Inspired by Yesterday

I have now seen the most beautiful church of my life. One of the program’s fieldtrips is to a monastery in San Millan, which is maybe 20 minutes outside of the city by bus. My camera’s batteries died, but not before I’d gotten a few good pics of the outside.

View from above: Yuso courtyard

It’s actually much better to have an excuse to just LOOK at everything without a lens in between (figuratively speaking, obviously we can’t avoid looking through lenses :P). I stared, often open-mouthed, at the gorgeous countryside, at the monastery below, and at the monastery above. There are twin monasteries, one giant one sort of in between the hills, and a small one up on one of the hills. They are called Yuso (“lower” in latin) and Suso (“upper” in latin). Yuso is gigantic, with a shop, a church, and housing for nuns. You have to take another bus for like ten minutes to get up to Suso. Oh, also, this is the birthplace of written Spanish. A monk wrote Castellano notes in the margins of a Latin text and, voilá, the written word of Spain was created.

We got tours of both Yuso and Suso, from two different women. The one in Yuso basically thought we understood no Spanish at all, when, really, it was just too echo-y in there to hear her words. I understand a lot of the words during tours, the problem is just coherently placing them together. I did get the gyst, however.

Due to the fact that this area was once Muslim territory, the “upper” has the cool arches between columns and high, rounded ceilings. Two extra columns were added after Suso was originally built, and you can tell how Roman they are as opposed to the Muslim architecture of the first three arches inside.

(((http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/805))) Check it out, yo! It’s a UNESCO heritage site! We also have homework: find a UNESCO heritage site in your country and present it in class. <3 love my life

There are statues of San Millán (c. 472-573 AD/CE) all over the place, because, after all, the municipality is named for him. Apparently this hermit lived in the mountains until he was summoned to be made a priest. Then he gave so much money to the poor that the other priests threw him out and let him go back to those mountains. His real name was Aemilian of Cogolla, and he is said to have been born in Berceo, which is super close to here. Berceo is also the name of the mall where we go to reach the Spanish walmart, Eroski.

Sadly, I will not be journeying to Eroski today, due to the not-so-lovely amount of rain we’ve been getting. I’m listening to classical music on RNE, studying my favorite language, and doing some laundry. Yoga will also happen before my roommate and a friend of mine from downstairs walk to a dinner party with me. We’re all cooking a dish, and then bringing the food to a friend that moved out of the dorms. First housewarming party!! It’s at 7, though, so I don’t think it’ll get too crazy.

Well, I’m off to be all domestic! (gotta clean my room and the kitchen, too)

Love,

Julia

P.S. Another thing that inspired me was seeing one of my friends scribble all the words she didn’t know into a tiny notebook. I wanted to be that cool nerd with the tiny notebook!!! Check back for updates 😉