and job prospects. Only at the end of the time did we realize we had met one of them before on our visit last year to Duke. He was from Brazil and we learned he was friends with our Brazilian friend that hosted us at Duke last May. He was also the person that organized the Brazilian music at the Fuqua Friday event we attended. No wonder he looked so familiar!
That same Saturday, a Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar (Pam) arrived while she was on her way back to Spain from a Europe trip before returning to the States. I coordinated a Rotary Scholar Tapas Dinner with the 2 other scholars in town and we all had a blast.
Later that same day, Sabi, arrived. He was an exchange student to El Paso the same year Burak was there and lived with the same host family as Burak. Sabi stayed with us for 10 days and the guys had a lot of beer and catching up to do.
On the 11th, I spoke to Rotary Club Barcelona ’92. They were really nice. It was a little intimidating walking into a meeting speaking to a group of men in my 2nd language, but I am getting used to that as well. They asked me some tough
questions. One was something regarding ‘what do you think about governments that adhere strictly to one religion?’. For example, Spain has had a strong tie to the Catholic church for a long time and has recently had more of a separation between the church and state. I told them that after living in five countries, I like the separation of church and state as seen in the US and I also like having a Christian ideology from our Founders. As a woman in Turkey, although the government is secular, it was difficult because their predominant religion of the country affects the culture heavily which affects the government. Trying to be diplomatic in a foreign language is a skill I am still perfecting.
The next day, I flew to Malaga in the wee hours of the morning (southern Spain) and was picked up my a scholar, Christanne, and her dad at the airport. We then drove to Granada to see the Alhambra, a well preserved, old Moorish-style fortress. For a late lunch we met up with Pam and the other Granada Rotary scholars. We then drove on to Seville where we would stay for the week to enjoy the annual Feria de Abril.
The Feria de Abril is a weeklong party in Seville where the town dresses up in flamenco dresses and traditional suits and drinks and dances until dawn. This is considered a nice break after the seriousness of the Easter week which is just a few weeks before the fair. I arrived with no fancy dress, but within no time, with lots of help from scholars and host moms, I looked the part as I pretended to dance the Sevillano.
Organizations, clubs, and companies sponsor these temporary restaurant/bar tents called ‘casetas.’ There are about 1,100 casetas in the fair park and in most cases you can only enter if you are a member or have tickets. At the height of the event, there are 2 million people at the fair.
Christanne, is a Rotary scholar in Seville, and had tickets to the Rotary caseta all week. We would arrive in the afternoon and not leave until the early morning. It was a tough schedule and I had to keep telling myself ‘you don’t get this chance very often in life’ so that I would keep up the pace. In the process, I presented the South Austin Texas Rotary banner to the Seville club and had a great time chatting with the Seville members.
In between going to the fair, I also went to an Arab bath and saw the Cathedral. The Cathedral in Seville made my mouth drop when I walked in (and I have seen a lot of cathedrals!). It is largest Gothic church in the world and the third largest church in general after St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome and St. Paul’s in London. It is said to hold the tomb of Christopher Columbus. The Arab bath was fun but a little disappointing after being in a real thing in Turkey. They ultimately recreated an Arab looking bath area and put in a variety of pools with various temperatures. My favorite was what they called the ‘Bano Turko’ which is a ‘Hamam’ in Turkish for bath. But really that bath was just like my wet vapor sauna in my local gym. It was exotic and I had a nice massage at the end. It also made me wonder if North Carolina would appreciate a ‘Hamam’?
Later in the week, a few of my Rotary club members from Barcelona planned to visit for the celebration as well. We had a lot of fun together when they arrived. After going to the fair on Friday afternoon, I returned home on Saturday around 5am, woke up at 8am, panicked, ran out the door with most of my luggage, and made my 8:55am flight to Barcelona. I want to blame my Rotary members for keeping me out so late, but I think it might have been my fault. :)
On the 17th, while our Hungarian friend was still here, we had a friend that I met in the Krakow airport visit me for 24 hours. She is an American studying in England and was on her way from Italy to Spain.
From the 18th to the 22nd, I subbed high school algebra, chemistry, and was a study hall monitor. Considering my last complete math and science class was my junior year of high school, I had to read up a bit on what I was supposed to ‘teach’. In the end, I let them do a lot of independent review of the material. They were fun, but really I don’t know what is harder to manage four-year olds or 14-year olds!
The week I subbed from 8:30 to 4:00pm all week, I was also teaching my adult class twice a week, my kids class twice a week, welcomed three new guests after seeing two leave, and also saw Burak leave to Rome.
On the 19th, I welcomed another American I met in the Krakow airport and two Belgian exchange students for the weekend. I gave them a brief tour since I was going to be busy all week and really didn’t hang out with them until Friday night when I made a tapas dinner for them.
On the 21st, I spoke to RC BCN Centre. The language of the club is Catalan, but occasionally they would switch over to Spanish for me. They were really nice and we had a great discussion. Around 11:45pm at the end of the dinner, the discussion turned to the topic of Socrates. I figured it was too late to listen to a philosophical discussion in Catalan regarding Socrates so I excused myself since I still had to give up early to work the next day.
At the end of the week I couldn’t do anything else. I was TIRED. So I went to the beach with my two Belgian exchange students and we just chilled out and got some sun while talking about the fun and silly experiences of living in Belgium. We carried on a conversation in a mix between French and English since we had all lived in Belgium.
On Sunday the 24th, all the guests left and Burak returned from Rome that afternoon. Minus the Americans for Informed Democracy planning meeting I held that evening, I tried to spend all my time with Burak before leaving him for another week the next morning.
Monday the 25th of April, I flew to La Coruna with just my backpack. From La Coruna I took a train to Santiago de Compostela where I got settled into my hostel and wondered around the small town on my own. That night I spoke to the Rotary Club Santiago. Because of a local holiday, there were only 3 members attending. I decided to forgo the formal presentation and just gave them some highlights of my speech continued by a discussion. I will see some of them again at the District conference in Segovia May 20-22.
The next morning, Christanne (my travel buddy) flew in from Seville. The plan was for her to land at 8:25am, catch the 8:30am airport bus, and rendezvous at the Santiago train station for a 9:04am train to a town where we could take a bus to the start of our Camino de Santiago. When I got the text that she had made it on the bus from the airport, I was ecstatic because our crazy plan was going to work. We had to catch this 9:04am train or we would lose the day to travel because the next train was at 4pm.
The Camino de Santiago has a long history. Basically the remains of James or St. James are said to be in the Cathedral of Santiago. The name Santiago comes from ‘Sant’ and ‘Iago.’ ‘Sant’ is for saint and ‘Iago’ is from Hebrew’s Yaacob. (‘Yaacob’ in Hebrew, ‘Jacobus’ in Latin, ‘Jacques’ in French, and ‘James’ in English)
For more history: http://www.caminosantiago.com/web_ingles/index.htm
Back to our travels on Tuesday: We arrived at the free hostel in Sarria for pilgrims but to be able to stay we had to have walked at least 10-11km. So we had planned to do this already but we decided to start the Camino from Samos which was just 10-11 km away from the hostel. We had to take a taxi there so we wouldn’t waste time waiting for a bus and would be able to still get a spot in the hostel. After a plane, a train, a bus, and a taxi, we finally got to a small town with a monastery, Samos, where we could commence our 120 km Camino. Whew!
As we watched the territory the taxi drove by, we got a little scared to think we were going to have to WALK that distance back. When we arrived, we slammed the taxi doors, said ‘thanks,’ and proceeded to check out the monastery. What we quickly realized was that at 2pm, the monastery and almost everything else in the town was closed until 4:30pm. Then the worry was how to obtain a stamp or a ‘sello’ on our little Camino passport to have proof we had been to Samos while all was closed.
We asked a restaurant lady and she told us to go to the monastery because maybe the hostel would be open. We quickly got excited and walked over there but found the hostel open without anyone supervising it. Then I saw one person working, the gas attendant, and I asked him when the hostel person would return so we could get our stamps. He said the magic words, ‘ I have the stamp.’ I wanted to kiss him. We were so excited we got our stamps and then I took a picture with him. He felt like a king for being of such importance to us and had a grin from side to side. We had our first stamp and even if we couldn’t see the monastery, we had begun our Camino!
I can’t put into words my experience for the next 5 days where Christanne and I covered 120 km (74.4 miles) in 32 hours and 30 minutes of continuous walking. We stayed for free each night in pilgrims’ hostels. We woke up at 5:30am to start at 6am and walk the 18-27 km for the day usually reaching our destination town between 2 and 4pm. We would shower and change into our clean set of clothes at the arrival of the new hostel. We would then shop for dinner for the night and also breakfast and lunch for the next day. We ate dinner at 6pm and were sleeping by 10pm. We met some really amazing and interesting people and also a couple of really weird characters. I felt like I was on my modern-day Canterbury Tales with various pilgrim characters with peculiar stories.
We would often only see towns with stores at our destination towns and wouldn’t see stoplights, street signs, nor anything of that sort during our walks. We often walked into a village and had a cow or two standing in the middle of our Camino. We almost got ran over by cows during our lunch in a small field. We crossed over flowing creeks and I almost fell because I was balancing my weight and the weight of my backpack (10 kilos/22.2 lbs) on one rock while trying to find the best place to put my next step.
In the end, I learned that I could walk 120 km in 5.5 days with a heavy backpack up and down hills, through creeks, and in the hot sun and rain. I had time to be introspective at a point where I have only three months before I return to my home country again and start a new stage in my life. I learned the joys of not checking my email everyday and not being in contact with the rest of the world. I learned how eating should be about fueling your body. I learned I could walk 4 hours without stopping. I confirmed my belief I have a small bladder. I took joy in finding toilet paper in hostels and café bathrooms. I saw the value of not having much because it would weigh you down on your walk and it is the same in life (I have storages in MD/VA/TX).
I saw a lot of analogies for life on my way as well. Once we entered a part of the Camino that crossed by a creek. On the left side, I saw stone steps that would keep us off of the mud and water. On the right side, I saw these twigs in the mud and I thought why where they there if there are stones to cross on the left? Then I followed the stones on the left with my eyes and realized they only led halfway down the watered path. The least likely path, the one with the twigs in the mud, was the right path because after the twigs, there were stones that led you to the other side of the creek. Ultimately, it made me think that sometimes the most ‘obvious’ path might not be the right one and sometimes rocky and unusual routes at the beginning can still lead you to where you want to go.
We arrived in Santiago on Sunday, May 1st and celebrated with fellow pilgrims that night. On Monday morning I flew back to Barcelona. While I waited for the plane in La Coruna I walked in the airport parking lot because I missed the Camino. That night I spoke to a Rotary club in Sabadell, just 40 min from my place. I managed to pull off a decent presentation even though I was ready to go to sleep when they started eating. Well, more about that all later.
May’s events will include:
- Rotary speeches to more clubs in the Barcelona area
- Welcoming my brother and sister from the States to BCN for a visit
- Going to Burak’s high school’s prom ( :) )
- Hosting 5 guests from USA and Belgium
- Speaking at the Rotary District (2210) Conference regarding my scholarship and experiences
Hope all is well, take care of yourself, and keep in touch.
Ruby
Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar 2004-2005
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
May 5, 2005
Gore to receive Internet lifetime achievement award
He really did have something to do with it.....for more
May 4, 2005
What is your Temperament? I am an Idealist Teacher
Here is a very interesting link. This test is a Temperament Indicator. You'll have to create a login (just takes 3-4 min). On the basis of your answers to certain questions, your temperament will be classified in one of the four categories -
1. Artisans value freedom and spontaneity. They want to be without constraint, at liberty to act on their impulses, play, and create.
2. Guardians value belonging to a group or community. They maintain stability through responsible, conservative, traditional behavior.
3. Idealists value personal growth, authenticity, and integrity. They yearn to develop themselves fully as individuals and to facilitate growth in others.
4. Rationals value competence and intelligence. They strive to learn, know, predict, and control the resources in their environment.
Check out a matrix classification of temperaments of some world-renowned personalities to get a better understanding.
I have been branded as an idealist ;-)
Here are some snippets from my reading -
• Idealists strive to discover who they are and how they can become their best possible self. This quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement drives their imagination.
• Idealists are gifted at helping others find their way in life, often inspiring them to grow as individuals and to fulfill their potentials.
• Idealists are incurable romantics. They believe that life is filled with possibilities waiting to be realized, rich with meanings calling out to be understood.
• Highly ethical in their actions, Idealists hold themselves to a strict standard of personal integrity. They must be true to themselves and to others, and they can be quite hard on themselves when they are dishonest, or when they are false or insincere.
• Idealists cherish a few warm, sensitive friendships; in marriage they wish to find a "soulmate," someone with whom they can bond emotionally and spiritually, sharing their deepest feelings and their complex inner worlds.
More general stuff on idealists can be found here.
Now, within also idealists there are four classifications.
1. Healer 2. Counselor 3. Teacher 4. Champion.
To know which one of those do I fall under, I’ll have to pay for a report but this website URL completes the missing link.
My type is the *Teacher* Idealists. (they are also called the ENFJ types - Extroverted Intuitive Feeling Judging
More of my info:
Your Type is
ENFJ
Extroverted Intuitive Feeling Judging
Strength of the preferences %
56 50 25 22
ENFJ type description by D.Keirsey
ENFJ type description by J. Butt
Qualitative analysis of your type formula
You are:
moderately expressed extrovert
moderately expressed intuitive personality
moderately expressed feeling personality
slightly expressed judging personality
The Idealists called Teachers are abstract in their thought and speech, cooperative in their style of achieving goals, and directive and extraverted in their interpersonal relations. Learning in the young has to be beckoned forth, teased out from its hiding place, or, as suggested by the word "education," it has to be "educed." by an individual with educative capabilities. Such a one is the eNFj, thus rightly called the educative mentor or Teacher for short. The Teacher is especially capable of educing or calling forth those inner potentials each learner possesses. Even as children the Teachers may attract a gathering of other children ready to follow their lead in play or work. And they lead without seeming to do so.
Teachers expect the very best of those around them, and this expectation, usually expressed as enthusiastic encouragement, motivates action in others and the desire to live up to their expectations. Teachers have the charming characteristic of taking for granted that their expectations will be met, their implicit commands obeyed, never doubting that people will want to do what they suggest. And, more often than not, people do, because this type has extraordinary charisma.
The Teachers are found in no more than 2 or 3 percent of the population. They like to have things settled and arranged. They prefer to plan both work and social engagements ahead of time and tend to be absolutely reliable in honoring these commitments. At the same time, Teachers are very much at home in complex situations which require the juggling of much data with little pre-planning. An experienced Teacher group leader can dream up, effortlessly, and almost endlessly, activities for groups to engage in, and stimulating roles for members of the group to play. In some Teachers, inspired by the responsiveness of their students or followers, this can amount to genius which other types find hard to emulate. Such ability to preside without planning reminds us somewhat of an Provider, but the latter acts more as a master of ceremonies than as a leader of groups. Providers are natural hosts and hostesses, making sure that each guest is well looked after at social gatherings, or that the right things are expressed on traditional occasions, such as weddings, funerals, graduations, and the like. In much the same way, Teachers value harmonious human relations about all else, can handle people with charm and concern, and are usually popular wherever they are. But Teachers are not so much social as educational leaders, interested primarily in the personal growth and development of others, and less in attending to their social needs.
Mikhail Gorbachev is an example of a Teacher Idealist.
