MAKE IT INTO ART - A VISIT TO MUSEO REINA SOFÍA

Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher once said: Take your broken heart, make it into art.

Few pieces of art represent this sentiment better than the world-famous Guernica, by Pablo Picasso. And our extremely fortunate Global Navigators and Program Leaders were able to see and enjoy this fantastic masterpiece at Museo Reina Sofía this week! The museum is one of Madrid's most highly regarded gems and we are very proud to be able to host amazing art pieces in this gigantic space. Our students were quite taken by the artwork and particularly by Guernica, a piece of art that represents the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and that, throughout the years, has become a symbol of the injustice of war in general.

Here are some of their amazingly insightful, passionate and emotionally intelligent comments about the piece (translated to English for this blog post!):

"I liked the figure of the woman with the baby but it also pains me to see her tears. She was devastated by the death of her child. She represents and captures the pain of parents who lose a child in the war"

"There is a bull and also a dove that is very difficult to see and both of these speak to me because the bull is a symbol of war and the dove is a symbol for peace. It is interesting that the bull is easier to see than the dove"

"There is a flower behind everything else that is happening. The flower is the only thing that has survived the war"

"The woman with the lamp is the only figure with hope in the painting"

"The figure that speaks to me the most is the dove. It is almost impossible to see it, like many horrible events in history. I think that the dove represents the people who are forgotten by history in these terrible wars"

At CIEE we are very proud of our Advanced Language & Culture students for their enthusiasm, their love for learning and their emotional maturity. We are looking forward to spending two more weeks with them and will certainly miss them a lot when they fly back home!