NO MORE UC3M

YES, after sending in a final reflection paper last night, I am finally done with our much-loathed school, UC3M (Universidad Carlos III). This past week was consumed by a ten page research paper, a creative project that was the death of me, a field trip to some Roman ruins on Friday for my prehistory class, and a prehistory final on Monday.


So after our amazing trip to Granada, Hilary went on another amazing trip to Ireland, and I literally the spent the entire puente working. A puente is a holiday off from school. Monday was Constitution Day for Spain and Wednesday was the day of the Immaculada (something religious?), so they made it a puente, which means bridge, by giving everyone Tuesday off too. I like this system, especially since I really needed those three days to do my Theory of the Image final paper and creative project. I ended up sewing a sort of pillow-looking thing shaped like a Madrid metro car with collages of Madrid and NYC in the windows to represent "My World in Images." It turned out fine, but was nothing compared to all the cool videos the media studies majors in my class made. But I am SOSOSO happy that class is now over, after a two and a half hour horror session of watching the rest of the class present their fabulous projects.

my host mom helped me with the windows

On Friday, I went on the strangest field trip of my life. My prehistory and ancient history class took a bus to Toledo to see an ancient Roman villa. Luckily a bunch of friends from my program are in this class and were as shocked and confused as I was. We have already been to Toledo with our program, and we were excited to go back again because it's a really pretty city and we did not see any Roman ruins the first time. Unfortuneately, the bus did not bring us to the city of Toledo- we ended up in a place called Carranque somewhere in the provence of Toledo. Misunderstanding. Carranque was in the mountains in the middle of nowhere and turned out to be pretty too.

Roman ruins + mountains

After our teacher, who is one of those people who never stops talking, lectured to us for an hour about random tidbits of ancient Rome that had nothing to do with the ruins, she said "Alright let's begin," and we started walking over this ramp that had been placed over the ruins of the Roman villa. We moved about 20 feet when she paused and continued to talk nonstop about how ancient Romans decorated their houses, and then all of a sudden there was a startling thud noise and one of the girls in our class had COLLAPSED. I think she fainted because she had not eaten any breakfast and was very tired from standing around listening to our teacher babble for so long. But then, about 10 minutes later, another man in our class collapsed! This was scarier because he is a much older adult. His name translates to Michelangelo. Someone called an ambulance and we all left the ruin site and went outside to wait for it to show up, which took about half an hour because we were in the mountains. Some older women in our class were getting very nervous at this point, and said that it must be the result of witchcraft. Michelangelo turned out to be fine, and we eventually continued on a quick version of our tour. A few minutes later, a nun in our class said she was feeling weak and had to leave. Witchcraft????? I think so.

Heather was a little too excited about the ambulance

the ruins had some very cool mosaics

the remains of an ancient basilica

On Sunday night my cousin Doli was in Madrid on her way back home from Morocco, so we went to my favorite vegetarian restaurant and walked around a LOT all over downtown Madrid. Muy divertido! I plan on spending the rest of the week enjoying Madrid as much as possible. We come back to NY on Monday. ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Hasta la vista,

Rachel