1. Artisans value freedom and spontaneity. They want to be without constraint, at liberty to act on their impulses, play, and create.
2. Guardians value belonging to a group or community. They maintain stability through responsible, conservative, traditional behavior.
3. Idealists value personal growth, authenticity, and integrity. They yearn to develop themselves fully as individuals and to facilitate growth in others.
4. Rationals value competence and intelligence. They strive to learn, know, predict, and control the resources in their environment.
Check out a matrix classification of temperaments of some world-renowned personalities to get a better understanding.
I have been branded as an idealist ;-)
Here are some snippets from my reading -
• Idealists strive to discover who they are and how they can become their best possible self. This quest for self-knowledge and self-improvement drives their imagination.
• Idealists are gifted at helping others find their way in life, often inspiring them to grow as individuals and to fulfill their potentials.
• Idealists are incurable romantics. They believe that life is filled with possibilities waiting to be realized, rich with meanings calling out to be understood.
• Highly ethical in their actions, Idealists hold themselves to a strict standard of personal integrity. They must be true to themselves and to others, and they can be quite hard on themselves when they are dishonest, or when they are false or insincere.
• Idealists cherish a few warm, sensitive friendships; in marriage they wish to find a "soulmate," someone with whom they can bond emotionally and spiritually, sharing their deepest feelings and their complex inner worlds.
More general stuff on idealists can be found here.
Now, within also idealists there are four classifications.
1. Healer 2. Counselor 3. Teacher 4. Champion.
To know which one of those do I fall under, I’ll have to pay for a report but this website URL completes the missing link.
My type is the *Teacher* Idealists. (they are also called the ENFJ types - Extroverted Intuitive Feeling Judging
More of my info:
Your Type is
ENFJ
Extroverted Intuitive Feeling Judging
Strength of the preferences %
56 50 25 22
ENFJ type description by D.Keirsey
ENFJ type description by J. Butt
Qualitative analysis of your type formula
You are:
moderately expressed extrovert
moderately expressed intuitive personality
moderately expressed feeling personality
slightly expressed judging personality
The Idealists called Teachers are abstract in their thought and speech, cooperative in their style of achieving goals, and directive and extraverted in their interpersonal relations. Learning in the young has to be beckoned forth, teased out from its hiding place, or, as suggested by the word "education," it has to be "educed." by an individual with educative capabilities. Such a one is the eNFj, thus rightly called the educative mentor or Teacher for short. The Teacher is especially capable of educing or calling forth those inner potentials each learner possesses. Even as children the Teachers may attract a gathering of other children ready to follow their lead in play or work. And they lead without seeming to do so.
Teachers expect the very best of those around them, and this expectation, usually expressed as enthusiastic encouragement, motivates action in others and the desire to live up to their expectations. Teachers have the charming characteristic of taking for granted that their expectations will be met, their implicit commands obeyed, never doubting that people will want to do what they suggest. And, more often than not, people do, because this type has extraordinary charisma.
The Teachers are found in no more than 2 or 3 percent of the population. They like to have things settled and arranged. They prefer to plan both work and social engagements ahead of time and tend to be absolutely reliable in honoring these commitments. At the same time, Teachers are very much at home in complex situations which require the juggling of much data with little pre-planning. An experienced Teacher group leader can dream up, effortlessly, and almost endlessly, activities for groups to engage in, and stimulating roles for members of the group to play. In some Teachers, inspired by the responsiveness of their students or followers, this can amount to genius which other types find hard to emulate. Such ability to preside without planning reminds us somewhat of an Provider, but the latter acts more as a master of ceremonies than as a leader of groups. Providers are natural hosts and hostesses, making sure that each guest is well looked after at social gatherings, or that the right things are expressed on traditional occasions, such as weddings, funerals, graduations, and the like. In much the same way, Teachers value harmonious human relations about all else, can handle people with charm and concern, and are usually popular wherever they are. But Teachers are not so much social as educational leaders, interested primarily in the personal growth and development of others, and less in attending to their social needs.
Mikhail Gorbachev is an example of a Teacher Idealist.
Life beyond terror.....
I have been traveling a lot, meeting many people, and within one month (Apr 4 to May 2) spoke to 8 Rotary clubs. At one club, I remember the topic of Sept 11th, American Foreign Policy, and the War on Terror being discussed.
The Rotarian mentioned that other countries have had terror and had many years of it. Europe has thousands of years of history and the US is a little baby of 200 plus years. Her point was that in that naivete, we are focusing our energies on what we perceive to be our largest problem when in fact, there are others and it isn't a new concept.
This is just a short thought but I was reminded of it when I was reading the article below when it mentions the approach between two heads of state, Bush and Hu (China). Bush was terror focused and Hu addressed many concerns of the people.
From Fareed Zakaria's article on China:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7693580/site/newsweek
In November 2004, President George W. Bush and China's President Hu Jintao traveled through Asia. I was in the region a few weeks afterward and was struck by how almost everyone I spoke with rated Hu's visits as far more successful than Bush's. Karim Raslan, a Malaysian writer, explained: "Bush talked obsessively about terror. He sees all of us through that one prism. Yes, we worry about terror, but frankly that's not the sum of our lives. We have many other problems. We're retooling our economies, we're wondering how to deal with the rise of China, we're trying to address health, social and environmental problems. Hu talked about all this; he talked about our agenda, not just his agenda." From Indonesia to Brazil, China is winning new friends.
The Rotarian mentioned that other countries have had terror and had many years of it. Europe has thousands of years of history and the US is a little baby of 200 plus years. Her point was that in that naivete, we are focusing our energies on what we perceive to be our largest problem when in fact, there are others and it isn't a new concept.
This is just a short thought but I was reminded of it when I was reading the article below when it mentions the approach between two heads of state, Bush and Hu (China). Bush was terror focused and Hu addressed many concerns of the people.
From Fareed Zakaria's article on China:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7693580/site/newsweek
In November 2004, President George W. Bush and China's President Hu Jintao traveled through Asia. I was in the region a few weeks afterward and was struck by how almost everyone I spoke with rated Hu's visits as far more successful than Bush's. Karim Raslan, a Malaysian writer, explained: "Bush talked obsessively about terror. He sees all of us through that one prism. Yes, we worry about terror, but frankly that's not the sum of our lives. We have many other problems. We're retooling our economies, we're wondering how to deal with the rise of China, we're trying to address health, social and environmental problems. Hu talked about all this; he talked about our agenda, not just his agenda." From Indonesia to Brazil, China is winning new friends.
May 3, 2005
Even more Camino history...
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/square/de95/04camino/040009d6.htm
Although there is no reference in apostolic times to the evangelisation of Spain by James, there is evidence in the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries of a tradition that James did preach the Gospel there.
Confirmation of the tradition was seen in the miraculous discovery of his tomb early in the 9th century. A hermit named Pelayo claimed to have received an angelic revelation that St James was buried on the hill where the city of Compostella now stands and to have seen a bright star shining over it.
He informed the local bishop, Theodomir of Iria Flavia (now Padron), who went to the spot indicated by the star and discovered an ancient tomb and declared that it was that of the Apostle.
The discovery was reported to the Pope (Leo III), who proclaimed it to the whole Christian world. A church was built over the tomb by King Alfonso II of Asturias (which then included Leon and Galicia), and pilgrims began to flock to the shrine. Later a grander one, which became a cathedral, replaced the original modest church when the episcopal see was moved from Fria Flavia to Compostella.
To explain the presence of the saint's tomb in Galicia a legend grew up that after his return to Palestine from his evangelising mission in Spain and his execution by Herod (Acts 12,2).
His disciples recovered his body, took it down to the coast, from which, with the saint's body, they were miraculously transported in an unmanned boat to the Galician coast at what is now Padron.
Thereafter the numbers of pilgrims making their way from all over Christendom to St James's shrine at Compostella continued to increase. In course of time numbers of religious houses providing accommodation for pilgrims were built along the route, roads were improved and bridges were built to ease the pilgrims' journey.
As a result there came into being a recognised pilgrim road along northern Spain from the Pyrenees to Compostella, known as the Camino de Santiago (Way of St James), or Camino Francs (French Road) since it was travelled by pilgrims coming from or through France. Within France too there were particularly favoured routes along which pilgrims travelled from different parts of France and other countries in Europe to join the French Road in Spain.
The 'Pilgrim's Guide' was written in the 12th century, probably around 1140-50. It is the earliest of the many descriptions that have come down to us of the pilgrimage to the shrine of St James. Unlike other accounts, however, it is not primarily a description of one particular pilgrim's journey-though it is clearly based on personal experience and is strongly imbued with the author's feelings and prejudices-but is designed to help prospective pilgrims with advice and guidance for their journey.
The 'Guide' is contained in a 12th century Latin manuscript known as the Codex Calixtinus, after an apocryphal letter attributed to Pope Calixtus or Callistus II (d.1124) which serves as a kind of preface, or more familiarly as the 'Book of St James' (Liber Sancti Jacobi).
This was a compilation evidently designed to promote the pilgrimage to Compostella, no doubt under the influence of Diego Glimmers bishop of Compostella from 1100, Archbishop from 1120), an energetic and ambitious prelate who actively promoted the development of the pilgrimage, the building of the new cathedral which had been begun by his predecessor Diego Peels, and the enhancement of Compostella's (and his own) status.
There are four versions of the Codex Calixtinus, the finest of which is preserved in the archives of Santiago Cathedral. It consists of five books, of different origins and dates.
The first and longest of the books is an anthology of hymns, sermons and liturgical writings in honour of St James.
The second is a collection of miracles attributed to the saint, most of them fairly recent (i.e. dating from the early years of the 12th century).
The third is an account of the evangelisation of Spain by St James, his martyrdom and the transfer of his remains from Jerusalem to Compostella.
The fourth is devoted to the History of Charlemagne and Roland, the story (attributed to Charlemagne's warlike Archbishop Turpin) of Charlemagne's legendary expeditions into Spain, linking the epic of the Emperor and his paladins with the story of St James and the pilgrimage to Compostella; and the fifth consists of the 'Pilgrim's Guide'.
In the manuscript preserved in Santiago the history of Charlemagne and Roland was detached and bound separately in the 18th century, so that in this text the 'Guide' is described as the fourth book.
Although generally dated to around 1140-50, the 'Pilgrim's Guide' appears to be a compilation including work by more than one hand, written at different dates. Its author or compiler is not positively known, but the work is commonly attributed to one Aimery (Aymericus) Picaud, a cleric from Parthenay-Ae-Vieux in Poitou, who may have travelled to Compostella in the retinue of a noble lady named Gerberga or Gebirga.
Certainly the author seems to have been a Frenchman, writing his guide in Latin-primarily for the benefit of French pilgrims; and the text of the Guide reflects the strong local patriotism of a native of Poitou and his distaste for the manners and customs of practically all the other peoples encountered on the road to Compostella. He may or may not have been the same person as one Aymericus who was a papal chancellor in the mid 12th century. To give greater authority to the 'Guide' certain chapters are specifically attributed to Pope Callistus, Aimery or Aimery the Chancellor.
The Guide is divided into eleven chapters, the longest of which are the seventh, eighth and ninth, devoted respectively to the characteristics of the countries and the peoples on the road to Compostella, the shrines to be visited on the way (particularly in France, with a long excursus on the life and passion of St Eutrope of Saintes) and a description of the town and cathedral of Compostella. The exact route is outlined in two shorter chapters, the second and the third.
The second chapter of the Guide divides the journey to Santiago from the French frontier into thirteen stages. The rationale of this subdivision is not clear. It appears to imply that each stage represents a day's journey.
But it seems unlikely that even a well mounted group of pilgrims-with which the author of the Guide must be presumed to have travelled, though only two of the stages are specifically described as being done on horseback-could complete a journey of between 440 and 490 miles, with stages of up to 60 miles, in only thirteen days.
A modern pilgrim took twenty-three riding days for the journey, with a maximum day's journey of 30 miles and an average speed over the whole distance of just under 3/2 miles an hour. Is it possible that the author of the Guide mentions only staging-points which he is anxious to recommend because at these places there were religious houses or hospices run by a religious order with which he had affiliations (perhaps the Clunic order which played a major part in organising the pilgrim route and is particularly mentioned in the Guide.
Although there is no reference in apostolic times to the evangelisation of Spain by James, there is evidence in the 6th, 7th and 8th centuries of a tradition that James did preach the Gospel there.
Confirmation of the tradition was seen in the miraculous discovery of his tomb early in the 9th century. A hermit named Pelayo claimed to have received an angelic revelation that St James was buried on the hill where the city of Compostella now stands and to have seen a bright star shining over it.
He informed the local bishop, Theodomir of Iria Flavia (now Padron), who went to the spot indicated by the star and discovered an ancient tomb and declared that it was that of the Apostle.
The discovery was reported to the Pope (Leo III), who proclaimed it to the whole Christian world. A church was built over the tomb by King Alfonso II of Asturias (which then included Leon and Galicia), and pilgrims began to flock to the shrine. Later a grander one, which became a cathedral, replaced the original modest church when the episcopal see was moved from Fria Flavia to Compostella.
To explain the presence of the saint's tomb in Galicia a legend grew up that after his return to Palestine from his evangelising mission in Spain and his execution by Herod (Acts 12,2).
His disciples recovered his body, took it down to the coast, from which, with the saint's body, they were miraculously transported in an unmanned boat to the Galician coast at what is now Padron.
Thereafter the numbers of pilgrims making their way from all over Christendom to St James's shrine at Compostella continued to increase. In course of time numbers of religious houses providing accommodation for pilgrims were built along the route, roads were improved and bridges were built to ease the pilgrims' journey.
As a result there came into being a recognised pilgrim road along northern Spain from the Pyrenees to Compostella, known as the Camino de Santiago (Way of St James), or Camino Francs (French Road) since it was travelled by pilgrims coming from or through France. Within France too there were particularly favoured routes along which pilgrims travelled from different parts of France and other countries in Europe to join the French Road in Spain.
The 'Pilgrim's Guide' was written in the 12th century, probably around 1140-50. It is the earliest of the many descriptions that have come down to us of the pilgrimage to the shrine of St James. Unlike other accounts, however, it is not primarily a description of one particular pilgrim's journey-though it is clearly based on personal experience and is strongly imbued with the author's feelings and prejudices-but is designed to help prospective pilgrims with advice and guidance for their journey.
The 'Guide' is contained in a 12th century Latin manuscript known as the Codex Calixtinus, after an apocryphal letter attributed to Pope Calixtus or Callistus II (d.1124) which serves as a kind of preface, or more familiarly as the 'Book of St James' (Liber Sancti Jacobi).
This was a compilation evidently designed to promote the pilgrimage to Compostella, no doubt under the influence of Diego Glimmers bishop of Compostella from 1100, Archbishop from 1120), an energetic and ambitious prelate who actively promoted the development of the pilgrimage, the building of the new cathedral which had been begun by his predecessor Diego Peels, and the enhancement of Compostella's (and his own) status.
There are four versions of the Codex Calixtinus, the finest of which is preserved in the archives of Santiago Cathedral. It consists of five books, of different origins and dates.
The first and longest of the books is an anthology of hymns, sermons and liturgical writings in honour of St James.
The second is a collection of miracles attributed to the saint, most of them fairly recent (i.e. dating from the early years of the 12th century).
The third is an account of the evangelisation of Spain by St James, his martyrdom and the transfer of his remains from Jerusalem to Compostella.
