during one night, I reflect on another night.

Ay.
Internet cafes can be ridiculous. I only wanted to come here and type up a tale of daring adventures and intrigue, but this is the third computer I´ve been on ... and it appears to be working, but who knows when I actually try to post this.

Oh, and now the cafe is closing completely. Hooray!
Anyway, my story was going to be about piling 15 people into a 7 passanger van and driving through the Adalucian countryside to a small pueblo where we had an awesome Spanish/English BBQ thanks to a Granada kid we met at church a few weeks ago. He´s actually studying and working in Denmark, but he says it´s so expensive to live there and Granada is so cool that he´d rather live in Granada and not work than live in Denmark and have five jobs. But for now, he´s commited to his Danish work and is only home on holiday, so he did the next best thing to moving permanently to Granada: threw an awesome party for friends, family and complete strangers!
He only expected about six of us American students to show up, but word got around somehow, and thirteen of us were waiting to be picked up at the gas station when he pulled up in a van already carrying a few Spanish friends.
But we made due. We also almost died, because the Spanish can´t drive. But we made due.
I lost count of how many people were eatting at the candle-lit picnic table that night, but I felt more fluent in Spanish than I had in a long time, telling stories and making jokes almost as naturally as I would in English. And somehow, because it was in Spanish, everything seemed funnier and more invigorating. We ate a lot of meat, as well as Fanta-esque juice and potato chips. oh, and bread!
I put a piece of bread on my head and said, "it´s a panbrerro!"
"Nooo," said a well intentioned Spanish kid, "SOMbrerro!"
But it was my turn to correct him. I knew what I was talking about, a bread hat! "PANbrerro!" I said again, probably looking stupider than I felt.
He couldn´t stop laughing.

I am no proficient at puns in two languages.

And I actually told most of that story! Well, except for the end, where we all ended the night by standing in a circle in the middle of the lawn and singing Spanish VBS songs. Everyone was college-aged, but somehow everyone knew the words and corresponding hand and body motions. Well, everyone except for us American kids. We just faked it -- smiled and laughed and spun around in circles shaking our hands when the other kids did. And when the Spanish kids began singing "Padre Abraham tuve muchos hijos," we joined in. Some things aren´t hard to translate.

The cafe really is closing now. Buenas Noches, todos.

Back from Seville + contest winner!

So I have returned to Granada, and as always am glad to be back. I was at first rather impressed with Seville with its smoother walk-ways, ritzier stores, bigger river and hipper night-life, not to mention a wider variety of tourist attractions. But it didn´t take 24 hours before I was longing for Granada´s cobblestones, orange walls and friendly graffiti.
I´ll write more about the city and our trip when I´ve got a bit more time, but first I´m excited to announce that we have a winner in the guess the brand name contest! Please be aware that I don´t endorse this company in any way, I just thought that their slogan was a bit absurd and sounded slightly freaky and psychadelic.
The slogan was:
Ven a la Placer Azul
Which translated to English means:
Go to the Blue Pleasure
Which said in a deep, raspy voice sounds:
Hideously creepy.
The winnder is:
Tylor!
And the brand name is:
Nestle.
Here´s Tylor´s winning entry:
"I think it is a Nestle ice cream product called "KIMY swirls blue"...it's cold, turns your mouth blue and is on a stick...familiar brand Nestle. What comics do I win?"

I´m not familar with the KIMY swirls blue and don´t know at all what it might do to your mouth, but all the advertising for Nestle frozen confections out here has a blue background, and the Nestle logo is blue, so that´s where I assumed the logo came from. Tylor may know more about this Blue Pleasure than even I did!
So anyway, this contest is over, and I´ll be sending Tylor some rad Spanish comics as soon as I get his address.
I´ll try to think of another contest to host soon. Thank you to everyone who participated!

Now that I´m in Seville, I suppose I should get a haircut!

