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Spain, David Gies* Style:
My mother emailed me last week asking how the David Gies lecture was. At the time I didn't know who David Gies was. The night before we got to Spain, I found out that the really awesome guy who had been teaching Global Studies and giving us the Spain pre-port lectures was David Gies. Yay! I finally knew his name. Unfortunately that night we all found out that he was not permanent faculty as we had all thought, but an interport lecturer who was leaving us in Spain. David had become somewhat of a celebrity/everyone's favorite teacher over the past three days and there was a collective "NO! DON'T LEAVE US!!!" heard throughout the ship. I woke up Wednesday morning thinking I had seen the last of David Gies the previous night. How very wrong I was…
Later that day, I was walking around Cadiz with about eight people and one of them (Whitney) bought a guitar. She wanted to put it back on the ship so five people went back. Kristen stayed because she wanted to get her passport photo taken and Zack and I decided to stay with her. We got directions but couldn't find the store so we wandered around until Zack noticed a sign that said "Goya". As in the artist Francisco de Goy, whom David Gies had talked about in Global Studies. Zack decided we should go in. We open the door and who's standing there but David Gies, his wife, and a friend of David's who happened to be a very prominent Spanish professor that knew all about the works they were about to see! David told us we were awesome for finding this place (it was kind of hidden) and admitted he had never been here and his friend was going to give them a tour. We asked if we could join and they said yes. The professor talked, David translated, and we had a lot of fun! The building was built by a marquis who wanted a chapel in his house and commissioned Goya to paint the rooms and Hayden to write music for him. We asked David when he was leaving and he said he'd be on the ship that night and the next day he was leaving and heading towards Madrid to visit his best friend.
The next day I went to the towns Arcos and Rhonda on a SAS trip. These towns are called the white towns because all the buildings are white washed. Rhonda is also famous for being home to the oldest bullring in the world (the picture for this entry is the bullring in Rhonda) and the place where Ernest Hemingway hung out. As we were walking around Rhonda, we noticed that a lot of SASers were surrounding a car. I went to see who it was and it was David Gies! Everyone was taking photos of him and his wife in their rented Spanish car! (He definitely has celebrity status on SAS.) Later on, we were walking around and saw him with his wife and some friends in the window of a restaurant and everyone was waving to him.
The non-David Gies parts of Spain:
The first day in Spain was spent wandering around Cadiz and finding cool stuff to do. We climbed up a bell tower in a church that had an amazing view from the top, ate chocolate con churros (fried dough dipped in chocolate) and saw the Goya museum. The next day I spent in Arcos and Rhonda. Arcos was pretty but slightly forgettable. Rhonda left more of an impression. There is a lot of bullfighting history in the town. Bullfighting used to be done on horseback in a square and later was switched to on foot. The oldest bullring in the world is really the oldest on foot bullring. The entire town is surrounded by a gorge and the scenery is amazing. The bridge to the town is new because it was built in the 1700s. (There's a building façade from the 1300s in Arcos which gives you an idea of how old these places are.) the third day I had wanted to go to Sevilla but I couldn't find a group of people to go with so I hung out in Cadiz with a group of people I had met on the tour the day before. We went to the beach and found some really cool sea glass and then we went to visit an old fort. We also found an awesome marketplace. It had a lot of stalls that sold things like fruit, meat, fish, cheese, fresh bread. (Dad would have loved this market. Lots of gross-looking meat and strange fish.) I bought an orange and someone else bought cheese and bread and sausage to make a sandwich. It was all so delicious! Yesterday I woke up early and went out to explore Cadiz with two friends, Matt and Laura. There was almost no one outside and it was freezing but it was gorgeous. We walked on a road along the ocean and stopped in a beautiful park that had a waterfall. We also stopped at the post office (I decided to collect stamps from each country) and the market place (it was so much fun to just walk around and look at all the different stalls). We didn't do a lot that day because we wanted to get back to the ship early to avoid docktime. (There's a specific time you have to be on the ship by and if you're 1-15 minutes late to get on board you get 3 hours docktime in the next port which means you can't get off the ship until 3 hours after everyone else.)
Today we're bunkering for fuel in Gibraltar. We just passed the rock. I went outside to take a picture but it wasn't that exciting. It was also freezing, raining, and foggy so it's a very bad picture.
*David Gies taught Global Studies and gave the best lectures. He was funny and engaging and I don't know how else to describe him. He was just a really cool person. The first time he lectured he showed up in jeans and a t-shirt that said Espana. He looked so touristy I couldn't believe that he was an expert on Spain. He's written about 13 books and he was also knighted by the king of Spain. He got a medal for it that supposedly gets him into a palace in Madrid but he has yet to test it out.
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