The fourth is devoted to the History of Charlemagne and Roland, the story (attributed to Charlemagne's warlike Archbishop Turpin) of Charlemagne's legendary expeditions into Spain, linking the epic of the Emperor and his paladins with the story of St James and the pilgrimage to Compostella; and the fifth consists of the 'Pilgrim's Guide'.
In the manuscript preserved in Santiago the history of Charlemagne and Roland was detached and bound separately in the 18th century, so that in this text the 'Guide' is described as the fourth book.
Although generally dated to around 1140-50, the 'Pilgrim's Guide' appears to be a compilation including work by more than one hand, written at different dates. Its author or compiler is not positively known, but the work is commonly attributed to one Aimery (Aymericus) Picaud, a cleric from Parthenay-Ae-Vieux in Poitou, who may have travelled to Compostella in the retinue of a noble lady named Gerberga or Gebirga.
Certainly the author seems to have been a Frenchman, writing his guide in Latin-primarily for the benefit of French pilgrims; and the text of the Guide reflects the strong local patriotism of a native of Poitou and his distaste for the manners and customs of practically all the other peoples encountered on the road to Compostella. He may or may not have been the same person as one Aymericus who was a papal chancellor in the mid 12th century. To give greater authority to the 'Guide' certain chapters are specifically attributed to Pope Callistus, Aimery or Aimery the Chancellor.
The Guide is divided into eleven chapters, the longest of which are the seventh, eighth and ninth, devoted respectively to the characteristics of the countries and the peoples on the road to Compostella, the shrines to be visited on the way (particularly in France, with a long excursus on the life and passion of St Eutrope of Saintes) and a description of the town and cathedral of Compostella. The exact route is outlined in two shorter chapters, the second and the third.
The second chapter of the Guide divides the journey to Santiago from the French frontier into thirteen stages. The rationale of this subdivision is not clear. It appears to imply that each stage represents a day's journey.
But it seems unlikely that even a well mounted group of pilgrims-with which the author of the Guide must be presumed to have travelled, though only two of the stages are specifically described as being done on horseback-could complete a journey of between 440 and 490 miles, with stages of up to 60 miles, in only thirteen days.
A modern pilgrim took twenty-three riding days for the journey, with a maximum day's journey of 30 miles and an average speed over the whole distance of just under 3/2 miles an hour. Is it possible that the author of the Guide mentions only staging-points which he is anxious to recommend because at these places there were religious houses or hospices run by a religious order with which he had affiliations (perhaps the Clunic order which played a major part in organising the pilgrim route and is particularly mentioned in the Guide.
More Camino History.....
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/town/square/de95/04camino/040009d2.htm
The guide is a translation from Spanish of the work of Elias Valifla Sampedro (1929-1989), who was parish priest of 0 Cebreiro and Doctor of Canon Law of the University of Salamanca, a Scholar and an expert on Compostelan studies. The priest devoted his life to the study of the pilgrimage to Compostela and this is reflected in his book.
This new Pilgrim's Guide incorporates the results of thirty years of research and of countless personal journeys along the Camino de Santiago. The maps, drawn to scale, are a clear expression of the current situation of the Camino. The format of the Guide and the organisation of its contents are the results of the desire to meet several objectives. The material is divided into four parts: a preliminary section and three others: the guide to the route, with maps, directions for the walker and a succinct commentary; historical and cultural notes on places of particular interest; and a final section on accommodation, associations, etc.
This guide will help the pilgrim to make his journey safely and in the true spirit of the pilgrimage. The size and ease of handling of this volume are also considered to be improvements over the author's earlier guides, and incorporate the suggestions made by pilgrims since 1985.
The discovery of the tomb of the apostle St James was one of the most important events of the Middle Ages. The great pilgrimages to Compostela brought together, and had a vital influence on, a number of different aspects of society: art, religion, and economic and cultural life. The influence of the pilgrimage was not confined to a specific period; it went beyond the boundaries of the Middle Ages, extending its vitality into succeeding centuries.
The pilgrimage to Compostela is the great legacy of medieval Christianity, left to us by a Europe composed of diverse populations, united by the common principles of faith and devotion. The phenomenon of the pilgrimage to "Finis Terrae", "the World's End", and to the tomb of the apostle St James, grew spontaneously from the grass roots; from the common folk who, disregarding social distinction or national borders, did much to further unity and fraternity among peoples.
Compostela was transformed to become, together with Rome and Jerusalem, one of the three great centres of pilgrimage of the Christian world. Rome itself witnessed with some misgivings of the height reached by the see of Compostela as its ascendancy grew, due to the increase in pilgrimages. The ambassador of the Moorish sultan Ah ben Yusuf wrote "The multitude of those going -to Santiago- and returning is so great that there is scarcely any room on the westward road..." Who Went on Pilgrimage? Gotescalco, bishop of Le Pay, is one of the earliest pilgrims of whom we have any record. He went to Compostela in the year 950, at the head of a vast retinue. Cesareo, abbot of Montserrat, made the pilgrimage in 959. Tn 1065 a large group of pilgrims from Lieige reached Compostela. The Count of Guines and the bishop of Lille were pilgrims to Compostela in 1084.
In the 11th century the number of pilgrims increased very markedly, drawn without distinction from all classes of European society. In 1072 Alfonso VI abolished the toll payable to the castle of Auctares, situated near the point where the Camino entered Galicia, and made over the money in favour of the pilgrims who went to Compostela, from Spain, France, Italy and Germany". The 12th century marked the height of the pilgrimages. Pope Calixtus II was himself a great supporter. The French priest from Poitou, Aymeric Picaud, has left us the valuable account of his pilgrimage to Compostela in the form of a collection of documents relating to St James, which he, for the glory of the apostle, attributed to Pope Calixtus II. It is for this reason that the collection is known as the "Codex Calixtinus". Among the vast number of pilgrims we frequently find distinguished travellers: bishops, kings, magnates, the rich and the saints. St Francis of Assisi himself made his pilgrimage.
Among the pilgrims were those who began their journeys out of real devotion, others who went as the delegates of cities, towns or individuals, and neither was there any lack of those who took the Way of St James in the fulfilment of a judicial punishment. How They Made the Journey Pilgrims generally travelled in-groups for mutual protection. Gathering at the departure point -ArIes, Le Pay, Vezelay, Paris, etc- they made their farewell to the town with a solemn act of devotion, receiving, blessed, the attributes or tokens of pilgrimage: broad hats to protect them from the sun, the cloak to counter cold and rain, the satchel for food, the gourd for water and the staff for defence and support over rough ground. The scallop shell, which the pilgrims wore soon, became the symbol of the Jacobean pilgrimage. Holy Years The privilege of the Compostelan Holy Year dates from the papacy of Calixtus II, the great devotee of St James. Holy Years occur when the feast day of the apostle -25 July- falls on a Sunday.
The Compostela Those who claimed to be true pilgrims, and could prove that they were not rascals or vagabonds, were permitted to stay at the great pilgrim Hospital de Los Reyes Catolicos (the hospital of the Catholic Monarchs, built by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1496) This tradition still exists. If you want to re-enact it, you should carry the "pilgrim passport" or any other document showing the signatures or stamps of parishes, municipalities or monasteries to prove the distance you have covered. When you arrive in Santiago, go to the office of the Secretary of the Cathedral. When he has verified your pilgrim passport, he will give you your 'Compostela", or certificate of pilgrimage, and any advice or help you may need. The Routes to Compostela True pilgrims have always followed the routes leading to two points of entry via the Roman roads through the western Pyrexes: the route of the Port de CIE (Ibaneta), which gave access to the major route from Bordeaux to Astorga, or the Somport route, which linked Bordeaux and Dax with Jaca and Zaragoza.
In the early years of the pilgrimage, the Camino underwent various modifications. The retreat of the Arab invaders and the formation of several new kingdoms contributed to this. Sancho the Great in Navarre (995-1035), Alfonso VI in Castile and Leon (1065-I lt)9) and Sancho Ramirez in Navarre and Aragon (1076-1094) helped to determine for once and for all the pilgrims' route to Compostela. Aymeric Picaud made his pilgrimage along the -by then- well-defined route early in the 12th century, leaving us his guidebook to the most interesting stages on the historic road. a) The Routes through France The cities of Arles, El Pea, Vezelay and Paris or Orleans were the points of departure for the Jacobean routes through France. Pilgrims who followed the route from Arles via Toulouse and Oloron crossed the Pyrenees by way of the Somport Pass. The other three routes joined at a point close to Ostabat on the edge of the French Pyrenees, and ascended to the Cize Pass.
The Routes through Spain Aymeric Picaud described the two main access routes to Spain, via the passes of Somport and Cize. The book with maps. Shows the different itineraries which pilgrims have taken for more than a thousand years, to venerate the Apostle. The most famous of all these routes is that followed and described by Picaud, the cleric from Parthenay-le-Vieux, who after his pilgrimage wrote the exceptionally interesting five-volume work completed in about 1139, and which received the name of Codex Calixtinus". The fifth book, the Liber Sancti Jacobi" or "Book of St James", It is one with most relevance to us. It outlines the stages on the Camino with a valuable topographical summary, mentions pilgrim hospitals and places of refuge and assistance, describes the quality of the food and water encountered, and remarks sometimes less than charitably- on the characteristics of the people through whose lands the author passed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The guide is a translation from Spanish of the work of Elias Valifla Sampedro (1929-1989), who was parish priest of 0 Cebreiro and Doctor of Canon Law of the University of Salamanca, a Scholar and an expert on Compostelan studies. The priest devoted his life to the study of the pilgrimage to Compostela and this is reflected in his book.
This new Pilgrim's Guide incorporates the results of thirty years of research and of countless personal journeys along the Camino de Santiago. The maps, drawn to scale, are a clear expression of the current situation of the Camino. The format of the Guide and the organisation of its contents are the results of the desire to meet several objectives. The material is divided into four parts: a preliminary section and three others: the guide to the route, with maps, directions for the walker and a succinct commentary; historical and cultural notes on places of particular interest; and a final section on accommodation, associations, etc.
This guide will help the pilgrim to make his journey safely and in the true spirit of the pilgrimage. The size and ease of handling of this volume are also considered to be improvements over the author's earlier guides, and incorporate the suggestions made by pilgrims since 1985.
The discovery of the tomb of the apostle St James was one of the most important events of the Middle Ages. The great pilgrimages to Compostela brought together, and had a vital influence on, a number of different aspects of society: art, religion, and economic and cultural life. The influence of the pilgrimage was not confined to a specific period; it went beyond the boundaries of the Middle Ages, extending its vitality into succeeding centuries.
The pilgrimage to Compostela is the great legacy of medieval Christianity, left to us by a Europe composed of diverse populations, united by the common principles of faith and devotion. The phenomenon of the pilgrimage to "Finis Terrae", "the World's End", and to the tomb of the apostle St James, grew spontaneously from the grass roots; from the common folk who, disregarding social distinction or national borders, did much to further unity and fraternity among peoples.
Compostela was transformed to become, together with Rome and Jerusalem, one of the three great centres of pilgrimage of the Christian world. Rome itself witnessed with some misgivings of the height reached by the see of Compostela as its ascendancy grew, due to the increase in pilgrimages. The ambassador of the Moorish sultan Ah ben Yusuf wrote "The multitude of those going -to Santiago- and returning is so great that there is scarcely any room on the westward road..." Who Went on Pilgrimage? Gotescalco, bishop of Le Pay, is one of the earliest pilgrims of whom we have any record. He went to Compostela in the year 950, at the head of a vast retinue. Cesareo, abbot of Montserrat, made the pilgrimage in 959. Tn 1065 a large group of pilgrims from Lieige reached Compostela. The Count of Guines and the bishop of Lille were pilgrims to Compostela in 1084.
In the 11th century the number of pilgrims increased very markedly, drawn without distinction from all classes of European society. In 1072 Alfonso VI abolished the toll payable to the castle of Auctares, situated near the point where the Camino entered Galicia, and made over the money in favour of the pilgrims who went to Compostela, from Spain, France, Italy and Germany". The 12th century marked the height of the pilgrimages. Pope Calixtus II was himself a great supporter. The French priest from Poitou, Aymeric Picaud, has left us the valuable account of his pilgrimage to Compostela in the form of a collection of documents relating to St James, which he, for the glory of the apostle, attributed to Pope Calixtus II. It is for this reason that the collection is known as the "Codex Calixtinus". Among the vast number of pilgrims we frequently find distinguished travellers: bishops, kings, magnates, the rich and the saints. St Francis of Assisi himself made his pilgrimage.
Among the pilgrims were those who began their journeys out of real devotion, others who went as the delegates of cities, towns or individuals, and neither was there any lack of those who took the Way of St James in the fulfilment of a judicial punishment. How They Made the Journey Pilgrims generally travelled in-groups for mutual protection. Gathering at the departure point -ArIes, Le Pay, Vezelay, Paris, etc- they made their farewell to the town with a solemn act of devotion, receiving, blessed, the attributes or tokens of pilgrimage: broad hats to protect them from the sun, the cloak to counter cold and rain, the satchel for food, the gourd for water and the staff for defence and support over rough ground. The scallop shell, which the pilgrims wore soon, became the symbol of the Jacobean pilgrimage. Holy Years The privilege of the Compostelan Holy Year dates from the papacy of Calixtus II, the great devotee of St James. Holy Years occur when the feast day of the apostle -25 July- falls on a Sunday.
The Compostela Those who claimed to be true pilgrims, and could prove that they were not rascals or vagabonds, were permitted to stay at the great pilgrim Hospital de Los Reyes Catolicos (the hospital of the Catholic Monarchs, built by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1496) This tradition still exists. If you want to re-enact it, you should carry the "pilgrim passport" or any other document showing the signatures or stamps of parishes, municipalities or monasteries to prove the distance you have covered. When you arrive in Santiago, go to the office of the Secretary of the Cathedral. When he has verified your pilgrim passport, he will give you your 'Compostela", or certificate of pilgrimage, and any advice or help you may need. The Routes to Compostela True pilgrims have always followed the routes leading to two points of entry via the Roman roads through the western Pyrexes: the route of the Port de CIE (Ibaneta), which gave access to the major route from Bordeaux to Astorga, or the Somport route, which linked Bordeaux and Dax with Jaca and Zaragoza.
In the early years of the pilgrimage, the Camino underwent various modifications. The retreat of the Arab invaders and the formation of several new kingdoms contributed to this. Sancho the Great in Navarre (995-1035), Alfonso VI in Castile and Leon (1065-I lt)9) and Sancho Ramirez in Navarre and Aragon (1076-1094) helped to determine for once and for all the pilgrims' route to Compostela. Aymeric Picaud made his pilgrimage along the -by then- well-defined route early in the 12th century, leaving us his guidebook to the most interesting stages on the historic road. a) The Routes through France The cities of Arles, El Pea, Vezelay and Paris or Orleans were the points of departure for the Jacobean routes through France. Pilgrims who followed the route from Arles via Toulouse and Oloron crossed the Pyrenees by way of the Somport Pass. The other three routes joined at a point close to Ostabat on the edge of the French Pyrenees, and ascended to the Cize Pass.