We just checked into our hostel, the city seems more modern than Granada, lovely larger and less graffiti´d.
The hostel was on a little tiny side street and looking for it on a just-bought map made my eyes go dizzy. But I was never even good at Where´s Waldo. We got some help from a few loitering locals, but since there were a few turns to take, I had to hold the map out in front of me, looking very touristy as we traveled.
We found a pleasant plaza where the girls all wanted to stop and look at shalls and buttons and jewelry and I re-oriented myself -- realizing we had gone the wrong way. Fortunatly, my traveling companions were too shopped-out to noticed that once we crossed the street, I led us right back down the way we came.
I feel very, very sneaky.
The downside of this is that they might now give me more directional credit than I´m actually worth.
This map is never leaving my side.

Travel news + a cry for help + an awesome trivia contest!

The bad news: I´m totally exhausted and confused from looking up hostel and ground transportation information for our trip to Italy next month
The good news: Holy crap, I´m going to Italy next month! And Sevilla next weekend! The beach seems to have been only the beginning.

If anyone out there knows anything about traveling in and around Europe, specifically Italia, please let me know. We´ll be there six days and are planning to see Venice, Cinque Tere, Florence and Rome before flying out for a day in Barcelona and then catching an overnight bus back to Granada.


Oh! bonus trivia question contest: there are signs all over Granada advertising a brand everyone in America is familiar with. The advertising slogan is "Ven a la Placer Azul." Kudos to anyone who can traslate that, but I´ll mail a couple of Spanish comic books to anyone who can guess what company the slogan is for and give me a good explanation why that´s their slogan. No cheating! You have a week.

A few notes about Granada and phones

Sometimes Granada feels like a labrynth. The streets are narrow, mostly cobblestoned and can vere off at a 45 degree angle without much notice. The buildings on every street are built deliberately high to block out the sun and wind and everything stretches out like wild ivy from a series of plazas and fountains, each street bisected and intersected dozens of smaller alleys and side streets.
In addition to this, there are no street signs. Sometimes you can find the name of an alley on a plaque posted on the side of a building at an intersection, but it´s hard from a set-rule. On major streets there might be Disneylandesque colored signs pointing to major plazas or landmarks, but most of the time they´re just there to direct tourists back to their hotel.
Again, not terribly helpful.
In some ways this system is cool; it makes just finding the door to a resturant or musem feel like stumbling onto a secret passage or clandestine hideout. It also seems appropriate that a roaming minetaur wouldn´t feel out of place here in Picasso´s homeland (the labryth-dwelling man-beast was a favorite symbol of the famous painter).
But for someone like myself who frequently got lost in the town I lived in for 14 years, it can also be sublimely frustrating. There is apparently one store in the city that sells international phone cards that can be used easily with my cell phone for three days in a row before our trip to the beach I spent over an hour seeking out this hidden shoppe. I never once found it. This is more remarkable when you realize that I had been there TWICE before and HAD DIRECTIONS.
I even had a friend walk me there (after it was closed, unfortunatly) and show me how to get home and I had no idea where we were. "See, it´s right by the Salsa place we were last night," he told me. And I saw the Salsa place, recognized the area, recognized that I had been there before, had walked there only last night, and was mesmerized. "I thought this was on the other side of the city!" It was not. Or maybe it was. I really had no idea what side of the city we were on anyway.
So basically, I´ve had to just use the phone in my house for calling home. This is not a terrible thing, just difficult, since the one phone in the house is in the TV room and someone is almost always watching TV in there and I don´t want to interrupt them.
So today I got up in the morning and made a late-night phone call to my girlfriend in the American Midwest. We talked for a little over an hour and my Señora later informed me that she had to go down to the street to use a payphone for a call she needed to make.
I felt bad and insisted she let me know when she needed to use the phone if I was on it. "It´s your phone, not mine," I told her in Spanish. "No," she smiled at me and said (also in Spanish), "you live in this house and the phone belongs to whoever lives in this house."
So Granada may be easy to be lost in, hard not to feel at home here.

