My Papa's 80th Birthday

This past weekend was my host-father’s 80^th birthday! The entire family went out for lunch (the main meal of the day – think Sunday dinner) at a little restaurant south of the city and across the road from the beach. We had the whole restaurant to ourselves, and the food was delicious – salad, potatoes with bacalao, spinach bread, alioli, ribs with honey, veggies, fried potatoes, rice and, of course, cake. I have included a bunch of pictures of my family. The first one is of my Mama and Papa and their daughter, Maria Sue giving Papa a kiss. The second one is of all of their grandchildren (and me...). The third one is with their five kids, and the fourth one is with all of their children-in-law. My Mama's neice, her two grown sons and the girlfriend of one of the sons also came. Fortunately, I had already met most of the family - all of the children, in-laws, and most of the grandkids, so I only had to meet the neice, her family, and the boyfriends of some of the granddaughters, which meant that I didn't have any trouble with names or getting people confused, which was nice.
The party was a typical family gathering - really loud, everyone catching up on everyone else's lives, seating according to age (fortunately, there were 8 other people between the ages of 16 and 30, so I had lots of company), children being embarrassed by their parents, etc. It felt like a cross between Thanksgiving dinner, Sunday dinner at the lake, and a wedding reception. It was really fun to be able to be part of it, but it also made me miss home a lot! I love you and miss you guys a lot!
For the next two weeks, I will be traveling in Norway and Italy, so my next post will be some time after April 11. Hasta luego!

Las Fallas - La Crema = The Burning

This past weekend was the burning of the Fallas. We went to Valencia on Thursday to see the giant Fallas there and then we were in Denia for the actual burning on Friday night -> Saturday morning. The Fallas in Valencia were HUGE - easily double or triple the size of the ones in Denia. This picture is of the Falla that won the competition in Valencia. It was NOT the Falla that spent the most money which was a big deal because it was a huge snub on the team that did spend the most money. There were so many people trying to see this Falla that there were times when we just had to stand in the crowd and look at it because no one could move. It felt a lot like being in the pictures that you see of Time Square at New Year's Eve.
We saw the giant statue of the Virgin Mary which they decorate with flowers that each woman and girl brings to the Virgin during a giant parade in her honor. They had a smaller version in Denia with a parade on Friday which we also saw.
We also saw a mascelta, which is a fireworks/firecrackers show, except that in Spain, they focus way more on the noise than on the lights. It actually happened in the middle of the afternoon in the plaza in front of the city hall. At the beginning, it was just like being really close to a normal fireworks show, but at the end, the ground was shaking and the whole crowd was yelling. They used really big explosions that have a deeper sound than the sharp cracks that hurt your ears, so it was not painful at all, it just made your entire body shake. It was a huge adrenaline rush!
During the afternoon, we went to see a bullfight. It was fascinating, but it was also really bloody. The stadium was completely sold out and the crowd participated a lot in the fight. There were six bulls and three matadors, each of whom fought two bulls. Before anything started, there was an opening ceremony where the picadors, bandilleros, and matadors were presented to the crowd. There really is a lot of artistry and ceremony involved in a fight, and I can understand why Spaniards defend it as a cultural expression of the contest between man and nature. When a really strong, angry bull is charging at a man with nothing but a cape and a sword, there is terrible beauty in that. The sad part is when the bull is weaker and stumbles or when the matador is not very good and has does not kill the bull on the first try. Then you just feel like the bull is put in the ring for sport and does not stand a chance anyway. The picadors are the hardest to watch for me because the bull butts up against the horse with a lot of force. The horse is protected by a really thick padding, but there were a few times when the horse almost fell because the bull was pushing on it so hard. I actually think that the bandilleros are the most fascinating to watch because they do not have a cape which means that when they run at the bull to stick it with their spears, they are completely exposed. The matadors were interesting, but they were not very good.
Alright, they are closing school, so one picture of them burning the Falla in the last post, and then I'm off. I think that the most powerful thing about watching these was the heat. Standing in the front row usually meant that you had to back away from it about a minute after it caught fire.