The Routes through Spain Aymeric Picaud described the two main access routes to Spain, via the passes of Somport and Cize. The book with maps. Shows the different itineraries which pilgrims have taken for more than a thousand years, to venerate the Apostle. The most famous of all these routes is that followed and described by Picaud, the cleric from Parthenay-le-Vieux, who after his pilgrimage wrote the exceptionally interesting five-volume work completed in about 1139, and which received the name of Codex Calixtinus". The fifth book, the Liber Sancti Jacobi" or "Book of St James", It is one with most relevance to us. It outlines the stages on the Camino with a valuable topographical summary, mentions pilgrim hospitals and places of refuge and assistance, describes the quality of the food and water encountered, and remarks sometimes less than charitably- on the characteristics of the people through whose lands the author passed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
University of Texas and El Camino de Santiago connection
Another fellow Longhorn who did the same camino as I ( I just did about 12km more) and also didn't go to her graduation.
http://www.santiago-today.com/santiago_article.cfm?art_id=35
According to El Correo Gallego, Jenna Bush will be arriving in Santiago de Compostela on Thursday after a 5 day pilgrimage. She has already made dinner reservations in old town.
Written by Ivar Rekve, ivar@santiago-today.com
[Published: Friday, May 28, 2004]
The five stages that Jenna Bush will be covering will be:
Day 1, Sarria - Portomarￃﾭn
Day 2, Portomarￃﾭn - Palas de Rei
Day 3, Palas de Rei - Arzￃﾺa
Day 4, Arzￃﾺa - O Pino
Day 5, O Pino - Santiago de Compostela.
She is expected to arrive in Santiago de Compostela on Thursday June 3rd. It is reported that she will be staying in Paradores (see link below) and in ￂﾓCasas Ruralesￂﾔ on the way here.
According to El Correo Gallego a restaurant in old town Santiago de Compostela has received a reservation for 6, which includes Jenna Bush. The reservation was made about two days ago.
Jenna Bush has just graduated from University of Texas with an English degree (graduation 22nd of May). She did not attend her own graduation, which created some buzz in the US (see Google News Link below).
http://www.santiago-today.com/santiago_article.cfm?art_id=35
According to El Correo Gallego, Jenna Bush will be arriving in Santiago de Compostela on Thursday after a 5 day pilgrimage. She has already made dinner reservations in old town.
Written by Ivar Rekve, ivar@santiago-today.com
[Published: Friday, May 28, 2004]
The five stages that Jenna Bush will be covering will be:
Day 1, Sarria - Portomarￃﾭn
Day 2, Portomarￃﾭn - Palas de Rei
Day 3, Palas de Rei - Arzￃﾺa
Day 4, Arzￃﾺa - O Pino
Day 5, O Pino - Santiago de Compostela.
She is expected to arrive in Santiago de Compostela on Thursday June 3rd. It is reported that she will be staying in Paradores (see link below) and in ￂﾓCasas Ruralesￂﾔ on the way here.
According to El Correo Gallego a restaurant in old town Santiago de Compostela has received a reservation for 6, which includes Jenna Bush. The reservation was made about two days ago.
Jenna Bush has just graduated from University of Texas with an English degree (graduation 22nd of May). She did not attend her own graduation, which created some buzz in the US (see Google News Link below).
April 24, 2005
The Route to Santiago - April 26 - May 2, 2005
My friend Christanne and I will embark on a 100-120 km walk from Samos to Santiago de Compstela the week of April 26 to May 2nd. I wanted to learn more about the history and also listed websites where I am finding practical information for our trip.
The Route to Santiago in History
From http://www.caminosantiago.com
At a time when Europe needed to be united, the Route to Santiago was the first element that made it possible. The find of the sepulchre of the first Apostle Martyr became an unquestionable symbol, compatible with the diverse conceptions of the christian peoples.
Conscious of the importance of having the relics of Santiago el Mayor, the Spanish Monarchies contributed significantly to the success of the holy route. In those times the Peninsula had a growing need for money and soldiers to fight against the Moorish.
The kings of Aragon, Navarre and Castile made a great effort to attract to their possessions powerful rich people, and to that end, employed all possible means: interchange of presents, arranged marriages and the announcements of the favours dispensed by the Apostle. As the faith in the miracles performed by Santiago extended people began to make pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela in order to obtain his grace.
The first known pilgrim was Gotescalco, Bishop of Puy, who made the pilgrimage in 950 accompanied by his retinue; later the route was to be followed by the Marquis of Gothia, who was murdered on the way; a century later, the Apostle´s tomb was visited by the Archbishop of Lyon. And along these distinguished pilgrims, a growing number of believers of all conditions travelled by the same route.
The Way to Santiago has indissolubly connected the culture, the knowledge and the information. Everything that was said, preached, told, sung, sculpted or painting along the Route was known to more people and places. On account of its influence on literature and art, Compostela, along with Rome or Jerusalem, became a place of cult for Christian society, especially between the 11 and 14 C.
From http://caminodesantiago.consumer.es/historia.html
El Camino es el fin, y la tierra, polvorienta y de asfalto, es el medio de transitar por él. El Finis Terrae romano y anteriormente celta es el destino de miles de personas durante estos años de comienzo del milenio. Parece ser que antes de la aparición del cuerpo del apóstol Santiago ya se iba a Finis Terrae, y allí miles de hombres sintieron aquel "religioso horror" al ver apagarse el sol en las aguas del océano.
El resurgimiento peregrinal, sobre todo desde el Año Jacobeo -1993- es un hecho que los estudiosos sociales tendrán que analizar. La mezcla de reto deportivo con religiosidad, con búsqueda de lo auténtico y de uno mismo, todo ello escoltado por estilos románicos y góticos, entre caballeros templarios y monjes benedictinos, entre hayas y trigos, entre castaños y carvallos, entre leyendas y milagros hacen del Camino de Santiago una experiencia singular. El marketing de las diferentes Comunidades Autónomas ha hecho el resto. Para muchos el recorrido del Camino de Santiago se convierte en peregrinaje cuando se encuentran con las raíces religiosas e históricas de Europa, cuando renuevan un camino de transformación interior, y cuando caminan al ritmo de otros siglos.
Desde el descubrimiento de la tumba del Apóstol Santiago en Compostela, en el siglo IX, el Camino de Santiago se convirtió en la más importante ruta de peregrinación de la Europa medieval. El paso de los innumerables peregrinos que, movidos por su fe, se dirigían a Compostela desde todos los países europeos, sirvió como punto de partida de todo un desarrollo artístico, social y económico que dejó sus huellas a lo largo de todo el Camino de Santiago.
El centro de la tradición jacobea es la creencia de que el cuerpo de Santiago está enterrado en el sepulcro de Compostela. Corría el año 813 después de Cristo cuando el obispo de Iria Flavia, Teodomiro, avisado por el eremita Pelayo de la existencia de unas luces misteriosas, informó al rey asturiano Alfonso II del descubrimiento milagroso de una tumba que contenía los restos mortales del apóstol Santiago. Según la leyenda, los discípulos de Santiago en el año 42 robaron el cuerpo de Palestina, donde le habían decapitado, y le embarcaron en una nave que con una tripulación angelical llegó a Iria, en la confluencia del Sar y el Ulla (actualmente la ría de Arousa). En cuanto atracaron, el cuerpo del apóstol fue llevado por los aires 12 millas hasta el lugar donde hoy se le venera. En la catedral de Santiago se conserva la roca donde dicen que fue atada la barca que trajo el cadáver del santo. Con la "aparición" del cuerpo del apóstol se inició lo que hoy conocemos como la ruta compostelana: "El camino de las estrellas".
The Route to Santiago in History
From http://www.caminosantiago.com
At a time when Europe needed to be united, the Route to Santiago was the first element that made it possible. The find of the sepulchre of the first Apostle Martyr became an unquestionable symbol, compatible with the diverse conceptions of the christian peoples.
Conscious of the importance of having the relics of Santiago el Mayor, the Spanish Monarchies contributed significantly to the success of the holy route. In those times the Peninsula had a growing need for money and soldiers to fight against the Moorish.
The kings of Aragon, Navarre and Castile made a great effort to attract to their possessions powerful rich people, and to that end, employed all possible means: interchange of presents, arranged marriages and the announcements of the favours dispensed by the Apostle. As the faith in the miracles performed by Santiago extended people began to make pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela in order to obtain his grace.
The first known pilgrim was Gotescalco, Bishop of Puy, who made the pilgrimage in 950 accompanied by his retinue; later the route was to be followed by the Marquis of Gothia, who was murdered on the way; a century later, the Apostle´s tomb was visited by the Archbishop of Lyon. And along these distinguished pilgrims, a growing number of believers of all conditions travelled by the same route.
The Way to Santiago has indissolubly connected the culture, the knowledge and the information. Everything that was said, preached, told, sung, sculpted or painting along the Route was known to more people and places. On account of its influence on literature and art, Compostela, along with Rome or Jerusalem, became a place of cult for Christian society, especially between the 11 and 14 C.
From http://caminodesantiago.consumer.es/historia.html
El Camino es el fin, y la tierra, polvorienta y de asfalto, es el medio de transitar por él. El Finis Terrae romano y anteriormente celta es el destino de miles de personas durante estos años de comienzo del milenio. Parece ser que antes de la aparición del cuerpo del apóstol Santiago ya se iba a Finis Terrae, y allí miles de hombres sintieron aquel "religioso horror" al ver apagarse el sol en las aguas del océano.
El resurgimiento peregrinal, sobre todo desde el Año Jacobeo -1993- es un hecho que los estudiosos sociales tendrán que analizar. La mezcla de reto deportivo con religiosidad, con búsqueda de lo auténtico y de uno mismo, todo ello escoltado por estilos románicos y góticos, entre caballeros templarios y monjes benedictinos, entre hayas y trigos, entre castaños y carvallos, entre leyendas y milagros hacen del Camino de Santiago una experiencia singular. El marketing de las diferentes Comunidades Autónomas ha hecho el resto. Para muchos el recorrido del Camino de Santiago se convierte en peregrinaje cuando se encuentran con las raíces religiosas e históricas de Europa, cuando renuevan un camino de transformación interior, y cuando caminan al ritmo de otros siglos.
Desde el descubrimiento de la tumba del Apóstol Santiago en Compostela, en el siglo IX, el Camino de Santiago se convirtió en la más importante ruta de peregrinación de la Europa medieval. El paso de los innumerables peregrinos que, movidos por su fe, se dirigían a Compostela desde todos los países europeos, sirvió como punto de partida de todo un desarrollo artístico, social y económico que dejó sus huellas a lo largo de todo el Camino de Santiago.
El centro de la tradición jacobea es la creencia de que el cuerpo de Santiago está enterrado en el sepulcro de Compostela. Corría el año 813 después de Cristo cuando el obispo de Iria Flavia, Teodomiro, avisado por el eremita Pelayo de la existencia de unas luces misteriosas, informó al rey asturiano Alfonso II del descubrimiento milagroso de una tumba que contenía los restos mortales del apóstol Santiago. Según la leyenda, los discípulos de Santiago en el año 42 robaron el cuerpo de Palestina, donde le habían decapitado, y le embarcaron en una nave que con una tripulación angelical llegó a Iria, en la confluencia del Sar y el Ulla (actualmente la ría de Arousa). En cuanto atracaron, el cuerpo del apóstol fue llevado por los aires 12 millas hasta el lugar donde hoy se le venera. En la catedral de Santiago se conserva la roca donde dicen que fue atada la barca que trajo el cadáver del santo. Con la "aparición" del cuerpo del apóstol se inició lo que hoy conocemos como la ruta compostelana: "El camino de las estrellas".
April 21, 2005
Studies: Gentrification a boost for everyone
I saw this happen right before my eyes living in Silver Spring, MD for 2 years. I didn´t know what it was called though and that it was happening all over the US....
Wed Apr 20, 6:25 AM ET
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
Everyone knows gentrification uproots the urban poor with higher rents, higher taxes and $4 lattes. It's the lament of community organizers, the theme of the 2004 film Barbershop 2 and the guilty assumption of the yuppies moving in.
But everyone may be wrong, according to Lance Freeman, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University.
In an article last month in Urban Affairs Review, Freeman reports the results of his national study of gentrification - the movement of upscale (mostly white) settlers into rundown (mostly minority) neighborhoods.
His conclusion: Gentrification drives comparatively few low-income residents from their homes. Although some are forced to move by rising costs, there isn't much more displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods than in non-gentrifying ones.
In a separate study of New York City published last year, Freeman and a colleague concluded that living in a gentrifying neighborhood there actually made it less likely a poor resident would move - a finding similar to that of a 2001 study of Boston by Duke University economist Jacob Vigdor.
Freeman and Vigdor say that although higher costs sometimes force poor residents to leave gentrifying neighborhoods, other changes - more jobs, safer streets, better trash pickup - encourage them to stay. But to others, gentrification remains a dirty word.
"All you have to do is talk to people around here," says James Lewis, a tenant organizer in Harlem, New York's most famous black neighborhood. "Everybody with money is moving into Harlem, and the people who are here are being displaced."
Even residents who have survived gentrification tend to believe it forces people out.
Maria Marquez, 37, has slept on the sofa for 12 years to give her mother and son the two bedrooms in their apartment in Chicago's gentrifying Logan Square area. But eventually, she says, "we're gonna get kicked out. It's a matter of time."
Kathe Newman, assistant professor of public policy at Rutgers University, argues that Freeman's research in New York understates the extent of displacement. But she says he has raised a good question: How, in the face of relentlessly higher living costs, do so many poor people stay put?
A hot-button issue
Gentrification has spawned emotional disputes in cities around the nation:
• In northwest Fort Lauderdale, where streets are named for the district's prominent old African-American families, three of four new home buyers are white, according to a survey by the Sun-Sentinel. City Commissioner Carlton Moore told the newspaper his largely black constituency fears displacement, even though he says it won't happen.
• In the predominantly Latino working class barrio of East Austin, the new Pedernales Lofts condominiums have raised adjacent land values more than 50% since 2003. Last fall, someone hung signs from power lines outside the lofts saying, "Stop gentrifying the East Side" and "Will U give jobs to longtime residents of this neighborhood?"
• In Charlotte, a City Council committee voted in December to remove language from a city planning department report that downplayed gentrification's threat to neighborhoods. Development could uproot some people, councilman John Tabor told the Charlotte Observer "If there are people in these neighborhoods who have to move because they can't afford their taxes, that's who I want to help," he said.
• In Boston's North End, the destruction of the noisy Central Artery elevated highway promises to attract younger, more affluent new residents and dilute the traditional Italian immigrant culture.
In the two decades after World War II, government urban renewal schemes tore down whole neighborhoods and scattered residents.
Gentrification, which appeared in the 1970s, was something else. Motivated by high gasoline prices, suburban sprawl and a new taste for old architecture, some middle class whites began moving into neighborhoods that had gone out of fashion a generation or two earlier.
Here's how it works: A dilapidated and depopulated but essentially attractive neighborhood - solid housing stock, well laid-out streets, proximity to the city center - is discovered by artists, graduate students and other bohemians.
Block by block, the neighborhood changes. The newcomers fix up old buildings. Galleries and cafes open, and mom 'n' pop groceries close. City services improve. Finally, the bohemians are joined by lawyers, stockbrokers and dentists. Property values rise, followed by property taxes and rents.
To some urban planners, gentrification is a solution to racial segregation, a shrinking tax base and other problems. To others, it is a problem: Poor blacks and Hispanics, who've held on through hard times and sometimes started the neighborhood's comeback, are ousted by their own success.
Jose Sanchez, an urban planning expert at Long Island University in Brooklyn, says some changing neighborhoods stabilize with a mixture of people. But he says the poor - and the bohemian pioneers - can also be "washed out" by scheming landlords or government policies such as rezoning and urban renewal.