Mar Amable

I flew over the Mediteranean once before.
But this weekend I actually swam in it.
After a three-hour trip in a bus with seats that might have been comfortable if my legs were half their current size, I arrived with the rest of my study abroad group somewhere on the Spanish coast. I´m told it´s called Roquetas de Mar, but I was so glad to get off of the two-story bus that I didn´t really care. We checked into our hotel, were told when the buffet would be open, and then hit the beach.
Wow, how posh does that all sound?
Wow, I also can´t believe that I just called something posh. I guess I really am in Europe.
I am used to beaches in Oregon where everything is damp and surrounded by cliffs and evergreens -- all fog and sweatshirts and driftwood. I have gotten used to beaches in California, more or less the sandy parking-lot at the end of the world, lined by firepits and tee-shirt stores. But as I stood up to my shoulders, being slightly rocked by waves, and digging my toes into sand and pebbles, the only words of description that came to my mind were: "I´ve never known the Mediteranean to be un-friendly."
It sounded like something Erin would say.
It´s less naturally impressive than the Northwest coast (no big waves, no sweeping vistas, just sand and sea and sky), and less commercial than SoCal (no surfers, no boardwalks, no billboards, only a patch of beach umbrellas and some topless middle-aged women), but entierly agreeable. The water is calm without being boring, the water midway between warm and cool -- transitioning from standing on the shore to being in the water is nearly seamless, and though the pebbley beach negates sandcastles, it also doesn´t stick get stuck in shoes, between toes or under swimsuits.
For a while we played four-on-four Ultimate Beach Frisbee (both ocean and beach were legal playingground) and I wished it could be an every day activity. I had two spectacular dives (neither entierly succesful), at least one goal-scoring throw, and my team emerged victorious. One goal was my tee-shirt and beach blanket. The other was a patch of sand by a lady with a book and blue and white umbrella. I think she was glad when our game ended.
Sadly, most of the charm of La Mar ended at the seashore. Aside from our strange and spectacular buffet dinner and breakfast, there wasn´t a whole lot to the town we found ourselves in. I have never seen kitch quite like I saw at this particular Spanish beach´s souvenier shops. Somehow the calm of the Medeteranean must have stolen all discerning taste from this town. Never once did I see anything I found to be funny, amusing or even terribly interesting. And never before have I seen so many statuettes of odd cartoon characters (including anamorphic bananas) engaged in every manner of sexual positions. I´m trying at the moment to purge these images from my mind and cannot imagine why anyone would purchase or display them.
But at night we went out watched. The water felt warm against my ankles as sand swished back and forth along the coast, the sea a deep gray-green, calmly rolling and pulsing underneat the starry sky.
It´s a scene you won´t find on a postcard.

More about names of cities (+ 2 bonus topics!)

I am still having a hard time making all the verb tenses agree in my sentences, but that hasn´t stopped me from making Spanish puns since the first day we arrived in Granada.
The most obvious, of course, is in the name of the city itself:
Gran Nada, "the big nothing."
Now, the joke doesn´t work entirely, because Granada is a vibrant, and quite baroque city. But it´s also more than a pomegranite (see previous entry) so what is in a name after all? Well, in this particular joke I´ve found a connection to my home town to go along with the fruit-based connection to my previous residence in Californa. As far as I know, Dallas, Oregon has never grown on a tree (although the high school mascot used to be the Prune Pickers about 100 years ago), but it truly was a big bunch of nothing.
Wow, that sounds mean. I love Dallas, really. There just isn´t much there

Bonus topic: Facial hair
I have been growing a beard. It´s coming along quite nicely. However, I may cut it tonight before we go salsa dancing. I haven´t decided yet.

Bonus topic 2: Tee-shirts
A few days ago I was talking to a few people I had just met at a café. Like most of the people here, they were both smoking, even though they´re Americans. The loudest of the two was from Texas and was wearing what looked like it could be a Sesame Street tee-shirt, except that it said 666 Hell Street (or something similar) instead.
I was wearing a orange and yellow tee-shirt that Erin had made me for Valentine´s Day that says "Agapé" on it. He was all, "dude, what´s your shirt say?" and I said, "oh. um, Agapé. It´s a Greek word for unconditional love."
"Oh," he said, "ok."

