Week 2 by Tiffany Cole

The Antique Layers of Spain:

My Second Week in Caceres

In my previous post, I noted that, beside a couple of obvious differences between Caceres, Spain and Hammond, Indiana, Caceres felt a lot like an American city and I hadn’t really been hit by a culture shock, just a language shock. Well, on May 16 and May 17, Gemma and Gloria took both of the classes—one class is grammar and language and the other class is history and culture—to the antique part of Caceres, where we went through a museum and walked through a few streets in the area. That was when it truly hit me that I was in Spain, a country much older than America with a longer history and completely different remnants of the past.

In the antique part, I truly felt like I was getting an experience I could never get in America no matter where or how far I travel, and I felt so amazed and so at peace. That feeling was multiplied May 19-May 20, when both classes took a trip to Sevilla, Spain to visit the cathedral. Perhaps because I’m not a religious person, I had absolutely no expectations when we walked into the cathedral, and I’m really glad about that. I was all the more awestruck when we stepped inside. The cathedral was, by far, the most beautiful, intricate place I’ve ever stepped foot in. Everything, from the ceilings to the walls to the floor to all the hallways and rooms within rooms, was brimming with passionate art and storytelling. The cathedral felt like it could house a village all on its own. As a writer who loves the stories every place, object, and person has to tell, I felt honored to be in a place that exuded the importance of art and storytelling to people in a world where art and storytelling is being viewed more and more as completely secondary to the STEM field, or, worse, unimportant.  

Speaking of stories, just taking note of the architecture and art in the antique part of Caceres and the cathedral in Seville gave me many ideas for the fiction I write, and I will definitely be implementing some of the structures into my own fiction.

Spain’s culture seems just as free and expressive, if not freer and more expressive, as America’s culture, so it has not changed my worldview, at least not yet. Perhaps when I get back to America in about twelve days and have time to get back into things in America and reflect on the differences, I will think otherwise. But as of now, Spain has not changed my worldview so much as made me braver, more open-minded, and more dedicated to improving myself.