Oviedo

This weekend is a four day weekend, and I never got around to making big travel plans. Instead last minute I went with two friends to Oviedo, which is about 3 hours away in Asturias.

I love Oviedo. It´s a smaller town than Santander, and much less crowded. There were a couple of beautiful cathedrals (Pictures to come! Promise!), one of which I got to go inside of. It apparently had the body of some saint, but she was in a stone coffin thing, so you couldn´t actually see her. We also randomly wandered into an art musuem, because it was free admission. We also spent part of the day searching for a statue of Woody Allen. Why is there a statue of Woody Allen in Oviedo you might ask...Well, I have no clue. I was talking to a friend of my host family who came to dinner, and she told me about the statue. I asked her why there was a statrue of him there. Because of my sub-par comprehension skills I didn´t really catch the answer. Either he got an award, or he gave Oviedo an award, or something, but he came to Olviedo and he really liked the gastronomy (her word, not mine) and some other junk, and voila, there´s a statue of him there. And yes, I did find it really randomly, and I got a picture with it. And that´s about it for my trip to Oviedo.

Other observations about Spain in general:

• The concept of La Casa and La Calle. People that have studied in Spain (AKA Jennifer) will know this, but maybe everyone elso won´t. In Spain, the house is sacred and thus is kept immaculate. The outside of the apartment building might look like the slums, but the inside is incredibly nice. People spend a lot of time, money, and effort to take care of their homes. It´s also a big ideal to get invited into a Spanish person´s home. On the flip side, the calle (street) belongs to everyone, so no one gives a shit about it. No one really cares about keeping the environment outside of the home pristine. People throw trash and stuff on the ground without a second thought, which seems so wrong to my good Oregon senses. It´s almost like a reversal of the culture back home, where you may let your house get messy and run down here or there (or maybe all the time), and no one gives a crap, but everyone works together to keep communal areas (parks, streets) clean.

• The return of The Mullet. For some god awful reason, mullets seem to be back in style in Spain. And not layered, semi-mullets but honest-to-God business in the front, party in the back mullets. And it´s not on trashy looking guys either. The ones I´ve seen rocking it look pretty stylish, not like if they were in the U.S. they´d be residing in a trailor park. I just don´t get it. Ánd I´ve seen way to many of them for this to just a random mullet encounter. It´s a real epidemic, albeit one that I enjoy.