The poor stay put
Freeman and Vigdor say gentrification has gotten a bad rap. When they studied New York City and Boston, respectively, they found that poor and less educated residents of gentrifying neighborhoods actually moved less often than people in other neighborhoods - 20% less in New York.
For his national study published this year, Freeman found only a slight connection between gentrification and displacement. A poor resident's chances of being forced to move out of a gentrifying neighborhood are only 0.5% greater than in a non-gentrifying one.
So how do some neighborhoods change so dramatically? Freeman says it's mostly the result of what he calls "succession": Poor people in gentrifying neighborhoods who move from their homes - for whatever reason - usually are replaced by people who have more income and education.
Freeman and Vigdor say skeptics who view gentrification merely as " 'hood snatching" should remember three things:
• Many older neighborhoods have high turnover, whether they gentrify or not. Vigdor says that over five years, about half of all urban residents move.
• Such neighborhoods often have so much vacant or abandoned housing that there's no need to drive anyone out to accommodate people who want to move in. A quarter of the housing in one section of Boston's South End was vacant in 1970; the population had dropped by more than 50% over 20 years. Today, the population has increased more than 50%, and the vacancy rate is less than 2%.
• Rising housing costs in gentrifying districts may ensure that poor residents who do move leave the neighborhood, rather than settle elsewhere in it. Since their places usually are taken by more affluent, better educated people, the neighborhood's character and demographics change.
Vigdor argues that hatred of gentrification is largely irrational: "We were angry when the middle class moved out of the city," he says. "Now we're angry when they move back."
He asks whether Detroit, which in 50 years has lost half its population and most of its middle class, would not have been better off with gentrification than it has been without it.
A housing shortage
Gentrification is a symptom of a bigger problem: Metro areas don't create enough housing, Vigdor says. When prices in the suburbs get high enough, home buyers start looking at "undervalued" urban housing. If it's close to downtown and has some period charm, so much the better.
But critics insist gentrification does real harm to real people. Lewis, the Harlem organizer, says he can't get statements from people who were forced out because he doesn't know where they went.
A surprising number of poor people, however, manage to hold on. Some explanations:
•Homeownership. Homeowners face rising property taxes, but unlike renters they also stand to gain from rising values. Idida Perez, 46, complains that taxes and escrow payments on her two-family house near Logan Square in Chicago have jumped $300 a month over the past few years. But the house, which she and her husband bought for $200,000 in 1990, is now worth $400,000.
•Rent control. Samuel Ragland, 82, pays $115 a month for his one-room rent-controlled apartment on fast-gentrifying West 120th Street in Harlem. His building is being converted into condos, but under New York law, his landlord can't move him out unless he's given a comparable apartment at a comparable rent in the same area.
•Government subsidies. Carole Singleton, 52, had to retire from her job as a hospital administrator after she got cancer. But she's been able to stay in Harlem because she pays only $300 of the $971 rent for her apartment; a federal housing subsidy covers the rest.
•Doubling (or tripling) up. After the rent on Ofelia Sanchez's one-bedroom apartment in the Logan Square area went from $500 to $600, she and her two kids moved into a three-bedroom with Sanchez's mother and her sister's family. The apartment houses 10 people. Sanchez and her son share a bed, and her daughter sleeps on the floor. But Sanchez won't move; she works as a tutor at the local elementary school, and her mother babysits while she takes classes at Chicago State University. "This is home," she says of the neighborhood where she's lived for 26 of her 27 years. "I don't know anyone anywhere else."
•Landlord-tenant understandings. In return for $595 monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment, tenant Maria Marquez rakes the leaves and shovels the front walk. She lays floor tile, repairs holes in the porch and changes light fixtures. It enables her, her son and her mother to stay in an area of Chicago where two-bedrooms rent for $1,000.
•More income devoted to rent. Poor New York households in gentrifying neighborhoods spent 61% of their income on housing, compared with 52% for the poor in non-gentrifying ones, Freeman found. Klare Allen, who is in her mid-40s, has been able to keep her three-bedroom apartment in Roxbury, a black neighborhood close to downtown Boston. But she has to pay $1,400 a month - 75% of her monthly income.
•Prayer. Alma Feliciano, 46, of Boston asked God for an affordable apartment that would allow her and her four children to stay in Roxbury and continue to attend her church, Holy Tabernacle. Her prayers were granted - a unit in a federally subsidized complex. Otherwise, she says, she would have had to leave the city.
One reason poor families make such heroic efforts to stay is because the quality of life is improving - partly thanks to gentrification.
In the Logan Square area, Marquez says, an influx of higher-income newcomers has coincided with what seems like more aggressive policing.
"The gang bangers are not around as much, and you don't see the prostitutes on the corners like you used to," she says.
Idida Perez hates the rising prices but admits, "There are a lot more small cafes owned by people from the neighborhood, and I am a big coffee drinker." And new businesses mean new jobs: Someone has to pour those lattes.
Wed Apr 20, 6:25 AM ET
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
Everyone knows gentrification uproots the urban poor with higher rents, higher taxes and $4 lattes. It's the lament of community organizers, the theme of the 2004 film Barbershop 2 and the guilty assumption of the yuppies moving in.
But everyone may be wrong, according to Lance Freeman, an assistant professor of urban planning at Columbia University.
In an article last month in Urban Affairs Review, Freeman reports the results of his national study of gentrification - the movement of upscale (mostly white) settlers into rundown (mostly minority) neighborhoods.
His conclusion: Gentrification drives comparatively few low-income residents from their homes. Although some are forced to move by rising costs, there isn't much more displacement in gentrifying neighborhoods than in non-gentrifying ones.
In a separate study of New York City published last year, Freeman and a colleague concluded that living in a gentrifying neighborhood there actually made it less likely a poor resident would move - a finding similar to that of a 2001 study of Boston by Duke University economist Jacob Vigdor.
Freeman and Vigdor say that although higher costs sometimes force poor residents to leave gentrifying neighborhoods, other changes - more jobs, safer streets, better trash pickup - encourage them to stay. But to others, gentrification remains a dirty word.
"All you have to do is talk to people around here," says James Lewis, a tenant organizer in Harlem, New York's most famous black neighborhood. "Everybody with money is moving into Harlem, and the people who are here are being displaced."
Even residents who have survived gentrification tend to believe it forces people out.
Maria Marquez, 37, has slept on the sofa for 12 years to give her mother and son the two bedrooms in their apartment in Chicago's gentrifying Logan Square area. But eventually, she says, "we're gonna get kicked out. It's a matter of time."
Kathe Newman, assistant professor of public policy at Rutgers University, argues that Freeman's research in New York understates the extent of displacement. But she says he has raised a good question: How, in the face of relentlessly higher living costs, do so many poor people stay put?
A hot-button issue
Gentrification has spawned emotional disputes in cities around the nation:
• In northwest Fort Lauderdale, where streets are named for the district's prominent old African-American families, three of four new home buyers are white, according to a survey by the Sun-Sentinel. City Commissioner Carlton Moore told the newspaper his largely black constituency fears displacement, even though he says it won't happen.
• In the predominantly Latino working class barrio of East Austin, the new Pedernales Lofts condominiums have raised adjacent land values more than 50% since 2003. Last fall, someone hung signs from power lines outside the lofts saying, "Stop gentrifying the East Side" and "Will U give jobs to longtime residents of this neighborhood?"
• In Charlotte, a City Council committee voted in December to remove language from a city planning department report that downplayed gentrification's threat to neighborhoods. Development could uproot some people, councilman John Tabor told the Charlotte Observer "If there are people in these neighborhoods who have to move because they can't afford their taxes, that's who I want to help," he said.
• In Boston's North End, the destruction of the noisy Central Artery elevated highway promises to attract younger, more affluent new residents and dilute the traditional Italian immigrant culture.
In the two decades after World War II, government urban renewal schemes tore down whole neighborhoods and scattered residents.
Gentrification, which appeared in the 1970s, was something else. Motivated by high gasoline prices, suburban sprawl and a new taste for old architecture, some middle class whites began moving into neighborhoods that had gone out of fashion a generation or two earlier.
Here's how it works: A dilapidated and depopulated but essentially attractive neighborhood - solid housing stock, well laid-out streets, proximity to the city center - is discovered by artists, graduate students and other bohemians.
Block by block, the neighborhood changes. The newcomers fix up old buildings. Galleries and cafes open, and mom 'n' pop groceries close. City services improve. Finally, the bohemians are joined by lawyers, stockbrokers and dentists. Property values rise, followed by property taxes and rents.
To some urban planners, gentrification is a solution to racial segregation, a shrinking tax base and other problems. To others, it is a problem: Poor blacks and Hispanics, who've held on through hard times and sometimes started the neighborhood's comeback, are ousted by their own success.
Jose Sanchez, an urban planning expert at Long Island University in Brooklyn, says some changing neighborhoods stabilize with a mixture of people. But he says the poor - and the bohemian pioneers - can also be "washed out" by scheming landlords or government policies such as rezoning and urban renewal.
The poor stay put
Freeman and Vigdor say gentrification has gotten a bad rap. When they studied New York City and Boston, respectively, they found that poor and less educated residents of gentrifying neighborhoods actually moved less often than people in other neighborhoods - 20% less in New York.
For his national study published this year, Freeman found only a slight connection between gentrification and displacement. A poor resident's chances of being forced to move out of a gentrifying neighborhood are only 0.5% greater than in a non-gentrifying one.
So how do some neighborhoods change so dramatically? Freeman says it's mostly the result of what he calls "succession": Poor people in gentrifying neighborhoods who move from their homes - for whatever reason - usually are replaced by people who have more income and education.
Freeman and Vigdor say skeptics who view gentrification merely as " 'hood snatching" should remember three things:
• Many older neighborhoods have high turnover, whether they gentrify or not. Vigdor says that over five years, about half of all urban residents move.
• Such neighborhoods often have so much vacant or abandoned housing that there's no need to drive anyone out to accommodate people who want to move in. A quarter of the housing in one section of Boston's South End was vacant in 1970; the population had dropped by more than 50% over 20 years. Today, the population has increased more than 50%, and the vacancy rate is less than 2%.
• Rising housing costs in gentrifying districts may ensure that poor residents who do move leave the neighborhood, rather than settle elsewhere in it. Since their places usually are taken by more affluent, better educated people, the neighborhood's character and demographics change.
Vigdor argues that hatred of gentrification is largely irrational: "We were angry when the middle class moved out of the city," he says. "Now we're angry when they move back."
He asks whether Detroit, which in 50 years has lost half its population and most of its middle class, would not have been better off with gentrification than it has been without it.
A housing shortage
Gentrification is a symptom of a bigger problem: Metro areas don't create enough housing, Vigdor says. When prices in the suburbs get high enough, home buyers start looking at "undervalued" urban housing. If it's close to downtown and has some period charm, so much the better.
But critics insist gentrification does real harm to real people. Lewis, the Harlem organizer, says he can't get statements from people who were forced out because he doesn't know where they went.
A surprising number of poor people, however, manage to hold on. Some explanations:
•Homeownership. Homeowners face rising property taxes, but unlike renters they also stand to gain from rising values. Idida Perez, 46, complains that taxes and escrow payments on her two-family house near Logan Square in Chicago have jumped $300 a month over the past few years. But the house, which she and her husband bought for $200,000 in 1990, is now worth $400,000.
•Rent control. Samuel Ragland, 82, pays $115 a month for his one-room rent-controlled apartment on fast-gentrifying West 120th Street in Harlem. His building is being converted into condos, but under New York law, his landlord can't move him out unless he's given a comparable apartment at a comparable rent in the same area.
•Government subsidies. Carole Singleton, 52, had to retire from her job as a hospital administrator after she got cancer. But she's been able to stay in Harlem because she pays only $300 of the $971 rent for her apartment; a federal housing subsidy covers the rest.
•Doubling (or tripling) up. After the rent on Ofelia Sanchez's one-bedroom apartment in the Logan Square area went from $500 to $600, she and her two kids moved into a three-bedroom with Sanchez's mother and her sister's family. The apartment houses 10 people. Sanchez and her son share a bed, and her daughter sleeps on the floor. But Sanchez won't move; she works as a tutor at the local elementary school, and her mother babysits while she takes classes at Chicago State University. "This is home," she says of the neighborhood where she's lived for 26 of her 27 years. "I don't know anyone anywhere else."
•Landlord-tenant understandings. In return for $595 monthly rent for a two-bedroom apartment, tenant Maria Marquez rakes the leaves and shovels the front walk. She lays floor tile, repairs holes in the porch and changes light fixtures. It enables her, her son and her mother to stay in an area of Chicago where two-bedrooms rent for $1,000.
•More income devoted to rent. Poor New York households in gentrifying neighborhoods spent 61% of their income on housing, compared with 52% for the poor in non-gentrifying ones, Freeman found. Klare Allen, who is in her mid-40s, has been able to keep her three-bedroom apartment in Roxbury, a black neighborhood close to downtown Boston. But she has to pay $1,400 a month - 75% of her monthly income.
•Prayer. Alma Feliciano, 46, of Boston asked God for an affordable apartment that would allow her and her four children to stay in Roxbury and continue to attend her church, Holy Tabernacle. Her prayers were granted - a unit in a federally subsidized complex. Otherwise, she says, she would have had to leave the city.
One reason poor families make such heroic efforts to stay is because the quality of life is improving - partly thanks to gentrification.
In the Logan Square area, Marquez says, an influx of higher-income newcomers has coincided with what seems like more aggressive policing.
"The gang bangers are not around as much, and you don't see the prostitutes on the corners like you used to," she says.
Idida Perez hates the rising prices but admits, "There are a lot more small cafes owned by people from the neighborhood, and I am a big coffee drinker." And new businesses mean new jobs: Someone has to pour those lattes.
April 11, 2005
March Update 2005
April 11, 2005
Dearest Friends, Family, and Rotarians,
As I turn my calendar to April 2005, I realize that it is a great time as ever to write to you about my March adventures.
In summation of this time, I visited Rome, saw friends from San Antonio, Texas, had 10 guests at my place, partied in Valencia for their largest street festival called ‘Las Fallas’, and spent my spring break in southern France visiting friends and vineyards. On the more constructive side, I am continuously organizing the Americans for Informed Democracy conference and Martinez Foundation Fundraising Dinner both being held in June in Barcelona.
For more details and photos, continue below, and check out my website at:
http://www.powersprep.com/rubypowers
The Full Update:
The first weekend of March I visited Rome for the first time in my life! I had kept in touch with a Rotary scholar, Elizabeth, I met in Berlin at the Americans for Informed Democracy conference. She is an opera singer in Rome and we decided to do a BCN/Rome swap on back to back weekends. At the same time, an old San Antonio friend, Brent, was running around Europe for the first time and with other Texan friends. Brent and I managed to set a meeting time and place at a Roman airport. They arrived from London 4 hours late the same day I arrived from Barcelona, but I waited because I had no way to reach them. At the same airport, no joke, I ran into another person that I met at the same conference in Berlin going through customs arriving at the same airport.
Regardless of the delay, we ran around Rome that weekend with Elizabeth as our guide and with no problems. We had a guided tour of the Coliseum and St. Peter’s Basicilia, we ran through the Vatican’s museum and saw the Sistine Chapel, and ate traditional Italian pizza, pasta, ice cream, and drank their coffee and wine. We were there at the same time an Italian intelligence officer was being buried after being shot by American troops in Iraq. Now, Italy is planning the removal of their troops from Iraq. It was an awkward day to be an American even though no one said anything to me about it.
