9/11, Visit to Cathedral, Housewarming party

September 11th,

I slept over at my piso and got up early to go over to Inma's office to ask questions about registering for classes.

As it turned out, I had been registering for my classes correctly and was ahead of schedule.  She told me not to worry as she would be giving a presentation about classes the following week.

Class was good, as we kept up our fast pace in covering all of the material.  I volunteered to read a poem at tomorrow's visit to Federico García Lorca's house.

I met up with our EAP group to tour the Cathedral of Granada.  Our guide was a grad student who was very knowledgeable.

From the outside the Cathedral of Granada looks big, but nothing spectacular as the gargoyles and seals of the empire are decaying.  We received our tickets and went into the "waiting room" before being allowed to venture inside.  

Looks can be deceiving, as inside as I was stunned by the size, beauty, and color of the towering columns and 80 foot high ceilings.  We were first greeted by a gruesome statue of Santo Matamoros, the Saint of the reconquest, trampling a moorish soldier.  According to the legend, Matamors saw a vision of the Virgin Mary in a cave.  She told him to begin the Christian reconquest and showed him the image of a white horse crushing a Moorish Soldier.  They're not opposed to depicting violence in art.

Everything inside had been painted white with a special paint to protect against a plague during the XVI century.  The gleaming ivory columns were decorated in gold leaf.  In the center of the room was the largest pipe organ I have ever seen, with hundreds of pipes spanning out in all directions.  They were covered in gold and at the tops sat golden statues of angels with trumpets.  The organ is played twice a year, Christmas and the first day of Semana Santa.

The main display of statues, paintings, and lots of gold was stunning, although filled with irony and manipulation, as Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand were pictured in humble robes as Joseph and Mary.  The pictured saints and other nobles in the paintings had bought their way into history and religious power.

That evening, I invited people over to my new piso and we had a housewarming party.  This year will be a lot of fun as we all want to have dinner parties and social gatherings at eachother's apartments.

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Today was the 7th anniversary of 9/11.  I thought about how that day has changed the United States and the world.  I remembered how at 13 I had biked to school and sat quietly in the classroom listening to the radio about events that I could not comprehend nor understand.