Cities of Fruit

Some of the most rousing dinner-table (technically lunch-table, but that just doesn´t sound right) conversations we´ve had in my house have revolved around fruit.
I´m not really sure how this happens. But one way or another, we were sitting there, me, Luke, and the Señora, descibing our favorite fruits to each other. The Señora explained that soon it would be melacotón season, and we would get to have those delicious, round fruits which as it turns out are known in English as peaches.
Luke tried asking about passion fruit, which he´d grown familiar with from his summer internship in Peru, but we could not find a Spanish word, so he was stuck describing something fleshy with lots of little tiny seeds that are OK to eat.
The Señora was dubious about this, feeling that no fruits have seed that you eat. Luke and I tried to show her the tiny seeds in a banana that Luke was eatting.
Since the topic had shifted to weird things fruits can do, I tried descibing the weirdest fruit I´ve ever seen -- the pomegranite. Explaining one in English is hard enough. They have a hard outershell, that sort of also goes all the way through them. And then a bunch of seeds, all of which are enveloped in their own little fleshy red seed pods, which you eat and spit out the seeds. You break it open and it seriously looks like a berry-flavored alien laid eggs in there.
Needless to say, I failed to communicate the essence of this fruit in my second language (which is still in heavy development). But my Señora did look very intrigued.
I ran to my backpack and dug out my trust dictionary to look up the English word for this most-bizarre of fruits and found the Spanish translation for Pomegranite:
Granada.
Really!
Just like in California, where the city I go to school is called Orange, I now live in a town named for a fruit. The next time I was out in the street I started to notice the obvious signs: all the posts along the sidewalk, all the manhole covers, they are all decorated metal representations of pomegranties. Granadas all over Granada.
My life is one big fruit salad.

Comer Comida

One of the most convinient things about living with a host family here in Spain is that for the first time in over two years, someone else is responsible for feeding me and doing my laundry. My host mom is a widow with seven grown up children and a small handful of grandkids. She doesn´t really speak any English, but that´s more than alright.
There are piles of old letters, folders and spiral-bound notebooks crammed haphazardly into a cupboard next to my bed. The first night I was here I spent a few hours browsing through them, absorbing scrawled declarations of amor, grammar lessons broken down point by careful point, clipped pages from New Wave fashion magazines, tourist brocures and at least one ski pass. Written in at least three different languages and dating back since before I was born, they suggest that La Señora has been hosting students in my room for quite a while.
She mostly leaves me and Luke alone, popping her head in our room a few times a day to ask "¿quieres comer?"
Meals happen oddly here. Breakfast takes place whenever we happen to get up and consists of the same three elements every day: a cup or orange juice, a mug of unusually thick milk and two pieces of toast. There is also a large plastic container of Cola Cao, chocolate powder to add to our milk. It dulls the odd, creamy flavor of the milk, but even after two or three minutes of vigilant stirring, always fails to completely dissolve, leaving clumps of chocolate powder skimming the surface. It´s nothing to complain about, though. The toast always comes with raspberry jam to spread on it, except for two consecutive days when we had muffins instead of toast at all.
Lunch is served between two and three in the afternoon, and this is the "big" meal, the one visiting family and friends will usually join us at. There are typically three dishes of some sort, ranging from panella (rice with chopped meat and vegetables), to stew, to straight-up meat of all varieties, to spinach soup or just a bowl of chopped tomatoes.
And always, always, always water and a loaf of french bread.
When I was in Puerto Rico they called this same style of bread "pan de agua," or "water bread." I wondered at the time where the name came from -- if it was made with more water than most kinds of bread, or typically eatten with water.
Now I understand that it´s because it´s eatten LIKE water. Every bite or two of lunch of dinner is followed by a bite of bread. I´ll cut myself four of five slices in a meal, and Luke and I by ourselves usually go through half a large loaf in twenty minutes or less.
Dinner is less formal than lunch, and usually Luke and I eat alone -- the Señora considers a cup of juice to be enough for her dinner. The meal is smaller, and sometimes a little more off-beat. Last night we had breaded chicken patties and french fries. And a lot of bread.

I am outdated.

Ok, so I really tried to put some links on the side or customize this page a little bit, but while I was off on my own FTP´ing and editing posts in Word Pad, things seems to have changed quite a bit. Everything´s all fancy and I have no clue how to make it work any more, especially with the limited time I have in this Internet café.
But I DID get rid of the typo in the header, so now it really does link to my old page where you can go to visit my friends on the Internet. They´re all quite nice.

