I love Segovia!

January 25, 2010

I really loved Segovia!! What I liked most about it when we got there in the gift shop there was pig stuff everywhere! Some people know this, but I LOVE pigs, especially piglets!!! So I was really excited to see that they had a bunch of stuff in the gift shops and on the street that were related to pigs. I even bought a little stuffed animal pig holding a heart that reads ‘Segovia.’ The reason for so many pigs however is that Segovia is famous for its pig dishes, especially cuchinillos or baby piglets. This, I do not like. But I still got a good souvenir from there for myself so that’s good J.

Our bus left at 9:30 for Segovia and it was only about an hour and a half drive, it went by really fast. And the bus was really nice! It was higher off the ground than the coach buses in the US and these had seat belts too and handles on the back of the chairs, for what…I really don’t know but they were very comfortable!

When we first approached Segovia, our buses stopped right in front of the Aqueduct! It was built by the Romans around 2,000 years ago and there is nothing holding it together except gravity…just rock on top of rock. It was pretty impressive. Our tour guide for the day was my art teacher, Ivan and he told us a story/fable about the Aqueduct. It goes something like this: one girl’s job was to fetch and carry water every day to the village. Tired of this job, she made a deal with the devil to bring the water to the people for her soul. Thus, the devil made the aqueduct and took the girl’s soul as well or something a long these lines.

Ivan also told us a fabled story about these mountains that appear to be in the shape of a women sleeping and it’s called La Mujer Muerta or in English, The Sleeping Lady or The Dead Woman. There are several legends about this mountain but the one Ivan told us was like this: This version recounts the struggles for leadership that were two brothers, sons of the recently deceased head of a tribe living in the then vast plateau. The mother of two, did not want to see this fratricidal struggle, offered his life to the gods in exchange for peace for their children and well kept.. After a big storm, appeared the mother's body as a great mountain, an image which the children recognized and immediately stopped the fight.

Throughout the day, we walked around looking at other historical places. We stopped by a house titled, La Casa de Picos or The House of Peaks, which has 365 peaks sticking out of the house. Houses owned by rich people would have unique patterns on the outside walls of the buildings to distinguish this wealth. We stopped around 12:30 pm to take a break and to eat lunch. Our host-mom had made us a sandwich with scrambled eggs and chorizo, which is a type of sausage and is very, very good. We had this long with a banana, mandarin, and water. It was very good.

After Lunch, a group of us went to this beautiful Cathedral for only 3 euros. I really loved the outside of it as well but in the inside was worth a look at too. It amazes me how tall Cathedrals are. At this one, they had this huge doors like in the Hogwarts castle in Harry Potter that almost reached the ceiling. In some rooms, we couldn’t take pictures because they were full with hanging tapestries that are very old and fragile. If we did take pictures in there, we would be fined 50 euro or 75.75 dollars anyways.

After visiting the Cathedral, we did a little walking and I stopped at a store to buy my pig with the Segovia heart, postcards, and something for my sister. We found an area with a good view of the Alcazar Castle and a beautiful forest landscape and decided to take pictures. Then we stopped at a Café/Bar for some ice cream-I got a lemon-lime freeze pop thing and it was only a euro! Lately in Spain it has been really dreary with rainy, cold, and windy weather but the weather in Segovia was perfect!! It was like early April in Wisconsin! It was especially a really nice surprise because the predicted weather for that day was rain and snow. It did rain a little bit but it wasn’t bad at all.

Our group met back at 3pm then to call to the Alcazar. This is the castle that inspired Walt Disney to create the castle that’s always shown at the beginning of the Disney movies. We couldn’t go to all of the rooms in the castle of course but we did get to see a lot of history including the thrones of the king and queen and we got to go up the stairs to the lookout on the castle. The view was AMAZING!!! We wanted to stay up there longer but needed to get going to the buses as well.

The bus ride home was pretty uneventful. I was exhausted mentally and physically from the day so I just decided to tune out everything and listen to my iPod. We got back around 7PM and then had pizza and salad for dinner around 9 PM. After dinner we decided to go out with our usual group to Café La Banque at the Plaza Mayor for some churros and hot chocolate. It hit the spot! The chocolate was not as thick as last time but it was still really good!! The restaurant was really warm and that along with the small of cigarette smoke and being initially tired was making me really sleepy. We stayed and talked for about an hour and a half, called it a night and left for home.

While we were walking back something really weird happened. Kaitlyn and I were waiting for the Green Pedestrian symbol to walk across the street when these two boys around high school age walked across before our ‘go’ light since there were not many cars around. They were walking right towards us so we both tried to move out of the way for them but one of the boys with short curly hair and piercings. But instead of continuing to walk, he stopped right in front of me and said in Spanish, “Do you remember me? Do you remember me?” I told him “no” each time and finally we were able to walk across and he said, “Well…see you later!” It was really weird but I figured either 1) He was drinking 2) He confused me with some other American girl or 3) He just wanted to bug me.