Pictures of Fallas

This Falla is on my walk to school. It started going up last Friday. Since then, they have also added little statues around it and a Falla Infantil which is a smaller Falla (8-10 ft tall).

Las Fallas

This past weekend, the festival of Las Fallas started in Denia. It is a festival dedicated to Saint Joseph, the carpenter. Traditionally, all the carpenters would clean out their shops, use the extra wood to make statues, and then burn on them on Saint Joseph’s Day. The burning signifies purging the people of their failures (fallas), from which the festival gets its name. Today, Las Fallas is a huge contest between the neighborhoods of Denia to construct the biggest and best statue (which today are made out of sculpted flammable foam over wood frames). Various intersections throughout the city have been shut down, and the different neighborhoods are starting to put together the statues.

Las Fallas is also an excuse for the entire city to be a fiesta: in a party, which means that almost 24 hours a day, you can hear firecrackers in various plazas of the city. Two nights ago, at 23:45 (11:45pm if you dislike military time), I was talking on the phone, leaning out my window, and looking out at the street when this group of young teenage boys (12-14ish?) came running down the street with a 2L pop bottle. I watched them curiously as they huddled over the bottle about fifty feet down the street. Suddenly, they all sprinted toward me, past me, and out into the plaza. I looked back at the bottle just in time to see it blow up in an explosion that was big enough to rattle the windows of the house across the street. It was sweet!

This coming Thursday, we are headed to Valencia (the capital of our region) to see the statues there. Las Fallas is a regional festival throughout the Valencian community, and the statues in the capital are the biggest. One neighborhood has spent 600.000 Euros = $800,000 constructing theirs! The day that we go, we are also going to see a bullfight and watch the fireworks which start at 1am!

In the mean time, we are in the middle of exams: literature today, history and art history tomorrow, and contemporary culture on Wednesday. Yeah for studying to the sound of firecrackers!

(apologies for the lack of pictures...I left my camera cord at my house...maybe tomorrow? - don't hold your breath)

Babel

Whoever decided I should have a blog (and that may have been me...) was silly. I hardly journal for myself, and between traveling during the past two weekends and having my first exam yesterday, the concept of writing anything not required for a class has not been that appealing. For what it's worth, you all can rest assured that I will not be overwhelming you with posts in the next three months.
Moving on...
We had small groups at church again last night, and since I have been gone for the past two weeks, it was pretty up in the air about what small group I would be in. In the process of everyone dividing heading off to the classrooms and odd corners of the church, I found myself tagging along with a group of girls who work at the school that is sponsored by the church. Six of them are from Germany, and two are from Texas. Another girl from Calvin, Courtney, was there as well. We met up with five ladies from the church - one is from Columbia, and at least two are from Denia, but I do not know where the other two are from. At least five different cultures and three different languages gathered in one place for one purpose because of one God. How cool is that?
As we sat down to start the Bible study, one of the girls from Texas asked me in English how well I understood Spanish. I thought she was concerned about me, so I told her that I usually understand things without much trouble. She nodded and said, "Oh good. Do you think you could translate for me?"
Throughout the whole Bible study, Courtney and I took turns translating back and forth between Spanish and English. Meanwhile, two of the German girls translated for the other German girls. Most of the time, the leader of the Bible study would talk in Spanish, and then simultaneous translation into German and English would happen on our respective sides of the group; the leader would ask if everyone understood and would continue upon confirmation. Every once in a while, someone who spoke only English (or only German) would ask a question, it would get translated into Spanish and then translated into the other Germanic language.
The process was often painfully slow and humbling because no one in the group spoke all three languages well enough to understand them all at conversation speed. If we had tried to build anything, it would have taken us centuries. However, an hour later we had worked our way through a discussion on one tiny phrase: "love does not envy." In the process, we talked about the difference between longing for something that builds God's kingdom and desiring something for personal gain, and at the end of the hour, I was left longing for one thing: "All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them" (Acts 2:4). How cool would that be?