So what can I say about Spain at the moment? I´ve started classes, and have my first homework of the school year to do tonight. This month is three weeks of "intensive language training," which means four hours of Spanish classes four days a week. It don´t think I´ve had one class that often since middle school, so I´ll have to get used to not having at least a day buffer between when my homework is assigned and when it´s due.
There are two teachers, one who I like, the other who I don´t exactly mind, but time seems to pass slower when she´s teaching. Note to future teachers: please be excited about your material, and don´t sit down in a desk for the whole class! especially when it´s something as difficult for students to engage in as Spanish and especially when you have a mushy local accent that makes it even harder to discern syllables!

Trying to revamp this fancy new page has sucked up all my alloted time, mis amigos. I shall return with many more stories later.
Paz!

short, but . . .

Yesterday we went to La Alhambra!
I climbed a tree in the gardens there.
it was totally sweet.

Raining in Granada . . .

Strange thing about this side of the world: it´s early September and it doesn´t get dark until after nine PM and isn´t light until eight in the morning. I thought originally that the Spaniards were a bit college-student crazy to stay up until midnight todas las noches, but it turns out that the sun is late to bed as well. The whole Spanish world revolves around a night-oriented day.

Today was my first academicly-oriented day in Europe as it started off with a Spanish placement test. After a quick breakfast of toast, creamy milk with chocolate and O.J. Luke and I made our way through the soggy streets to the Plaza de Isabel la Catolica where we were supposed to meet the other students before continuing to la esculea.
But we were late and no one was there. So we headed up to the school alone. I´m glad Luke was with me, as he´s as good with directions as I am bad with them. Yesterday it took me two hours to get home after wandering around back alleys and hidden plazas and going in circles every which-way. I need to take Luke with me everywhere, like a walking, talking compass. Navigation is not a bad quality to have in a roommate. Saves me money on a GPS device.
We crammed into little tiny desks in a room on the second floor of the school -- at least three different study abroad groups were taking placement tests, so the small building was alive with chatter, mostly in English. Getting through the crowds was almost more difficult that the test, of which there were three parts.
The first was a bunch of short essays that was a relative cinch. It´s not hard to write about "what is a typical day like?" in any language you´ve got a passing ability in.
Then came an hour of multiple choice grammar questions. It´s not as fun figuring out what´s wrong with other people´s sentences than making up your own. Well . . . at least not when you don´t know the language well enough to be a smart-alec about it.
Then we took a break as the professoras corrected our tests and then called us in one-by-one for a short grammar section. This wasn´t hard as by that point they knew what we could handle. I got asked a lot of questions about school and such, and I only wished I could remember the verb for "to learn." It´s aprender, but that little revelation came about ten minutes too late.
It looks like I´ll be placed in one of the two intermediate levels, which is exactly where I thought I would be. Nice to know that the teachers have the same impression of my abilities as I do.
This Internet café is crowded y tengo much hambre. So for now, salúd!

¡Hola, chicos y chicas!

Estoy ahora en Granada!

So I got up at four AM this morning and lugged my huge, lumpy and awkward Army Surplus duffel bag full of fifty pounds of clothes and other essentials to the hotel lobby and got on a bus to the London Heathrow airport where we flew to Malaga Spain.
Flying over Western Europe is curiously like flying over a giant Atlas. Unlike America there is little topography or geology to speak of, it´s all flat with every coast line clearly drawn and every farm bordered neatly by rows of trees. Except for the golden glow of the sun on the Bay of Biscay, everything looked the same as I imagine it would in a full-scale map.
In Malaga we waited in the most crowded, poorly designed bagage claim I´ve ever seen and finally loaded into a few big white vans and drove to Granada.
Spain is browner than I thought it would be. It´s not particuarly glamorous -- it has more in common with pictures I´ve seen of South American than the kilometers closer UK -- a few palm trees, lots of broken down buildings and tan countrysides freckled with orchards of trees spaced with pixel-precision.
(The radio station in this Internet cafe is now playing "Take on Me." I don´t know why I feel compeled to mention that.)
But Granada the city is a little different. It´s all stone streets and storefronts y paques y catédrals. Once we arrived we were paired up with our host families. I´m staying in a fourth floor appartment with a widow and her adult daughter, rooming with a kid from North Carolina named Luke. The food so far is great. My Spanish is not. The city is cool. I´ll have more soon.