landing

Well, I made it.  Arrival was followed by frantic scrambling to visit family and do the holidays and then to find a house and get settled in for the start of the semester.  Here’s the place…

the way home

So I jumped ahead a little in the last post because as I was leaving Spain I did not know if I would be coming back or not.  (I was, however, leaning towards staying here).  Because of this I decided to pack up everything and bring it with me.  This a little insane – I had to return bikes and books and pay my debts and find a roommate for my apartment and make elaborate plans and say goodbyes…Which included the wheel set I had begun to build.  In order to not have to unlace it completely, I stuffed it full of clothes…

Anyhow, I imaginably I had a ton of stuff.  I had made a box for the wheels, a large suitcase purchased last-minute from a chino, a small suitcase (rolly-size, but overstuffed), a tube full of posters and my messenger bag, also stuffed to the gills.  This certainly put me over the limit.  Morgan was gracious enough to take me to the airport.  

I was, in a word, anxious about the check-in process, being broker than broke and having waaay too much luggage.  Luckily the check-in lady gave me a break.  I led with “This is a bike, I was told I could bring it for free”.  This was patently absurd, the box was obviously not a bike.  Anyhow, she let my luggage on and ignored the fact that it was 15 lbs overweight.  They then let me carry on three bags.  It worked.  And that’s how I boarded the fart-tube home from Spain.

 On the way up I took these pictures of Madrid from the air – you can see how big and sprawly it is and how smogy it is and the towers of Mordor.  Only the best.

decision time

 

these are the IV bottles from the hospital where we did our clinicals

So, I was nearing the end of the semester and having a lot of doubts.  The "International Nursing" program that looked so good on SLU’s website really wasn’t measuring up.  The classroom experience was lacking, the materials and dummy we had to work with were ridiculous.  There were frequently not enough materials or things that weren’t up to date.  And the practice dummy was about as useful as a mannequin. (It did, however, have genitalia, a step up from the department store vareity).  No one knew what was going on – by that I mean that no one was familiar with the program.  Th professor was new and had not taught basic nursing  (or in a classroom) for years and years.  She was also using someone else’s PowerPoint’s and would often say "I don’t know what that means" or "I don’t understand why they would say that" (!).  The department head was also new as was the dean.  It was frustrating, but I had been hoping that the clinical time would make it worth while.

It was disappointing.  The hospital was very small.  In Spain there is an extensive public health system, such that everyone is covered.  The is still a private health care system as well, but it only serves those who pay for private insurance on top of the public system they already pay for in taxes.  It was explained to me that the benefit is in privacy.  For example in the public hospitals patients may share rooms and the family is not allowed to stay overnight with their loved ones.  In the private hospital the rooms are all private and there is space for family members.  This was about the only benefit I could see.  The lack of modern medical technology in the hospital was pretty incredible.  We used glass thermometers and all of the IV bottles were glass as well.  Blood pressures were theoretically being taken manually, except that most days we were there we provided the blood pressure cuffs as theirs did not work.  Aside from this, the aides which did most of the patient care (i.e. bathing, feeding, changing,etc.) were extremely brusque.  We would be assisting with baths or whatever and express concern about whether the patient was cold or not and they would state that they were not cold. Period.  I also assisted with a bath where the patient had red, irritated skin on and around the genitalia.  Instead of taking care to treat this gently, the aide scrubbed at it perfunctorily with a wash cloth while the patient squirmed and grimaced.  Pretty unpleasant.  Beyond this the organization was quite different and nurses there did not appear to have anywhere near the level of responsibility or respect there that they have here.  I want to emphasize that this is by no means true across the board, that I am only talking specifically about the place where I was.  The last thing I am trying to do is slam Spanish health care as a whole.

