El Escorial Y “Carnaval”

El Escorial Excursion – Friday, February 5^th

This was one of our school excursions that we went on with our school group! It is a palace/school/monastery in a town a little outside Madrid called San Lorenzo. It is a mountain town and the landscape is so peaceful. It was almost a 3 hour bus ride from Toledo – I slept on the bus both ways haha!

We got a guided tour of the whole palace, it was massive! On one side of the building is the school, and in the middle is the library, and the other side is the monastery. It was believed that studying has to be done before moving to the religious side. It is also a palace where the king and queen of Spain used to live. I couldn’t take pictures in the inside, but here is some pictures of the outside. Even the pictures can’t explain how big it was standing outside of it though. I really did like the tour and learning about the history of all the different parts of the palace. My favorite part was looking at the gardens, imagine seeing this view out your window every morning!

CARNAVAL – Saturday, February 6^th and Sunday, February 7^th

“Carnaval” is a very famous celebration all throughout Spain, and it symbolizes one last celebration the weekend before Ash Wednesday, the start of the 40 days of Lent. It includes processions, dancing, singing, and the tradition of the burning of the sardine at the very end to symbolize the end of carnaval. There is nothing in the U.S. to compare it to – people dress up in costumes so it is kind of like Halloween, and there are parades so it is kind of like 4^th of July, but in reality you just can’t compare it to anything in the U.S. It was so interesting to be a part of it and learn more about the traditions from my host family. For my carnaval, I traveled with my host family to the the pueblo – my host mom’s home town and stayed overnight at her parent’s home Saturday night. Carmen danced in the streets during the parades on Saturday and Sunday. It was cute and her costume was quite impressive – all the costumes were homemade!

Carmen in action and Carmen’s whole dance group:

In the plaza on Sunday afternoon was when they had the burning of the sardine and they were also serving sardines for people to eat. Carmen’s dance team “won” out of the three dance groups so they were all so happy and all the kids were dancing around the burning sardine. I was kind of scared someone was going to get hurt because they were so close to the fire it seemed, but it all turned out ok and everyone was very happy!

Although I was kind of confused what was going on the whole time during carnaval, looking back on the experience I learned so much and spent good, quality time with my host family – it was definitely an intense culture immersion experience!