Differences in College Life

Colleges don't have dorms and students don't really go away to college, they usually live with parents or relatives and commute. College is also WAAY cheaper here. At the public law/economics/business university that houses our study abroad program, tuition is 700 euro (about $1000) a year. (We are paying upwards of $8000 for one semester here, grr!) Also, the job market in Spain is awful and most people live with their parents until they're at least 25, and staying at home until 30 is not at all uncommon. Since college is cheap, lots of people go, but even with an advanced degree as an architect or engineer, young college graduates may not make more than 1000 euros a month.

However, very few students work until they're finished with school. Our Spanish teacher said that she didn't get her first job until she was 22 or so. Spanish students spend a lot of time going out, and often stay out late at bars, but don't really hang out at home since not many have their own apartments.

Relationships are also very public, people are always making out on the metro or on the street. It would be gross in the U.S., but a girl told me that people will think something's weird if two people are dating but their friends never see them touching or making out with each other.

Drinking, of course, is much different. Spain does have a legal drinking age, 18, but I've never seen it enforced. Bars, clubs, and restaurants don't card. Wine is very cheap. It costs about 1 to 3 euro a bottle, and comes with lunch at the cafeteria at school. Even though drinking is commonplace, being drunk isn't cool or acceptable like it is in the U.S. People go out all night partying, but would just think you're an idiot of you drink so much that you lose control of yourself. It's certainly a change from U of Iowa.

Art Museums

Anne´s mom has been in Madrid with us for the last week or so visiting, so we´ve had fun going to all the cool stuff downtown. The last two days we went to the Prado and the Museo Reina Sofia, the two big art museums in Madrid. The Prado has older artworks and the Reina Sofia has more modern art, including Picasso´s Guernica and a lot of art by Salvador Dali. Here are some of our favorite pieces:

The Prado:

Cheeseburger from Paradise

It´s a little hard to tell in this reproduction, but this painting is actually one of the first examples of product placement. In the painting, St. Paul the hermit´s prayer is answered when a crow comes from heaven and delivers a cheeseburger to him. The miracle is much more dramatic in real life, though. I advise going to the Prado yourself.

Mythology:

My favorite paintings were a couple by Velazquez and Rubens that depicted different myths. I had fun because we had studied a bunch of the same paintings in my classical mythology class. Here are a couple of my favorites.

Watch out, Venus

In this painting, Apollo the messenger god arrives at Vulcan´s forge to tell Vulcan that his wife, Venus, has been messing around with Mars, the god of War. Vulcan decides to get even and forges a magical net that he uses to catch the two in the act and trap them.

The Judgement of Paris - Peter Paul Reubens

In this painting, Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera get in a fight over who is the most beautiful. They pick a man named Paris, give him a golden apple marked ¨beauty¨and tell him to give it to the most beautiful goddess. Of course, being goddesses, they also all bribe him. Athena offers Paris success in war if he chooses her, Aphrodite offers him the most beautiful woman in the world, and Hera offers him greatness. Predictably, Paris chooses Aphrodite. Unfortunately, the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen of Troy, is already married. Aphrodite makes Helen fall in love with Paris, and the Trojan War begins.

The Reina Sofia - Guernica

The Reina Sofia was huge and we didn´t get to see nearly all of it before we were pooped. The pieces by Picasso and Dali were neat. Probably the most famous piece of art there is Guernica by Picasso:

Guernica is huge, it takes up a whole wall. The story behind it is that Hitler wanted to test out a new type of bomb, so Franco gave him permission to bomb a city in northern Spain (I think in the Basque country, but I´m not sure) without repercussions. Picasso was exiled to France at this point in time, and painted this painting. It was shown in the World´s Fair in France and then was on display in France, but has only recently been allowed into Spain.

The museum also had a series of photographs on display by Dora Maar that were taken in Picasso´s studio while he was painting Guernica. The photos show the progression of the work from sketches to its final form. These are especially interesting because the painting was a lot different in its earlier stages. For instance, the bull on the left was a whole figure and fairly normal looking. The hand at the bottom with the broken sword was part of an entire body that extended one fist up into the air, and the horse head in the middle was pointing down. The transformation as he added layers was really interesting.