The Castle and Montgo

We actually got to go inside the castle on Friday, and it was sweet! We have lots of fun pictures, and I actually learned quite a bit. Our guide talked to us about the differences between the Holywood portrayal of castles and the use and construction of historical castles, especially focusing on how historical castles are built for defense, not to be a royal home. For example, you know how they always talk about using battering rams on the doors? That probably wasn’t very common because the doors entrances are built at right angles to the city wall. To get to the door, you have to walk next to the city wall, and there isn’t any room to back up and go ramming into the wall because the road coming up to the gate is fairly narrow and makes a sharp turn.

He also talked about how castles are built on top of each other. When you conquer something or come to a site that was previously inhabited, it doesn’t make any sense to destroy it and start from scratch. Your castle will be much stronger and the work will go a lot faster if you just build around and over top of what was already there. At the gate, you can see gates from the Moors, the ones who built the original castle in the 12^th C and from the various conquistadors in the 14^th and 16^th C’s. The Moorish doors are built in the shape of a horseshoe (Spanish: herradura which literally means “hard iron,” and is my new favorite Spanish word right now).

Saturday morning, Seth and Paul organized a trip up Montgo, the mountain that is right next to Denia. We were going to climb all the way to the top (minimum of 3 hours to the top), but when we got up, it was very cloudy, and we wouldn’t have been able to see the city anyway. Instead, we decided to climb to the Cova de l’Aigua (Valenciano for Cave of Water) which was about a 1.5 hr hike. When we got to the cave, we figured out why it is called the Cave of Water. You have to climb over a pool of water just to get in the cave, and once you are in, you are pretty much walking in mud. Around the corner and in the back of the cave, there is a part of the wall that is hollowed out and you can see a big pool of water about two feet deep that extends back at least twenty feet to where you can’t see it anymore under the rock. On the other side of the cave, higher up, you can crawl in between the rocks (there is about a 1.5 foot clearance) into various smaller caves where a channel was built to gather the dripping water and funnel it into a bigger pool which feeds the pool at the mouth of the cave. Just outside the cave, covered in a metal cage so that people don’t graffiti it, is some Roman writing. There is nothing there to indicate what it says, but it was fun to see it and climb around in the cave for a while. We also sat around, ate our sandwiches, and took lots of fun pictures while we were up there. We have one of “More bars in more places” which is five of the girls all lined up in front of the view of the city. Guess who’s the top bar?

On our way back down the mountain, we stopped at a church which was built next to the home of Pare Pere which is Valenciano for “Father Peter.” He is not a saint, but he is revered in this community as a very godly person who will pray for you whenever you have a problem. The church has a walking garden with twelve stations that show the life of Jesus from birth to ascension.

Unfortunately, my pictures from climbing Montgo are still on my camera, and I can't transfer them until I get back home and don't have internet. So, you're getting the story before you can see it. Hopefully, I can put pictures up as soon as I get back from Barcelona (on Monday).

P.S. Sorry about the weird auto-formatting. For some reason it won't let me change the font or make everything the same color...

Church

This one is fairly long and doesn’t have any pictures because it has more to do with daily life and adjusting to a new place and lifestyle than with going someplace extraordinary. However, I hope you enjoy it.


When we came to Denia, Maria Elena (that’s the name our professor uses when she lives here) told us that we should try to get as involved as possible in community activities. The church I am going to, which is actually a Baptist church, does social assistance work in the city, and this past Tuesday I went to help out. All of the ladies helping were between 40 and 70, but they are all really nice. The only lady whose name I actually learned is Rosario. She’s from Peru, and her late husband owned a yacht company that did mini cruises in various parts of the world, so she has been all over the Western coast of the US, Hawaii, all over the European coast, and finally has settled in Denia to retire. They told me I should come back earlier next week so that I can have coffee with them and chat before we get to work. Most of the people who came in to pick up clothes and food were Muslim women and children. They appear to be of Middle Eastern descent, but they speak Spanish like native speakers with the Denia accent, so I don’t think they are first-generation immigrants. Anyway, it was a very strange experience being in a church handing out clothing to people who were obviously of a different faith with no expressed interest in the church at all.