The day I returned from Rome, I had a Rotary dinner where Dr. Martinez (www.martinezfoudnation.org) was to present about her Foundation that I am helping gain publicity and funds. Luckily, I wasn’t too tired and was able to pull on a suit and be there. I am organizing a Fundraising Dinner on June 9th in town. I am promoting the Foundation and the dinner through my Rotary club presentations and publications.
The next day, March 8th, I had a Rotary Scholar from Louisiana that I met in Austin in Jan 2004 visit me with a friend. They were running through Spain and trained down from Toulouse, France. I showed them a good time at night after they ran around by day. We met up with them again 2 weeks later in Toulouse, France.
On the 9th, I found out I was waitlisted to Duke Law, ranked 11th in the US. That day was a catalyst for my ‘Get Ruby into Duke Campaign’ that took me a few more weeks to complete the initial phase. As, Burak is matriculated to Duke’s Fuqua, we are moving to Durham in August. Going to Duke Law while he is at Fuqua would be a dream come true.
Basically, I have asked 40 people to either write a letter of recommendation or put in a good word for me with the Admissions office. I have contacted the head of the Public Interest and Pro Bono program that I am interested, waitlisted, and will be an energetic leader. I have sent postcards to the law and business school. I have Fuqua and Duke Law alumni, lawyers in DC and TX, a District Judge in TX, a Rotary governor, a Former Deputy Director of the CIA, US Senator’s staff members, family of patients of the Martinez Foundation, and former teachers at The Princeton Review all writing letters or calling for me. I was really happy when spring break came around that I could take a break from the flurry of asking people for their time and constantly emailing. I am praying about it everyday and have decided to just have faith and not let it ruin my lovely remaining 3-4 months here.
On the 10th, I welcomed two American exchange students living in Belgium, vacationing in Barcelona for the weekend. They had never traveled on their own before but their club let them because I was a former exchange student and a current scholar here. It was fun comparing our notes from living in Belgium and how we see the differences between Belgium, Spain, and the US.
On the 11th, Elizabeth, living in Rome came through for the weekend. Luckily, I had enough room to host all three girls at the same time and they traveled together when I couldn’t go show them around.
I run a complete hostel honestly with Internet, guidebooks, and maps all over the walls with suggestions on walks and how to plan your day. After having my 5th person for the week come, I almost had my ‘this is my kitchen, this is how the microwave works and doesn’t work, this is the toilet, this the shower, don’t leave the heater on, this is how to turn the electricity on when it goes out, this is how to use the key,’ speech all memorized. After a month of this, I realized I always kept forgetting one important thing to tell my guests. For example, ‘don’t jump into the shower until you know there is warm water running,’ or ‘this is how to use the key, lets go have you try it now.’ (some guests were sitting outside the door for hours because they didn’t know how to open the door).
And on the 11th, my dear Texan friends were literally running through Barcelona for 6 hours because due to a French transportation workers’ strike, their previous day’s flight out of Paris had been cancelled. On the only rainy day of the week, my poor Texans had just a few hours to run up the Sagrada Familia and take a bus tour to ‘see’ my city. Luckily, all my guests gathered for a tapas dinner and had a nice laugh out of the wet outdoors before they had to fly to their third country of the day.
On the 17th, I had the chance to meet with a trustee of the Martinez Foundation who happens to be a UT Law alum and lives in Houston. We brainstormed ways to get more funds for the Foundation and I told him about my projects while I am in Barcelona. He told me he admired my vision and organizational skills and said that is what is needed more on the board of trustees to gain funds.
Friday the 18th, Luis, an old AIESEC Austin friend who we had stayed at his house in Paris in February, came to our place for the weekend. Luckily he speaks Spanish, is very outgoing, and had been to Barcelona before because we left him the very next morning for one day in Valencia. Of course we left early on the 19th after my Scholar friend who lives in Seville had arrived at my place to crash for a bit and travel with Burak and I for our crazy adventure to Valencia.
We bused from BCN to Valencia for the last day of their wild street festival where they blow up fireworks in the middle of the day and burn works of art, las fallas, at the end of the last night that had been built all year long. Of course it doesn’t seem to make sense, but I think that is what makes it so exciting!
More on Las Fallas: http://www.donquijote.org/culture/spain/fiestas/lasfallas.asp
We played with firecrackers, walked around all day, hung out with locals in their neighborhoods watching little kids set off firecrackers, ate churros con chocolate, and slid down slides in the park. At night we watched the fallas being burnt with firemen by their side just to prevent any city fires.
We had no place to stay, so slept until 9am in the cold and finally in the warmer waiting room. Once we returned to Barcelona, we crashed for as long as we could in a comfortable warm bed.
With only about one day to recover, we took off to Toulouse by regional train from Barcelona. It was an 8-hour ride with a 1-hour stop at the Spanish-French border. I quickly had to pull out my French hidden deep within my brain just to be able to order lunch and buy tickets. The trip took us right through the Pyrenees and we had great scenery as we took turns sleeping and catching up on our reading. It is amazing what you miss out from flying everywhere all the time.
Once we arrived in Toulouse, we stayed with a French friend we met in Austin in 2000, Jeff, who happens to have an apartment there. He showed us around, shared his culture, and we had the best time that week. Luis, stayed at our place the weekend before, flew in that Thursday because he too was a friend of Jeff’s. Also that weekend, Emily, a Parisian exchange student who lived with Burak’s same host family in El Paso, Texas, came to stay at the same apartment with us. So we had a whole bunch of Francophiles who had lived in Texas reuniting a few years later.
On the 24th, after my speech to the Rotary Club of Toulouse Ouest, we all took a day trip to Carcassonne. It is a beautiful, enclosed, intact medieval town that you have only see in movies and fairy tales. It has a moat, castle, small cobble stone streets, and everything!
On Friday, we took a road-trip just an hour from Toulouse on the way to Cordes, another medieval town on a hill. On the way, we stopped at three wineries for tasting. We found that people were either super nice or really rude. The places where we were invited to come in we almost all bought a bottle, had a great conversation with our host, and left with several pictures of them and their place. It wasn’t as commercialized as our trip through Napa Valley a year ago, but it was great having the close contact with the owners once we found a nice château to visit.
On Saturday, we went to Bordeaux for the day. Burak and I hopped on an organized wine tour once we arrived and that occupied most of our afternoon. We visited 2 wineries, one of which Thomas Jefferson had passed through a couple hundred years before. We prefer dry red, but tasted a sweet white that is produced in an area that has a unique microclimate where fungus grows on the grapes because the vineyards are located between two rivers. They call the fungus Noble Rot. Anyway, we also learned that France created an artificial forest to break the strong winds from the ocean before hitting the vineyards and it extends all the way south to the border with Spain.
Once we returned to the city, we met up with Tracy, another person I met at the Berlin AID conference. When we sat down for a Middle Eastern dinner, we stumbled upon a Turkish restaurant owner who knows Burak’s grandfather! When we found out, we took a picture together and also called Burak’s grandpa on the cell phone so that the old friend could say ‘Hi!’ So, my continued theme for this month and maybe the entire year is, It is a Small World After all (excuse the cliché).
On Sunday April 27th, Easter, we went to a Catholic mass (even though we are Protestant) in the famous St. Sernin church in Toulouse. We enjoyed examining the insides while listening to the French sermon.
We returned one week later to Barcelona on Monday, the 28th, to rest, clean clothes, and prepare for work/school the next day.
On the 30th, Pierre, my host brother from my second family in Belgium when I lived there in 1999-2000, and his girlfriend arrived for their week-long visit. We had fun showing them around and I had good practice of speaking English to Burak, Spanish to roommates, and French to our Belgian guests.
Can’t believe March is over. I am finishing this finally on April 11th, when April is 1/3rd over. Ah! Where does the time go?
Thoughts in summary:
1. None of all my meeting up with people in Europe like we live in the same American state would be possible without email and mobile phones. Luckily, my phone works all over Europe so I constantly have phone coverage (minus subways/metros). Also, in 1999-2000, when I was an exchange student to Belgium, cell phones were gaining in popularity and so was internet. Europe didn’t have all the budget airlines developed all over to make traveling to a major city for a weekend feasible.
2. This world is really small. Let me list examples from this month alone! We met a friend of Burak’s grandfather in Toulouse, accidentally. Burak’s tutoring student at the international school knew my aunt Anita who worked at an international school in Venezuela. We invited a Duke business student over recently to our place in BCN, and before he left, we realized we had seen him a year ago at his school the night he organized the entertainment for the students weekly social gathering. He was also a friend of our Brazilian friend that hosted us in Durham. I also saw a person I met at the Berlin conference in the customs line in the Roman airport as I was actually waiting for my Texans that were supposed to be on the same flight.
3. The difference in how Spaniards vs. Americans (US) view work. I have noticed that Spaniards (even though I live in Catalonia –forgive me Catalans) drop work on the weekends. They can not be bothered to work on the weekends (if their job doesn’t require it). They also work less hours than the typical US citizen. They also get most of August off for vacation plus an extra few weeks plus various local and national days off. Now, as I told a Rotary club a week ago (hopefully they didn’t misunderstand me), the Americans need to learn from the Spaniards to take more breaks. There is research out there that says Americans are working so hard their productivity is decreasing. I believe that. The only way I was able to manage to have a wedding and a honeymoon, etc. was because I changed jobs within one and a half years. In Spain, you get time off from work (and it doesn’t count as your vacation time) for a wedding and a honeymoon. Also when American company cultures have no problem with workers eating their lunches in front of the computer, this is ludicrous! My Catalan friend couldn’t believe me when I told her that. We are working ourselves to death in the US. And for what? Americans need to learn from Southern Europeans how to enjoy life, stop work when the clock turns 6pm, and not check our Blackberries for the latest emails. Learn to live a little!
4. To balance the above argument, Spaniards need to cut the bureaucracy and be more efficient. They need to think out of the box and quit thinking in the Franco times when the more employees employed the better, even if they really have very ridiculous jobs. Spanish companies, if not influenced by other countries like Germany or the US, are usually very lax on their customer service and are not very modernized (like using email and the internet). If the Spaniards could learn something or two on organization and efficiency, they could cut some jobs, save some money and headache for customers, and compete against other international companies. I swear (not literally), if a company or university wanted to hire me as an efficiency/organizational consultant, I could revolutionize their place.
5. I added an article to my blog today about how the Mediterranean diet, filled with fresh vegetables and fruits, wheat breads, red wine, and little meat, is great for fighting cancer, living longer, and overall better health. Now, this isn’t a new discovery or anything, but I have a few thoughts on it as I live in the Mediterranean region where that diet is prevalent.
In the US, we have all our food pre-package, super fried, ready to stay on the shelf forever, and our freezers stocked for the entire year. Now over here, I have to go to the grocery store everyday. This isn’t just because I have no room to put my food and no car/truck to bring on the groceries home with, but because we eat the freshest stuff that doesn’t have a shelf life. I figure I can be bothered for this trade off if I have less trans fats, dyes, and preservatives in my food. I am so happy that the American Food and Drug Association is requiring food makers to list the trans fat content in foods by 2006. We will all soon think twice about those Oreos that have been on the shelf for a month.
6. During Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, Rotary was outlawed. Franco didn’t want money being sent out of the country and also he didn’t like groups organizing themselves. Franco associated Rotary in the same group as Masons. From 1939-1975, Rotary (founded in the US one hundred years ago this February) was not allowed to meet in Spain and do their community service work.
After talking to a future Rotary club president and experiencing Rotary in Spain for the last 8 months, I have noticed how this 36 year ‘break’ has really kept Rotary in Spain from being where it could be today without Franco. Also, the Rotarian told me that he doesn’t believe Spaniards have the same organizational culture like Americans do because of Franco. I agree as I also saw this being the aftermath resulting from Portugal’s dictator on the Portuguese culture. A Portuguese friend on my visit to Lisbon last fall told me that people have been scarred from gathering ever since the dictatorship and to this day just return home from work to watch TV and hang out with the family. This, he says, hurts him as a theatre director and actor in Portugal, because the citizens are not accustomed to going to theatres where there are a lot of people. Ultimately, dictators’ effects on culture and society extend for many years in various ways.
7. Franco also outlawed divorce during his reign. I heard someone told me that some people had divorced before Franco’s time. Some of the previously divorced people had even remarried by Franco’s time, but then they were told that they really weren’t divorced in the first place. I need to look more into this one. I listed a long explanation of Spanish culture on my blog for an in-depth look at the effect on marriage, women’s rights, and family.
Ok, I will spare you for the next 20 days when I have my April update out….
April’s events will include:
- Rotary speeches to Rotary Club (RC) BCN Europa and RC BCN ‘92
- Speaking to Burak’s school regarding International Relations careers
- Visiting Granada
- La Feria in Seville with my Rotary club and other scholars
- Burak’s going to Rome for his work
- Hosting 8 guests from USA, Hungary, and Belgium
- Walking the Camino de Santiago from April 25th to May 2nd
Hope all is well, take care of yourself, and keep in touch.
Ruby
Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar 2004-2005
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Dearest Friends, Family, and Rotarians,
As I turn my calendar to April 2005, I realize that it is a great time as ever to write to you about my March adventures.
In summation of this time, I visited Rome, saw friends from San Antonio, Texas, had 10 guests at my place, partied in Valencia for their largest street festival called ‘Las Fallas’, and spent my spring break in southern France visiting friends and vineyards. On the more constructive side, I am continuously organizing the Americans for Informed Democracy conference and Martinez Foundation Fundraising Dinner both being held in June in Barcelona.
For more details and photos, continue below, and check out my website at:
http://www.powersprep.com/rubypowers
The Full Update:
The first weekend of March I visited Rome for the first time in my life! I had kept in touch with a Rotary scholar, Elizabeth, I met in Berlin at the Americans for Informed Democracy conference. She is an opera singer in Rome and we decided to do a BCN/Rome swap on back to back weekends. At the same time, an old San Antonio friend, Brent, was running around Europe for the first time and with other Texan friends. Brent and I managed to set a meeting time and place at a Roman airport. They arrived from London 4 hours late the same day I arrived from Barcelona, but I waited because I had no way to reach them. At the same airport, no joke, I ran into another person that I met at the same conference in Berlin going through customs arriving at the same airport.
Regardless of the delay, we ran around Rome that weekend with Elizabeth as our guide and with no problems. We had a guided tour of the Coliseum and St. Peter’s Basicilia, we ran through the Vatican’s museum and saw the Sistine Chapel, and ate traditional Italian pizza, pasta, ice cream, and drank their coffee and wine. We were there at the same time an Italian intelligence officer was being buried after being shot by American troops in Iraq. Now, Italy is planning the removal of their troops from Iraq. It was an awkward day to be an American even though no one said anything to me about it.
The day I returned from Rome, I had a Rotary dinner where Dr. Martinez (www.martinezfoudnation.org) was to present about her Foundation that I am helping gain publicity and funds. Luckily, I wasn’t too tired and was able to pull on a suit and be there. I am organizing a Fundraising Dinner on June 9th in town. I am promoting the Foundation and the dinner through my Rotary club presentations and publications.
The next day, March 8th, I had a Rotary Scholar from Louisiana that I met in Austin in Jan 2004 visit me with a friend. They were running through Spain and trained down from Toulouse, France. I showed them a good time at night after they ran around by day. We met up with them again 2 weeks later in Toulouse, France.
