"You'll follow me back with the sun in your eyes, and on your own, bedshaped with legs of stone."

When you read this, I’ll be in Turkey, which marks the fourth country out of five I’ll be visiting this semester, unless something unexpected happens.

Sorry I missed last week’s post.  Fridays can be tough, because I’m such a party animal and all.

Here’s what’s up in my life.  I have written a series of vignettes for your enjoyment.

Oh, might as well listen to this while you read.  Keane is one of my favorite bands of all time.  Sure, they washed out a little bit with their later work, but there's some really quality earlier career stuff, don't doubt.  This song is called "Bedshaped."

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My dad and I have a premonition that by this time next year, I’ll be clinically insane.  Ten weeks isolated on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay will do that to you.  The bright-eyed, bushy-tailed little intern will slowly decay into something more sinister.  My first weekend, alone for forty-eight hours, will be spent plugging away at my future-Pulitzer Prize winning novel.  My ninth will feature me staring out the window, listening to Creedence Clearwater’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain” on repeat, tearing my hair out due to intense loneliness and writer’s block.

What I mean to say is that the NOAA internship opportunities have been posted, and there are none in Southern California so I’ve applied to one in Boulder, CO and one in Gloucester Point, VA.  The latter looks like an incredible opportunity, but the site’s isolation, distance from major airports, and sole internship opportunity (meaning I won’t have any college-aged colleagues) means that I’ll be left largely on my own.  And if that doesn’t promise a descent into insanity, I don’t know what does.

Or it could just be the start of my professional canoeing career, who knows.

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Before my Grandma Bobbie passed away, she wrote this essay about the things in this world she would miss after she was gone.  She also wrote some incredible family histories about getting to visit the Russian Ballet in the 20’s and stories from my grandpa’s life that may or may not be entirely true (for example, how could she know his grandmother was teased for having bright red hair as a child?).  However, if anyone knew that kind of stuff, it was her.

Regardless, there’s this one paragraph in her writing, from a passage that begins “Now that I am very old and can look back through a typically American life, I know what I'll miss most when I am dead.” I’ve pasted it below.

Googled.

“O.K., here's the biggie! What human child from an early age does not recognize as beautiful beyond description, the works of Egyptian artists of early history? Instant affinity for the mask of gold of King Tut... the most perfect artwork every created and how privileged we all have been to see it.”

Now, I’ve always kind of laughed to myself about that, because I don’t think they’re the “most perfect artwork ever created,” but I thought of her when I read this paragraph out of my history book about the Mediterranean.

“[The bust of Queen Nefertiti] suggests that she was one of the most ravishingly beautiful women who ever lived. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans, nor even the greatest sculptors of the Italian Renaissance, were ever to portray her equal.  If ancient Egypt had produced no other work of art than this, those three millennia would still have been worth while.”

In short, my grandma is pretty awesome.

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Last Sunday, I went hiking to the highest point in the province of Madrid.  The mountain called itself Peñalara.  It’s 7,965 feet above sea level, which is high enough to provide great views of Segovia and maybe the Pyrenees.  I went with my friend Tyler and we had a relaxed ascent and a rushed descent to catch the train on time, making for a nice 7.5 mile hike.

When I got home, I ate a well-deserved white chocolate ice cream.  All of the white chocolate ice creams are left at the end because I eat the “classic” and almond ones first.  White chocolate is a dumb imposter and it will always be picked last in the gym class that is my freezer.  That said, I still eat it eventually.

To the left is a mountain used for skiing soonish.  There is a dearth of snow at the moment.

Not sure what the 100 year anniversary obelisk is celebrating.

Behind us is Segovia, but my camera kind of sucks.

Because bulls with bells around their necks roaming public trails is a normal phenomenon here.

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On Friday, I went to El Escorial, which is the Royal Monastery of Spain.  There’s no way to describe how awesome it was, but I’ll give you a few sentences and then just make you look at pictures.  Philip II built it, and he was a devout guy so he basically said “make it monumental but not overly-lavish, keep it about my man God.”  And they did a pretty good job fulfilling his expectations.  It’s got lots of paintings, which we weren’t allowed to take picture of.  Most notably, El Greco, and this royal painter guy who did a great copy of Van Der Weyden’s “The Descent.”  Actually, most notable was this incredible Hall of Battles and a crazy awesome ceiling.  Pictures will explain.

 

Wikipedia

Wikipedia

Google

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That’s about it for me this week.  I hope Turkey fulfills all of my expectations and I can get away without any type of sickness or bodily harm.

Keep it real, friends.

-Rachael

P.S. This week, I realized I have enough time to earn a Minor in Literature.  That is good news.  My current Lit prof liked my midterm comparing the Semetic and Grecian creation stories.  Pandora makes Eve seem like the heroine of Genesis.