On Thursday evenings, the church has a mid-week gathering for a time of praise, fellowship, and small group study. It is held in their old building downtown, so it’s really easy to get to. Chani (a friend of mine from Calvin) and I went together just to check it out. When we walked in, we didn’t know where to go, so we sat behind a group of students. They didn’t look very Spanish to me, but we greeted them in Spanish, and they responded in Spanish. The girl who did most of the talking was Miriam. Most of them are from Germany (two are from Texas) and are volunteering at the Alpha and Omega school which our church runs. They are all post-high school and pre-university students. There is a group of about twenty students at any given time. They come for anywhere from two months to a year and they come and leave individually so there is always someone in the group who speaks good Spanish and a few who barely speak it. Hopefully, we will get to know them better over the next few months.


After Chani and I talked to them for a while, the singing started. I didn’t know any of the songs, but it was all praise music (complete with overhead projection ). One of the songs we sang talked about bringing praises before God’s throne, and while we were singing, I nearly burst into tears. It is so powerful to see the unity of the church when it’s doing what it’s supposed to do. There were people there from Peru, Central America, Germany, Texas, Michigan, various parts of Africa, and Denia all praising God together, and a good portion of them were speaking a second or third or fourth language or a very different dialect of their first language. Think about what the Church, the universal Church, must be like. C.S. Lewis has a piece in The Screwtape Letters about how the devil wants Christians to focus on the brokenness and annoyances of their own tiny body of believers that gathers in a building every week. He says that as long as the devil can keep us focused on that, we will not be able to see the Church: universal, sanctified, powerful, and Spirit-filled, working through the power of Jesus to build the kingdom of God. I was so blessed this past week to catch a tiny glimpse of that Church in a small stone building in downtown Denia.


After we finished singing, we went to small groups. Since Chani and I weren’t already in one, we got put into a group of high school girls. The leader is Anna, and Alicia helps her. Then there is Rebecca, Juliana, Andrea, Beti, Sara, Sara, Diana and Noelia, all between the ages of fifteen and seventeen. Alicia is in her mid-twenties and just finished her bachelor’s degree in biochemistry. (As an aside: We had a fun two-minute conversation comparing curriculum and enjoying the looks of horror on the high school girls’ faces while we listed off the many different types of chemistry we have either taken or will take.)


The church is doing a series on love, so that’s what the small groups are focusing on too. When we did the part about speaking in the tongues of angels but not having love, the leader used Chani and me as an example: even if these girls could speak perfect Spanish and explain everything in the world to us in Spanish, if they did it without love, it would mean nothing. We all laughed, but in a way, it was a good reminder too. Sometimes, we get really focused on speaking here.


Later, I was walking home, and I realized that I hadn’t felt this happy since actually coming to Denia, and I realized that for the very first time, I had felt included in a place. It’s not like I’m indispensable – I could leave and not come back and very few people would even notice – it’s more that I felt surrounded. I know the names and faces of fifteen different people there! That more than tripled my circle of people from Spain that I know. I also realized that if this is what the church is like in all parts of the world, I could move anywhere as long as there is a church there. I can also understand why people start attending church in the first place. Even if you don’t know that you need God, it’s pretty easy to know that you need other people, and the church can fill that need in a way that very few other institutions can, especially if you don’t have a healthy or socially fulfilling family situation. One last thing: I’ve also been realizing that when I get back home, it’s not going to work for me to go to an all-white church anymore. The whole diversity thing is getting to me, and I have barely been here two weeks.