UC3M and UCM

So, I posted about my classes, but I never mentioned my universities, so I figure now that I'm going back to Wesleyan in two days, this is a great time to mention the schools I attended last semester. The first of the two is the Universidad de Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M). Named after Carlos III, a reforming king, the university was founded in 1989 (that's right - it's younger than me and most other people who are reading this!) and is not actually located in Madrid, but in Getafe, a suburb which is about 20 minutes outside of Madrid (there are campuses in Leganes and Colmenarejo as well - other suburbs of Madrid about equidistant). Unfortunately, this semester the highway out of Madrid to Getafe was under construction, so it always took me at least 50 minutes to get there. It's a small university by Spanish standards - only a couple thousand students - which makes it great for exchange programs from the United States, and they know that. UC3M has an entire department called "Hispanic Studies" - basically Spanish and Spain for foreigners. I steered away from those - because there are no Spaniards in any of those classes - and took some of the mini-courses in the Humanities department. Unfortunately, UC3M specializes in Business, Economics, Government and related things, so I wasn't able to find classes that fit perfectly with my major, but that's another story.

Here are some pictures of the main section of the Getafe campus:
Inside the main cafeteria:
And the Humanities section of campus (three buildings where I had almost all my classes, including the choir):
A bust of Carlos III in the Humanities campus:Inside Buildings 14 and 15 (the buildings all have names, but for the most part no one knows them):
And the puny Christmas tree that the Humanities campus had up for a month or so:

Because I couldn't find the classes I needed for my majors, I slapped together a curriculum using an independent study, mini-classes, and one class taken at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM). I recently learned that the word Complutense refers to the Roman name for a city near Madrid (now called Alcala de Henares), and I have no idea why a university actually located in Madrid would be named after a suburb. When the university was founded in the 1930s (that makes it one of the older Spanish universities, not counting the two super old ones founded in the Middle Ages), it was named the Universidad Central de Madrid (the Central University of Madrid) and though I have no proof, I think the name was changed to distance the university from its past - as a battleground of the civil war and a site of major student uprisings under Franco. The campus is called Ciudad Universitaria (University City) and for good reason - it's huge. There are three different Metro stops that service the campus and numerous buslines, including about 10 designed just to circulate within the university campus. With about 100,000 students, it's immense and you would never meet anyone outside of your speciality, let alone outside your department (Spanish students specialize from the first day of their first year in college, and each department has its own building), so I would never want to go to the Complutense full time, but the history offerings were exemplary, so it worked out well for me. The campus is actually pretty close to where I lived, but walking to the school from the Metro took 20 minutes, and going by bus only shortened that slightly, so it still took me 35 minutes to get from my house to my classroom.

This 12 story building is the School of Geography and History (la Facultad de Geografia y Historia):One of the many buses on the highway that runs through campus:
And an expanse of forest between my department and the rest of campus (of course I had to go to one of the schools furthest from the Metro). If you see pictures of the battles fought in Ciudad Universitaria during the Spanish Civil War, they all look similar to this...