This is Dulcinea, Don Quixote's love interest. Um, she doesn't seem too interested!
Here I am, pretending to be deep in my reading of DQ. The professor read us the chapter about Don Quixote fighting the windmills... which was quite funny. I was glad to finally understand why these windmills are so famous!
And here is one of many DQ statues all over this area of Spain... needless to say, he's a popular guy around here!
Well, yesterday I ventured out with a group from SLU on a tour of places related to either "Don Quixote" or Cervantes (the author). It was really cool and somewhat surreal to actually see the famous windmills associated with Don Quixote. To be honest, I've never read the story, but I hoped that I could soak in enough cultural references so that someday when I hopefully do, I'll hopefully remember some of it.
We stopped at a house where Cervantes lived, which was pretty cool... although he had the biggest wine storage I had EVER seen.... well I haven't seen that many wine storage areas, so maybe that's not helpful, but it was huge!
We also went to Consuegra, which is this town about 1.5 hours outside of Madrid. It had a row of the famous windmills near a castle. So beautiful! The view, on top of the ridge, where the castle and windmills were, was amazing.
Then, we went to a town where the woman who inspired the character "Dulcinea" lived. In the story, Don Quixote falls in love with Dulcinea, a woman who he builds up to be a princess... when in reality, she's not so amazing, and she's not a princess either. That's of course, part of the fun of the story. Anyhow, that's why I included the picture of Dulcinea's statue.
Now, I need to read the book. Given that it's 1100 pages long, I don't know if that'll happen in the near future, but I do feel this trip was helpful in understanding the most famous work of Spanish literature. I hope I am a little closer to "getting" it.
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