So I hit the wall at about finals time and decided that what I did not want to continue struggling against all of this and that I did want to feel like I was getting he kind of preparation that I want, that I can feel confident in.  Also, I wanted to stop feeling like I was hemorrhaging money.  So, with about a week left in Spain before my Christmas ticket home, I started trying to figure out where I could transfer.  This was a pain in the ass due to the time difference as how much fun it normally is to deal with bureaucracy over the telephone.  But really, people were nice and helpful.  Thinking that coming bakc to KC was really the only option (and the most appealing, really) the credits I had fit best at UMKC.  They accepted them and me and so that was that.  It really was incredible how quickly everything worked out and how smoothly.  I don’t have to lose any time and will graduate on the same schedule as if I had stayed at SLU.

I have some regrets about not being able to spend more time in Madrid.  I was really settling in.  But, the relief I felt after making the decision reassured me that it was the right move.

sidra

One night Shelby and I were wandering around in the center and came across this food market.  Around the holidays these things would appear and disappear in different plazas every couple of days.  The Christmas market in the Plaza Mayor was a constant, but different gift markets and food markets were always in some state of transition.  This one was a particularly nice with food samples – mostly cheeses and breads and sidra or cider.  There is a tradition of pouring this stuff like this or in even sillier ways, involving either the bottle or the glass or both behind your head.  Its messy and somehow also comes off as macho when dudes do it. (On this night there was a guy behind us pouring from ridiculous heights, pretty impressive, I must say). This purportedly improves the taste and carbonation.  Sooo, in order to remove the need to pour it like that, I suppose, there was this tap to do the job.

 

And then there was Shelby and I, scoffing at tradition.

around the house

I was lucky enough to have an exterior window in my room and to live in a house with a great balcony.  This is what it was like…

I took this and the next one up and down the street I lived on, just to give some ambiance.

..posing while having coffee with me.

This is from the window of my room. Everyday, just like this.

?

Green wall

My route home from my English-teaching job took me past this wall almost everyday.  It is sponsored by one the banks, Caixa.  In Spain it super common for the banks to sponsor the arts – along near the Prado there are galleries that are connected to most of the major financial institutions.  There has been some discussion of what the crisis means for this…it should be interesting given that so much of the art space in the city is funded this way.  Anyhow, this wall is pretty exciting, here is a link to an article about it, with a picture of it with a shorter haircut.

snow!

After having been told many, many, many times it never snowed in Madrid, it did.  In the city it didn’t stick, but just north of town where Morgan and Oriana live there was some small accumulation.  We’re talking mebbe a few inches.  But the bus stopped.   We went the next day and it was beautiful.  Then, to top it off, if snowed in the city after I had left!

Christmas lights in Madrid

(First, a note, I’ve decided to finish up the entries about the last little bit in Spain, as a record.  I do realize it is now March.)

It was funny to me, being from KC where the Plaza lights are such a big deal, how much better the displays in Madrid are.  On the main street and plazas of the whole city center there are tons of lights, making all kinds of patterns that are way more varied than the building outlines that people do at home.  I didn’t get a picture of it but in one of the plazas there were lights shaped like eyes that blinked.  The street with the flying saucer lights is one of the main thorough-fares.  The amount of effort that went into this – weeks of putting up temporary utility poles and wiring them in and hanging the lights was pretty incredible.

Spanish dogs

Spanish dogs are the most well behaved.  This is not an uncommon sight, the dog not tied up in any way waiting outside the bar for its owner.  In Santander there was a dog lost outside the bar where we had coffee and a man there calmly opened the door, let the dog come in a look for it’s person, which it didn’t find, so the man let it out again.  There are so many dogs here.  Recently I decided that since there are so many people in Madrid for short periods or travelling through that owning a dog is really about making sure everyone knows you really live here.  But, really, the dogs are incredibly calm and sweet, and I feel bad for most of them since apartments here are small and some of the dogs are big.  And then there’s the dogshit.  It’s a constant hazard.  But it’s much nicer to think about this cute picture (and make up new lyrics for the Clash) than dogshit.