More Learnin'

 

February 7, 2012

The weather is overcast and cool again today (60s), but it won’t keep us inside.  We’re well into our second day as Road Scholars.  When I was teaching, we sometimes used a K-W-L chart when we studied a topic:  K for what you already know, W for what you want to know, and L for what you learned.  I clearly didn’t know much about the history of Florida and the cultures of its people before we came on this trip.  Since I taught U.S. history in some of my ESOL classes, I knew that Florida had belonged to Spain before it became part of the U.S. in the early 1800s.  And regarding the culture, I knew that people spoke Spanish in Miami and you could get good bagels and whitefish salad in Boca.  But in less than 48 hours, I’ve absorbed a tremendous amount of knowledge.  

Today, our guide appeared in the guise of a pirate queen from the 1740s, complete with Queen Anne pistol.  We got off to an early start in the historic area, at the Spanish Quarter Living History Museum, an open-air museum that shows visitors how people lived in St. Augustine in the 1700s.  At that time, St. Augustine was a small and relatively poor village where everyone was either in the military or supporting the military in some way.  The blacksmith showed us how to make iron nails (which cost the equivalent of $4 in today’s money) and the carpenter showed us how to make round wooden pegs out of square pieces of cypress.  They used wooden pegs rather than iron nails to hold furniture together because the nails were expensive and they rusted, too.  The housewife gave us a tour of her garden and henhouse.  She explained that the villagers drank a tea made from the leaves of the cassia plant, which was very high in caffeine.  Inside the two-room Casa Gallega, she pointed out some of the features of the early Spanish homes.  There was no door to the street.  Instead, you would enter from the courtyard.  All of the homes faced south, and windows were placed only on the eastern and western sides of the house.  Since there were no windows on the northern side of any house, your courtyard would remain private.  

Here’s a new word I learned:  sutler.  A sutler is a sort of merchant who followed the soldiers from camp to camp to sell them the things they would need, such as ammunition, clothing, flasks, dice, etc.  When we visited a sutlery in town, I was tempted to buy some very stylish red and white striped knitted stockings (just like the lady pirate was wearing), but I resisted the urge.  Elliott is very pleased that I’ve kept my shopping impulse under control. 

The diversity of St. Augustine grew during the mid-1700s.  Around that time, a British merchant brought a large group of people from Turkey, Greece, Italy, and Minorca to Florida to work as indentured servants.  They were a mixture of Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox, and the Greeks established a colony called New Smyrna.  We visited the St. Photios Greek Shrine on St. George Street, a memorial to the first Greek settlers in the Americas.  

Of course, we were starving after our busy morning.  Lunch was a quick bite at the Spanish Bakery – empanadas, sausage rolls, soup.  Then we stopped next door at Whetstone Chocolates for some locally-made dark chocolate-raspberry truffles. 

Our first stop after lunch was the plaza with its marketplace.  Facing the plaza is the Cathedral Basilica, a structure dating back to the 1700s.  Our cathedral guide pointed out details of the interior, designed by James Renwick, architect of the original Smithsonian buildings in Washington, DC.  After walking through the cathedral to admire the altar, altar piece, and stained glass windows, we strolled along some of the small streets radiating from the plaza.  I was feeling hungry again, so we stopped for some Cuban black beans and rice at a café called La Herencia.  Shortly before 3 p.m., we were on our way back to the hotel.