Monday, March 02, 2009

Midterms, Cuenca, and Futbol

Cuenca Photo Album
Athletico Madrid - FC Barcelona Game

This past week, I had midterm exams for my classes and unlike classes at OU where teachers schedule their own tests, the university here has a certain week for midterms, therefore all of the midterms fall on this week. It was quite stressful! Aside from the stress of studying, I think I did pretty well on the exams, I shall find out soon enough.

Enough about class, lets talk about futbol! I joined a futbol siete (7) team through the school and we started playing games last week. We had just enough players to field a team and no substitues, so needless to say, we got our butts handed to us (5 - 0). This week we will have one sub so maybe we can get some fresher legs rotated into the game. Besides being beat so badly, it was quite a lot of fun and it was a great workout.

On Friday, I went on an excursion with the University to Cuenca, Spain which is about 2 hours away from Alcala. It is a quaint little town in the middle of Spain with some very cool art and architecture. We took a tour of the modern art museum (with some questionable looking art) and a cathedral (these are getting a little bit old, not gonna lie). Check out my pictures from the trip on the link above!

Today, (the best part of my weekend) I went with my friend Conner (a huge futbol fan like me) to see a match between Athletico Madrid and FC Barcelona. We got to our seats about an hour early to get some good pictures of a somewhat empty stadium and to catch a glimpse of our favorite players warming up. After a while, the fans started to fill the stadium and the excitement of ensuing game was building up. Our seats were right right next to "los Ultras" (they are the fanatical Athletico Fans for life) and the atmosphere was amazing for this thrilling game. In the end, Barcelona ended up losing 4 - 3 but there were some fantastic goals in this game (I will try to post a link to the highlights once they are online) and I got every cent out of the 80 Euro ticket!

Here's a video of the fans:



I also bought a few scarfs so I could act like a local when I go to games:


Of course, I had to buy a FC Barcelona scarf! The other one has a quote on it from King Juan Carlos I when he told Hugo Chavez to shut up (¿Por que no te callas?) at the 2007 Ibero-American Summit in Santiago Chile (watch the video here), when he kept interrupting the Prime Minister of Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, while he was speaking. It's become a very popular quote in Spain, obviously, it's on a scarf!

That's it for now, I must get to bed and start another week of classes. I can't belive it's already March!

-Jamie

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