Finally, another post!

I never cease to be amazed at all that there is here, the different types of culture there are in Castellon. I experienced two different facets of culture this past weekend and both were different and interesting and amazing.Friday was the Fiesta de las Paellas, the paella festival. In case you aren’t familiar with it, paella is a typical rice dish from Spain. The dish usually contains rice, vegetables and some sort of protein. Sometimes the dish has seafood, but the one that is typical to Castellon has rice, judias, chicken, sausage and rabbit. It is a dish that is typically prepared by men and is eaten for the main mean on Sundays. It is usually made in a large skillet, similar to a wok but not as deep, and is made traditionally on top of firewood but now people also prepare it in their homes on the stove. The general idea behind the campus festival is to gather all of the students on campus and celebrate the beginning of a new semester. It is a way to gather the students with something that is traditionally Spanish, something that everyone is familiar with and has eaten all of their lives. People are given firewood and are on their own from there to make their dishes. The people that want to can make paella and enter a contest to see who makes the best paella, but it is not a requirement to make paella to join the festivities and other people grill meat and eat bocadillos. And everyone drinks. Pretty much, the way that would best describe the festival is Flunk Day, except you know when it is going to be, there are tons more people because it is open to not only the college students, everyone is grilling or making paella and the school does not provide you with beer- you have to provide your own alcohol. Everyone comes knowing that they are going to have a good time, regardless of the weather or what they eat. In typical Spanish style, everyone shares their food with everyone else. There is live music, the marching band is walking around the entrance of the area where the festival takes place, people playing games, and there are tons and tons of people everywhere. It is one big college party and the whole campus takes part in it, no matter who you are and if you want to get drunk or not. There are people everywhere, not everyone is grilling and people are just having an amazing time knowing that they are part of this amazingly crazy day.
After the festivities ended, I went with my host family and two of their friends to Antonio’s parents’ house in the mountains. The house used to belong to his maternal grandparents and was passed down to his mom after they died. It is in a cute little village called Xodos, away from everything. Although it is only about and hour and a half away, it feels like you have stepped into a completely different world, where time has stopped and things are the same way as they were decades ago. It is a sleepy town hidden in the mountains where the next closest town is a 20 minute drive. The house was pretty much freezing because no one is ever up there in the winter time, so it took almost all weekend for it to heat up. I felt to rustic, so Little House on the Prairie having to heat up the house using a fireplace. It was such a relaxing weekend. We went to a deserted town about an hour in and walked around there, then went on a hike after lunch. We walked around the town at night, which was one of the scariest things since it was windy and it just looked creepy in general. It was such a different lifestyle and it was amazing to see the people that lived there and know that there are still people that live that way. That not everyone wants to live in a city, big or small, and that they are satisfied knowing that the closet neighbor is down the mountains. It is just such a different lifestyle. You can’t just run to the grocery store, you make a trip to the little shops in the next town over. You can’t send a text whenever you want to because there is no reception. It’s amazing to think that there are places like that all over the world, but we fail to think about that when we are sitting at our laptops inside of Starbucks sipping our lattes while talking on our cell phones. It’s sad to think that these towns are slowly disappearing because people would rather move to large cities. I can see why people would want to live there, but I can also see why people would decide to move away from there.
I feel like more and more I see the contrast between cultures. I was able to see two totally different cultures in one weekend. I was also able to see how different they are from the culture that I am used to back at home. There are more similarities than differences, but the differences are so obvious for me as a foreigner since they are new to me. I love being able to experience new, things, no matter how small they are, every day :)