Today I took my first field trip of college! Instead of having my "Literatura Española del Siglo de Oro" (Spanish Golden Age Literature) class, we went to visit "La Casa de Cervantes" (House of Cervantes), the famous Spanish author who wrote the well-known "Don Quixote".
Apparently, the house itself (seen below) is not the actual home he was born in. That was destroyed long ago because no one knew it was a house of someone famous, but this house was reconstructed on the exact location the original stood, in a fashion that the original would have been like.
Inside the house were rooms that would have been typical of a family of Cervantes class. Apparently, they were pretty wealthy (as his father was a doctor). Women and men lived in separate rooms, and women rarely left the home. We were able to see models of a womens' sitting room, an men's sitting room, a woman's bedroom/child's bedroom (which were joined), a man's bedroom, and a kitchen. Inside was also a small museum of puppets used to retell the tale of "Don Quixote" as well as various editions of "Don Quixote" over the centuries and in different languages (the latter satisfying the book-worm in me greatly).
On the field trip (which was walking distance from my school, by the way) we also saw a hospital where Cervantes father worked and that San Ignacio Loyola also worked at while he attended school at Alcala de Henares.
We also had a look at a few convents in Alcala, one which Cervantes' sister had lived in and another in which Santa Teresa de Avila (de Jesus), a Spanish Catholic-Mystic, had lived in. A great field trip all in all, why don't colleges in the US do this?
HIGHLIGHT OF CASA DE CERVATES: Seeing the different editions of the famous tale in the museum.
1. Casa De Cervantes
2. Sign Outside the House (states he was born at this spot)
3. The Hospital where his dad/Loyola worked
4. My Amazing Professor: Ernesto!
0 comments:
Post a Comment