Time Off

In Spain, Spring Break is more commonly known has Holy Week Break.  The week leading up to Easter is a big deal here with all the schools closed and most stores closed or being open for less time.  Apparently there are parades at all hours of the day, every day.  I however will not be in Spain for most of the Holy Week.  Tomorrow afternoon I am leaving to meet my parents in Paris where we will spend a few days and from there visit Rome and Barcelona.  Then on Easter we'll be coming back to Granada so I can go class on Monday.  I'm really excited to see my parents and excited to visit a few new cities and see just how much Italian I've learned in the past six months. Because of traveling, I will either blog a lot in the next week or so (due to wifi in hotels) or not blog at all (due to having so much fun). So no one freak out if you don't hear from me for a week or so.  I can't wait to share all my travel experiences with you!


I am actually getting a full day head start on my Spring Break due to a general strike that is going on in Spain today.  It was up to teachers to decide to if they wanted to have class or not and all my teachers decided to participate in the strike.  I haven't done a lot of research into the new labor reforms or anything but I can tell you, the people of Spain are really mad about something. The first half the year, protest weren't really that huge of a deal.  Maybe once a month I would here about one on the news, but even then, they were rarely violent.  Starting pretty much after the election in November, protests started being more common and more often are becoming violent.  My host mom seems to think that these people are just idiots that want to cause trouble, but when every single one of my teachers is cancelling class to participate in a strike, it makes me wonder if there really is something to be angry about.  I'll need to check into that.

This morning I woke up to a big crowd of people outside of my apartment shouting "Huelga general" or general strike.  They were on their way to a large department store down the street, to try and keep the store from opening.  According to my host mom, people also shoved plastic in the key holes of banks to keep them from opening the doors and spray painted over the screens of ATMS to keep people from taking out money.  My roommate decide to walk into the city center to see what those protests were like and she said "it was pretty crazy".  I decided I would rather stay home and start packing for my trip than to go stand in the middle of a bunch of angry people. I don't know if this strike or the protest will actually change anything, but people are certainly trying to change something.