On the 9th, I found out I was waitlisted to Duke Law, ranked 11th in the US. That day was a catalyst for my ‘Get Ruby into Duke Campaign’ that took me a few more weeks to complete the initial phase. As, Burak is matriculated to Duke’s Fuqua, we are moving to Durham in August. Going to Duke Law while he is at Fuqua would be a dream come true.
Basically, I have asked 40 people to either write a letter of recommendation or put in a good word for me with the Admissions office. I have contacted the head of the Public Interest and Pro Bono program that I am interested, waitlisted, and will be an energetic leader. I have sent postcards to the law and business school. I have Fuqua and Duke Law alumni, lawyers in DC and TX, a District Judge in TX, a Rotary governor, a Former Deputy Director of the CIA, US Senator’s staff members, family of patients of the Martinez Foundation, and former teachers at The Princeton Review all writing letters or calling for me. I was really happy when spring break came around that I could take a break from the flurry of asking people for their time and constantly emailing. I am praying about it everyday and have decided to just have faith and not let it ruin my lovely remaining 3-4 months here.
On the 10th, I welcomed two American exchange students living in Belgium, vacationing in Barcelona for the weekend. They had never traveled on their own before but their club let them because I was a former exchange student and a current scholar here. It was fun comparing our notes from living in Belgium and how we see the differences between Belgium, Spain, and the US.
On the 11th, Elizabeth, living in Rome came through for the weekend. Luckily, I had enough room to host all three girls at the same time and they traveled together when I couldn’t go show them around.
I run a complete hostel honestly with Internet, guidebooks, and maps all over the walls with suggestions on walks and how to plan your day. After having my 5th person for the week come, I almost had my ‘this is my kitchen, this is how the microwave works and doesn’t work, this is the toilet, this the shower, don’t leave the heater on, this is how to turn the electricity on when it goes out, this is how to use the key,’ speech all memorized. After a month of this, I realized I always kept forgetting one important thing to tell my guests. For example, ‘don’t jump into the shower until you know there is warm water running,’ or ‘this is how to use the key, lets go have you try it now.’ (some guests were sitting outside the door for hours because they didn’t know how to open the door).
And on the 11th, my dear Texan friends were literally running through Barcelona for 6 hours because due to a French transportation workers’ strike, their previous day’s flight out of Paris had been cancelled. On the only rainy day of the week, my poor Texans had just a few hours to run up the Sagrada Familia and take a bus tour to ‘see’ my city. Luckily, all my guests gathered for a tapas dinner and had a nice laugh out of the wet outdoors before they had to fly to their third country of the day.
On the 17th, I had the chance to meet with a trustee of the Martinez Foundation who happens to be a UT Law alum and lives in Houston. We brainstormed ways to get more funds for the Foundation and I told him about my projects while I am in Barcelona. He told me he admired my vision and organizational skills and said that is what is needed more on the board of trustees to gain funds.
Friday the 18th, Luis, an old AIESEC Austin friend who we had stayed at his house in Paris in February, came to our place for the weekend. Luckily he speaks Spanish, is very outgoing, and had been to Barcelona before because we left him the very next morning for one day in Valencia. Of course we left early on the 19th after my Scholar friend who lives in Seville had arrived at my place to crash for a bit and travel with Burak and I for our crazy adventure to Valencia.
We bused from BCN to Valencia for the last day of their wild street festival where they blow up fireworks in the middle of the day and burn works of art, las fallas, at the end of the last night that had been built all year long. Of course it doesn’t seem to make sense, but I think that is what makes it so exciting!
More on Las Fallas: http://www.donquijote.org/culture/spain/fiestas/lasfallas.asp
We played with firecrackers, walked around all day, hung out with locals in their neighborhoods watching little kids set off firecrackers, ate churros con chocolate, and slid down slides in the park. At night we watched the fallas being burnt with firemen by their side just to prevent any city fires.
We had no place to stay, so slept until 9am in the cold and finally in the warmer waiting room. Once we returned to Barcelona, we crashed for as long as we could in a comfortable warm bed.
With only about one day to recover, we took off to Toulouse by regional train from Barcelona. It was an 8-hour ride with a 1-hour stop at the Spanish-French border. I quickly had to pull out my French hidden deep within my brain just to be able to order lunch and buy tickets. The trip took us right through the Pyrenees and we had great scenery as we took turns sleeping and catching up on our reading. It is amazing what you miss out from flying everywhere all the time.
Once we arrived in Toulouse, we stayed with a French friend we met in Austin in 2000, Jeff, who happens to have an apartment there. He showed us around, shared his culture, and we had the best time that week. Luis, stayed at our place the weekend before, flew in that Thursday because he too was a friend of Jeff’s. Also that weekend, Emily, a Parisian exchange student who lived with Burak’s same host family in El Paso, Texas, came to stay at the same apartment with us. So we had a whole bunch of Francophiles who had lived in Texas reuniting a few years later.
On the 24th, after my speech to the Rotary Club of Toulouse Ouest, we all took a day trip to Carcassonne. It is a beautiful, enclosed, intact medieval town that you have only see in movies and fairy tales. It has a moat, castle, small cobble stone streets, and everything!
On Friday, we took a road-trip just an hour from Toulouse on the way to Cordes, another medieval town on a hill. On the way, we stopped at three wineries for tasting. We found that people were either super nice or really rude. The places where we were invited to come in we almost all bought a bottle, had a great conversation with our host, and left with several pictures of them and their place. It wasn’t as commercialized as our trip through Napa Valley a year ago, but it was great having the close contact with the owners once we found a nice château to visit.
On Saturday, we went to Bordeaux for the day. Burak and I hopped on an organized wine tour once we arrived and that occupied most of our afternoon. We visited 2 wineries, one of which Thomas Jefferson had passed through a couple hundred years before. We prefer dry red, but tasted a sweet white that is produced in an area that has a unique microclimate where fungus grows on the grapes because the vineyards are located between two rivers. They call the fungus Noble Rot. Anyway, we also learned that France created an artificial forest to break the strong winds from the ocean before hitting the vineyards and it extends all the way south to the border with Spain.
Once we returned to the city, we met up with Tracy, another person I met at the Berlin AID conference. When we sat down for a Middle Eastern dinner, we stumbled upon a Turkish restaurant owner who knows Burak’s grandfather! When we found out, we took a picture together and also called Burak’s grandpa on the cell phone so that the old friend could say ‘Hi!’ So, my continued theme for this month and maybe the entire year is, It is a Small World After all (excuse the cliché).
On Sunday April 27th, Easter, we went to a Catholic mass (even though we are Protestant) in the famous St. Sernin church in Toulouse. We enjoyed examining the insides while listening to the French sermon.
We returned one week later to Barcelona on Monday, the 28th, to rest, clean clothes, and prepare for work/school the next day.
On the 30th, Pierre, my host brother from my second family in Belgium when I lived there in 1999-2000, and his girlfriend arrived for their week-long visit. We had fun showing them around and I had good practice of speaking English to Burak, Spanish to roommates, and French to our Belgian guests.
Can’t believe March is over. I am finishing this finally on April 11th, when April is 1/3rd over. Ah! Where does the time go?
Thoughts in summary:
1. None of all my meeting up with people in Europe like we live in the same American state would be possible without email and mobile phones. Luckily, my phone works all over Europe so I constantly have phone coverage (minus subways/metros). Also, in 1999-2000, when I was an exchange student to Belgium, cell phones were gaining in popularity and so was internet. Europe didn’t have all the budget airlines developed all over to make traveling to a major city for a weekend feasible.
2. This world is really small. Let me list examples from this month alone! We met a friend of Burak’s grandfather in Toulouse, accidentally. Burak’s tutoring student at the international school knew my aunt Anita who worked at an international school in Venezuela. We invited a Duke business student over recently to our place in BCN, and before he left, we realized we had seen him a year ago at his school the night he organized the entertainment for the students weekly social gathering. He was also a friend of our Brazilian friend that hosted us in Durham. I also saw a person I met at the Berlin conference in the customs line in the Roman airport as I was actually waiting for my Texans that were supposed to be on the same flight.
3. The difference in how Spaniards vs. Americans (US) view work. I have noticed that Spaniards (even though I live in Catalonia –forgive me Catalans) drop work on the weekends. They can not be bothered to work on the weekends (if their job doesn’t require it). They also work less hours than the typical US citizen. They also get most of August off for vacation plus an extra few weeks plus various local and national days off. Now, as I told a Rotary club a week ago (hopefully they didn’t misunderstand me), the Americans need to learn from the Spaniards to take more breaks. There is research out there that says Americans are working so hard their productivity is decreasing. I believe that. The only way I was able to manage to have a wedding and a honeymoon, etc. was because I changed jobs within one and a half years. In Spain, you get time off from work (and it doesn’t count as your vacation time) for a wedding and a honeymoon. Also when American company cultures have no problem with workers eating their lunches in front of the computer, this is ludicrous! My Catalan friend couldn’t believe me when I told her that. We are working ourselves to death in the US. And for what? Americans need to learn from Southern Europeans how to enjoy life, stop work when the clock turns 6pm, and not check our Blackberries for the latest emails. Learn to live a little!
4. To balance the above argument, Spaniards need to cut the bureaucracy and be more efficient. They need to think out of the box and quit thinking in the Franco times when the more employees employed the better, even if they really have very ridiculous jobs. Spanish companies, if not influenced by other countries like Germany or the US, are usually very lax on their customer service and are not very modernized (like using email and the internet). If the Spaniards could learn something or two on organization and efficiency, they could cut some jobs, save some money and headache for customers, and compete against other international companies. I swear (not literally), if a company or university wanted to hire me as an efficiency/organizational consultant, I could revolutionize their place.
5. I added an article to my blog today about how the Mediterranean diet, filled with fresh vegetables and fruits, wheat breads, red wine, and little meat, is great for fighting cancer, living longer, and overall better health. Now, this isn’t a new discovery or anything, but I have a few thoughts on it as I live in the Mediterranean region where that diet is prevalent.
In the US, we have all our food pre-package, super fried, ready to stay on the shelf forever, and our freezers stocked for the entire year. Now over here, I have to go to the grocery store everyday. This isn’t just because I have no room to put my food and no car/truck to bring on the groceries home with, but because we eat the freshest stuff that doesn’t have a shelf life. I figure I can be bothered for this trade off if I have less trans fats, dyes, and preservatives in my food. I am so happy that the American Food and Drug Association is requiring food makers to list the trans fat content in foods by 2006. We will all soon think twice about those Oreos that have been on the shelf for a month.
6. During Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, Rotary was outlawed. Franco didn’t want money being sent out of the country and also he didn’t like groups organizing themselves. Franco associated Rotary in the same group as Masons. From 1939-1975, Rotary (founded in the US one hundred years ago this February) was not allowed to meet in Spain and do their community service work.
After talking to a future Rotary club president and experiencing Rotary in Spain for the last 8 months, I have noticed how this 36 year ‘break’ has really kept Rotary in Spain from being where it could be today without Franco. Also, the Rotarian told me that he doesn’t believe Spaniards have the same organizational culture like Americans do because of Franco. I agree as I also saw this being the aftermath resulting from Portugal’s dictator on the Portuguese culture. A Portuguese friend on my visit to Lisbon last fall told me that people have been scarred from gathering ever since the dictatorship and to this day just return home from work to watch TV and hang out with the family. This, he says, hurts him as a theatre director and actor in Portugal, because the citizens are not accustomed to going to theatres where there are a lot of people. Ultimately, dictators’ effects on culture and society extend for many years in various ways.
7. Franco also outlawed divorce during his reign. I heard someone told me that some people had divorced before Franco’s time. Some of the previously divorced people had even remarried by Franco’s time, but then they were told that they really weren’t divorced in the first place. I need to look more into this one. I listed a long explanation of Spanish culture on my blog for an in-depth look at the effect on marriage, women’s rights, and family.
Ok, I will spare you for the next 20 days when I have my April update out….
April’s events will include:
- Rotary speeches to Rotary Club (RC) BCN Europa and RC BCN ‘92
- Speaking to Burak’s school regarding International Relations careers
- Visiting Granada
- La Feria in Seville with my Rotary club and other scholars
- Burak’s going to Rome for his work
- Hosting 8 guests from USA, Hungary, and Belgium
- Walking the Camino de Santiago from April 25th to May 2nd
Hope all is well, take care of yourself, and keep in touch.
Ruby
Rotary Ambassadorial Scholar 2004-2005
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Social Values and Attitudes of Spain
http://www.country-studies.com/spain/social-values-and-attitudes.html
After the restoration of democracy, the changes in everyday Spanish life were as radical as the political transformation. These changes were even more striking when contrasted with the values and social practices that had prevailed in Spanish society during the Franco years, especially during the 1940s and the early 1950s. In essence, Spanish social values and attitudes were modernized at the same pace, and to the same degree, as the country's class structure, economic institutions, and political framework.
To say that Spanish social values under Franco were conservative would be a great understatement. Both public laws and church regulations enforced a set of social strictures aimed at preserving the traditional role of the family, distant and formal relations between the sexes, and controls over expression in the press, film, and the mass media, as well as over many other important social institutions. By the 1960s, however, social values were changing faster than the law, inevitably creating tension between legal codes and reality. Even the church had begun to move away from its more conservative positions by the latter part of the decade. The government responded haltingly to these changes with some new cabinet appointments and with somewhat softer restrictions on the media. Yet underneath these superficial changes, Spanish society was experiencing wrenching changes as its people came increasingly into contact with the outside world. To some extent, these changes were due to the rural exodus that had uprooted hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and had brought them into new urban social settings. In the 1960s and the early 1970s, however, two other contacts were also important: the flow of European tourists to "sunny Spain" and the migration of Spain's workers to jobs in France, Switzerland, and West Germany.
One of the most powerful influences on Spanish social values has been the country's famous "industry without smokestacks"-- tourism. In the years before the Civil War, tourists numbered only about one quarter of a million, and it took more than a decade after World War II for them to discover Spain's climate and low prices. When they finally did, the trickle of tourists became a flood. The leading countries sending tourists to Spain were France, Portugal, Britain, and West Germany. Of course tourists brought much more than British pounds or German deutsche marks; they also brought the democratic political and social values of northern Europe.
The other population flow that affected Spanish cultural values involved Spanish workers who returned from having worked in the more industrialized and more liberal countries of Western Europe. The exact number of returning migrants fluctuated greatly from year to year, depending on economic conditions in Spain and in the rest of Europe. The peak period was 1965 to 1969, when more than 550,000 returned; but nearly 750,000 returned during the decade of the 1970s. The return flow ebbed somewhat during the 1980s, when only about 20,000 came back per year. The principal problems encountered by these returning Spaniards were both economic (finding another job) and cultural (what the Spanish refer to as "social reinsertion," or becoming accustomed again to the Spanish ways of doing things). Many of the returnees came back with a small sum of money that they invested in a small business or shop, from which they hoped to advance up the economic ladder. Above all, they brought back with them the cultural habits and tastes of France, West Germany, and Switzerland, contributing thereby to the cultural transformation of post-Franco Spain.
Outsiders who still thought of Spain as socially restrained and conservative were surprised to note the public changes in sexual attitudes in the country since the late 1970s. Once state censorship was relaxed on magazines and films in 1976 and in 1978, the market for pornography flourished. In a country where Playboy was outlawed until 1976, ten years later this and other foreign "adult" magazines were already considered tame and were outsold by domestic magazines. Throughout Spain's large cities, uncensored sex films were readily available in government-licensed theaters, and prostitutes and brothels freely advertised their services in even the most serious press. Despite these attention-getting changes in public attitudes, however, Spanish government policy for some years remained quite distant from social practice in two important areas related to private sexual behavior, contraception and abortion.
