Mérida: Roma Existe en España

Temple of Diana

This past weekend, I went to Mérida.  Now, I doubt that many of you have heard of this little city, but it used to be a key location in the Roman Empire.  Yes, the ROMAN empire.  Badajoz has some Islamic roots, Cáceres, where I went last week, has some medieval roots, and Mérida, has Roman roots.  This is all in one autonomia, very similar to state in the US.  Well, Mérida also is the capital of Extremadura.  This is weird because the two provinces that make up that autonomia are Badajoz and Cáceres.  In Andalucia, the capital is Sevilla, but Sevilla is also a province.  It is very uncommon for that to happen in Spain, and here is one of the exceptions.

Well, history aside, Mérida is an incredible city.  Not only do they have sites fenced off so you have to pay to enter, which I didn't do, but they have Roman structures throughout the city.  There is a bar that has part of an arc as part of it's foundation.  They have el Templo de Diana in the middle of the street.  Honestly, it was just as cool as Rome.

The only problem with Mérida when comparing it to Badajoz is that it is much smaller.  It also doesn't have the exciting night life that we have here.  The friend we visited actually comes to Badajoz every weekend because there isn't as much to do there.  I'm sure if I was actually living there, I would find more faults with Badajoz, but since I'm not, I'm going to complain about Mérida.  Actually though, I don't need to return to Cáceres, but I need to go back to Mérida.  It was that cool and I feel like I didn't see it all...because I didn't.

So that was the historical part of my weekend, now on to my favorite holiday: Halloween.  If you know me then you know I love dressing up.  Last year I painted myself blue, last summer I dressed up as a gorilla and made it on the front page of the paper.  I put tons of effort into making the perfect costume.  This year, it was a little different.  Halloween isn't nearly as big in Spain.  They think that it is only about dressing up as something scary and that's it.  To show how much they love me, my school in the pueblo had festivities for Halloween.  There was a Halloween costume contest at recess.  In the spirit of dressing up, I cut two holes in a sheet and immediately became a ghost.  The rules were that you could not buy anything and that it had to be from things around the house.  The winners were a spider, two mad nurses, and an epic scarecrow.  It was a lot of fun.

¡Los Ganadores! The winners!

Otherwise, Halloween passed pretty nonchalantly.  I saw one kid dressed up on Halloween.  That's it.  After not seeing much on Halloween itself, you can imagine my surprise when I got invited to a Halloween party at someone's casa de campo, which is a summer house in the countryside.  My friend Tom and I went to get costumes in the little window we left for ourselves in between getting back from Mérida and getting picked up for the party.  I found a crown and decided to be a king.  Tom found a mask and decided to be an alien.  Not our best effort, but it was something.

When we got to the car, the Scottish girl who had invited us greeted us and told us about this party and how many people were going to be there.  We told her we had just bought costumes for the party.  Erin burst out laughing.  Although in Scotland they celebrate it like they do in the US, she knows that in Spain costumes are not a thing.  Tom and I look at each other and are kind of embarrassed; however, we don't have to wear the costumes if we don't want to.

Picture from the summer house

So we get to the party and for the longest time the only thing that related to Halloween were two pumpkins.  Then Erin decorated the rest of the room with some homemade decorations and it had more of a Halloween vibe.  After a couple of hours, Tom and I wore our costumes for all the Spainards to see.  At first they laughed, but then they tried wearing our costumes.

The reason why dressing up for Halloween is not big here is because they dress up for Carneval in March.  That's their biggest holiday to wear their disfraz, costume.

As you may have noticed, I have been writing more than I promised.  We'll see how things go and if I have an interesting week, I'll be sure to fill you in on it!

Can you guess what this is supposed to be?