During the Franco years, the ban on the sale of contraceptives was complete, at least in theory, even though the introduction of the pill had brought artificial contraception to at least half a million Spanish women by 1975. The ban on the sale of contraceptives was lifted in 1978, but no steps were taken to ensure that they were used safely or effectively. Schools offered no sex education courses, and family planning centers existed only where local authorities were willing to pay for them. The consequence of a loosening of sexual restraints, combined with a high level of ignorance about the technology that could be substituted in their place, was a rise in the number of unwanted pregnancies, which led to the second policy problem--abortion.
Illegal abortions were fairly commonplace in Spain even under the dictatorship. A 1974 government report estimated that there were about 300,000 such abortions each year. Subsequently, the number rose to about 350,000 annually, which gave Spain one of the highest ratios of abortions to live births among advanced industrial countries. Abortion continued to be illegal in Spain until 1985, three years after the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol--PSOE) came to power on an electoral platform that promised a change. Even so, the law legalized abortions only in certain cases: pregnancy resulting from rape, which must be reported to the authorities prior to the abortion; reasonable probability of a malformed fetus, attested to by two doctors; or to save the mother's life, again in the opinion of two physicians. In the 1980s, this was as far as public opinion would permit the state to go; surveys showed that a clear majority of the electorate remained opposed to abortion on demand.
Perhaps the most significant change in Spanish social values, however, involved the role of women in society, which, in turn, was related to the nature of the family. Spanish society, for centuries, had embraced a code of moral values that established stringent standards of sexual conduct for women (but not for men); restricted the opportunities for professional careers for women, but honored their role as wives and (most important) mothers; and prohibited divorce, contraception, and abortion, but permitted prostitution. After the return of democracy, the change in the status of women was dramatic. One significant indicator was the changing place of women in the work force. In the traditional Spanish world, women rarely entered the job market. By the late 1970s, however, 22 percent of the country's adult women, still somewhat fewer than in Italy and in Ireland, had entered the work force. By 1984 this figure had increased to 33 percent, a level not significantly different from Italy or the Netherlands. Women still made up less than one-third of the total labor force, however, and in some important sectors, such as banking, the figure was closer to one-tenth. A 1977 opinion poll revealed that when asked whether a woman's place was in the home only 22 percent of young people in Spain agreed, compared with 26 percent in Britain, 30 percent in Italy, and 37 percent in France. The principal barrier to women in the work place, however, was not public opinion, but rather such factors as a high unemployment rate and a lack of part-time jobs. In education, women were rapidly achieving parity with men, at least statistically. In 1983, approximately 46 percent of Spain's university enrollment was female, the thirty-first highest percentage in the world, and comparable to most other European countries.
During Franco's years, Spanish law discriminated strongly against married women. Without her husband's approval, referred to as the permiso marital, a wife was prohibited from almost all economic activities, including employment, ownership of property, or even travel away from home. The law also provided for less stringent definitions of such crimes as adultery and desertion for husbands than it did for wives. Significant reforms of this system were begun shortly before Franco's death, and they have continued at a rapid pace since then. The permiso marital was abolished in 1975; laws against adultery were cancelled in 1978; and divorce was legalized in 1981. During the same year, the parts of the civil code that dealt with family finances were also reformed.
During the Franco years, marriages had to be canonical (that is, performed under Roman Catholic law and regulations) if even one of the partners was Catholic, which meant effectively that all marriages in Spain had to be sanctioned by the church. Since the church prohibited divorce, a marriage could be dissolved only through the arduous procedure of annulment, which was available only after a lengthy series of administrative steps and was thus accessible only to the relatively wealthy. These restrictions were probably one of the major reasons for a 1975 survey result showing that 71 percent of Spaniards favored legalizing divorce; however, because the government remained in the hands of conservatives until 1982, progress toward a divorce law was slow and full of conflict. In the summer of 1981, the Congress of Deputies (lower chamber of the Cortes, or Spanish Parliament) finally approved a divorce law with the votes of about thirty Union of the Democratic Center (Union de Centro Democratico--UCD) deputies who defied the instructions of party conservatives. As a consequence, Spain had a divorce law that permitted the termination of a marriage in as little as two years following the legal separation of the partners. Still, it would be an exaggeration to say that the new divorce law opened a floodgate for the termination of marriages. Between the time the law went into effect at the beginning of September 1981, and the end of 1984, only slightly more than 69,000 couples had availed themselves of the option of ending their marriages, and the number declined in both 1983 and 1984. There were already more divorced people than this in Spain in 1981 before the law took effect.
Despite these important gains, observers expected that the gaining of equal rights for women would be a lengthy struggle, waged on many different fronts. It was not until deciding a 1987 case, for example, that Spain's Supreme Court held that a rape victim need not prove that she had fought to defend herself in order to verify the truth of her allegation. Until that important court case, it was generally accepted that a female rape victim, unlike the victims of other crimes, had to show that she had put up "heroic resistance" in order to prove that she had not enticed the rapist or otherwise encouraged him to attack her.
Another important sign of cultural change involved the size and the composition of the family. To begin with, the marriage rate (the number of marriages in proportion to the adult population) has declined steadily since the mid-1970s. After holding steady at 7 per 1,000 or more for over 100 years, the marriage rate declined to about 5 per 1,000 in 1982, a level observed in West Germany and in Italy only a few years earlier. Fewer people were marrying in Spain, and the family structure was changing dramatically as well. In 1970, of the 8.8 million households recorded in the census, 59 percent consisted of small nuclear families of two to five persons, 15 percent were somewhat larger nuclear families that included other relatives as well as guests, and 10.6 percent were households of unrelated individuals who had no nuclear family. Large families of more than three children were only 9 percent of the total. In a 1975 municipal survey that dealt only with families, the following results were registered: couples without children constituted 16 percent of all families; and two-children families made up 34 percent of the total. Although the number of family units increased more than 20 percent between 1970 and 1981, the average size of the family decreased by about 10 percent, from 3.8 persons to 3.5. The typical extended family of traditional societies (three generations of related persons living in the same household) hardly appeared at all in the census data. Clearly, that characteristic of Spanish cultural values was a thing of the past.
After the restoration of democracy, the changes in everyday Spanish life were as radical as the political transformation. These changes were even more striking when contrasted with the values and social practices that had prevailed in Spanish society during the Franco years, especially during the 1940s and the early 1950s. In essence, Spanish social values and attitudes were modernized at the same pace, and to the same degree, as the country's class structure, economic institutions, and political framework.
To say that Spanish social values under Franco were conservative would be a great understatement. Both public laws and church regulations enforced a set of social strictures aimed at preserving the traditional role of the family, distant and formal relations between the sexes, and controls over expression in the press, film, and the mass media, as well as over many other important social institutions. By the 1960s, however, social values were changing faster than the law, inevitably creating tension between legal codes and reality. Even the church had begun to move away from its more conservative positions by the latter part of the decade. The government responded haltingly to these changes with some new cabinet appointments and with somewhat softer restrictions on the media. Yet underneath these superficial changes, Spanish society was experiencing wrenching changes as its people came increasingly into contact with the outside world. To some extent, these changes were due to the rural exodus that had uprooted hundreds of thousands of Spaniards and had brought them into new urban social settings. In the 1960s and the early 1970s, however, two other contacts were also important: the flow of European tourists to "sunny Spain" and the migration of Spain's workers to jobs in France, Switzerland, and West Germany.
One of the most powerful influences on Spanish social values has been the country's famous "industry without smokestacks"-- tourism. In the years before the Civil War, tourists numbered only about one quarter of a million, and it took more than a decade after World War II for them to discover Spain's climate and low prices. When they finally did, the trickle of tourists became a flood. The leading countries sending tourists to Spain were France, Portugal, Britain, and West Germany. Of course tourists brought much more than British pounds or German deutsche marks; they also brought the democratic political and social values of northern Europe.
The other population flow that affected Spanish cultural values involved Spanish workers who returned from having worked in the more industrialized and more liberal countries of Western Europe. The exact number of returning migrants fluctuated greatly from year to year, depending on economic conditions in Spain and in the rest of Europe. The peak period was 1965 to 1969, when more than 550,000 returned; but nearly 750,000 returned during the decade of the 1970s. The return flow ebbed somewhat during the 1980s, when only about 20,000 came back per year. The principal problems encountered by these returning Spaniards were both economic (finding another job) and cultural (what the Spanish refer to as "social reinsertion," or becoming accustomed again to the Spanish ways of doing things). Many of the returnees came back with a small sum of money that they invested in a small business or shop, from which they hoped to advance up the economic ladder. Above all, they brought back with them the cultural habits and tastes of France, West Germany, and Switzerland, contributing thereby to the cultural transformation of post-Franco Spain.
Outsiders who still thought of Spain as socially restrained and conservative were surprised to note the public changes in sexual attitudes in the country since the late 1970s. Once state censorship was relaxed on magazines and films in 1976 and in 1978, the market for pornography flourished. In a country where Playboy was outlawed until 1976, ten years later this and other foreign "adult" magazines were already considered tame and were outsold by domestic magazines. Throughout Spain's large cities, uncensored sex films were readily available in government-licensed theaters, and prostitutes and brothels freely advertised their services in even the most serious press. Despite these attention-getting changes in public attitudes, however, Spanish government policy for some years remained quite distant from social practice in two important areas related to private sexual behavior, contraception and abortion.
During the Franco years, the ban on the sale of contraceptives was complete, at least in theory, even though the introduction of the pill had brought artificial contraception to at least half a million Spanish women by 1975. The ban on the sale of contraceptives was lifted in 1978, but no steps were taken to ensure that they were used safely or effectively. Schools offered no sex education courses, and family planning centers existed only where local authorities were willing to pay for them. The consequence of a loosening of sexual restraints, combined with a high level of ignorance about the technology that could be substituted in their place, was a rise in the number of unwanted pregnancies, which led to the second policy problem--abortion.
Illegal abortions were fairly commonplace in Spain even under the dictatorship. A 1974 government report estimated that there were about 300,000 such abortions each year. Subsequently, the number rose to about 350,000 annually, which gave Spain one of the highest ratios of abortions to live births among advanced industrial countries. Abortion continued to be illegal in Spain until 1985, three years after the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol--PSOE) came to power on an electoral platform that promised a change. Even so, the law legalized abortions only in certain cases: pregnancy resulting from rape, which must be reported to the authorities prior to the abortion; reasonable probability of a malformed fetus, attested to by two doctors; or to save the mother's life, again in the opinion of two physicians. In the 1980s, this was as far as public opinion would permit the state to go; surveys showed that a clear majority of the electorate remained opposed to abortion on demand.
Perhaps the most significant change in Spanish social values, however, involved the role of women in society, which, in turn, was related to the nature of the family. Spanish society, for centuries, had embraced a code of moral values that established stringent standards of sexual conduct for women (but not for men); restricted the opportunities for professional careers for women, but honored their role as wives and (most important) mothers; and prohibited divorce, contraception, and abortion, but permitted prostitution. After the return of democracy, the change in the status of women was dramatic. One significant indicator was the changing place of women in the work force. In the traditional Spanish world, women rarely entered the job market. By the late 1970s, however, 22 percent of the country's adult women, still somewhat fewer than in Italy and in Ireland, had entered the work force. By 1984 this figure had increased to 33 percent, a level not significantly different from Italy or the Netherlands. Women still made up less than one-third of the total labor force, however, and in some important sectors, such as banking, the figure was closer to one-tenth. A 1977 opinion poll revealed that when asked whether a woman's place was in the home only 22 percent of young people in Spain agreed, compared with 26 percent in Britain, 30 percent in Italy, and 37 percent in France. The principal barrier to women in the work place, however, was not public opinion, but rather such factors as a high unemployment rate and a lack of part-time jobs. In education, women were rapidly achieving parity with men, at least statistically. In 1983, approximately 46 percent of Spain's university enrollment was female, the thirty-first highest percentage in the world, and comparable to most other European countries.
During Franco's years, Spanish law discriminated strongly against married women. Without her husband's approval, referred to as the permiso marital, a wife was prohibited from almost all economic activities, including employment, ownership of property, or even travel away from home. The law also provided for less stringent definitions of such crimes as adultery and desertion for husbands than it did for wives. Significant reforms of this system were begun shortly before Franco's death, and they have continued at a rapid pace since then. The permiso marital was abolished in 1975; laws against adultery were cancelled in 1978; and divorce was legalized in 1981. During the same year, the parts of the civil code that dealt with family finances were also reformed.
During the Franco years, marriages had to be canonical (that is, performed under Roman Catholic law and regulations) if even one of the partners was Catholic, which meant effectively that all marriages in Spain had to be sanctioned by the church. Since the church prohibited divorce, a marriage could be dissolved only through the arduous procedure of annulment, which was available only after a lengthy series of administrative steps and was thus accessible only to the relatively wealthy. These restrictions were probably one of the major reasons for a 1975 survey result showing that 71 percent of Spaniards favored legalizing divorce; however, because the government remained in the hands of conservatives until 1982, progress toward a divorce law was slow and full of conflict. In the summer of 1981, the Congress of Deputies (lower chamber of the Cortes, or Spanish Parliament) finally approved a divorce law with the votes of about thirty Union of the Democratic Center (Union de Centro Democratico--UCD) deputies who defied the instructions of party conservatives. As a consequence, Spain had a divorce law that permitted the termination of a marriage in as little as two years following the legal separation of the partners. Still, it would be an exaggeration to say that the new divorce law opened a floodgate for the termination of marriages. Between the time the law went into effect at the beginning of September 1981, and the end of 1984, only slightly more than 69,000 couples had availed themselves of the option of ending their marriages, and the number declined in both 1983 and 1984. There were already more divorced people than this in Spain in 1981 before the law took effect.
Despite these important gains, observers expected that the gaining of equal rights for women would be a lengthy struggle, waged on many different fronts. It was not until deciding a 1987 case, for example, that Spain's Supreme Court held that a rape victim need not prove that she had fought to defend herself in order to verify the truth of her allegation. Until that important court case, it was generally accepted that a female rape victim, unlike the victims of other crimes, had to show that she had put up "heroic resistance" in order to prove that she had not enticed the rapist or otherwise encouraged him to attack her.
Another important sign of cultural change involved the size and the composition of the family. To begin with, the marriage rate (the number of marriages in proportion to the adult population) has declined steadily since the mid-1970s. After holding steady at 7 per 1,000 or more for over 100 years, the marriage rate declined to about 5 per 1,000 in 1982, a level observed in West Germany and in Italy only a few years earlier. Fewer people were marrying in Spain, and the family structure was changing dramatically as well. In 1970, of the 8.8 million households recorded in the census, 59 percent consisted of small nuclear families of two to five persons, 15 percent were somewhat larger nuclear families that included other relatives as well as guests, and 10.6 percent were households of unrelated individuals who had no nuclear family. Large families of more than three children were only 9 percent of the total. In a 1975 municipal survey that dealt only with families, the following results were registered: couples without children constituted 16 percent of all families; and two-children families made up 34 percent of the total. Although the number of family units increased more than 20 percent between 1970 and 1981, the average size of the family decreased by about 10 percent, from 3.8 persons to 3.5. The typical extended family of traditional societies (three generations of related persons living in the same household) hardly appeared at all in the census data. Clearly, that characteristic of Spanish cultural values was a thing of the past.
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