“Quieres chupita?”

Well, here we are. Sitting in a 24 café in Madrid’s airport, eating an overpriced “tarta de fresa” and washing it down with an equally overpriced, moderately mediocre beer, waiting until I’m tired enough to find a corner and try and sleep through the surrounding ambient sounds of weary travelers, janitors,  security, and the loudspeaker with the British accent. My flight to Italy leaves at 645 in the morning, and I’ll have taken my first steps to my last rendezvous through Europe. Also, today was my lst day of classes, boo-yah.

Also I hope I didn’t just get played by some guy pretending to be Irish, from Cork. Probably should’ve asked him what part seeing how I was just there but his accent was good enough. Although either way, it’s only 2.50, which is in fact the right price for the subway, and his hand did look pretty busted up, so consider it my good deed for the day. Frankly I hate feeling like I have to be overly suspicious of everyone anyway, so I think I’d rather get played and not know it than tell him I don’t have anything then sit there and wonder if he actually needed the help. Of course, for future travels, I probably won’t be wearing a shirt that screams an allegiance to a certain country – aka this Ireland jersey I’m currently wearing.

But anyway, here’s a little bit of a recap on the past week, as it was actually moderately eventuful(ish).

Monday, lunch started and proceeded as it normally does on Mondays. However, today was Maria’s birthday, and so she had went out and bought this nice little cake-thing. My roommate from Holland and myself got nice giant slabs of it on a plate, which was awesome for the first 5 minutes because it was delicious. Unfortunately, we both got about half way through it and looked at each other with eyes that said, “This cake is delicious but extremely heavy and we’ve just gone from enjoying it to yet another mission to put down more food than should be humanly possible in Spain.” And I know what you’re thinking, but yes, you can get that much information out of a look. Anyway, as we’re working through the next quarter of this delicious piece of work, Maria promptly asks me, “Quieres chupita?” (You want a shot?) “Un chupita? De…qué…?” “Pues, no estoy exactamente seguro.” (Well, I’m not exactly sure.) Of course, my immediate reaction to this was, why not, she hasn’t managed to kill us yet in over these past few months. Anyway, it was pretty much straight moonshine that had then been put in a bottle full of grapes, so the alcohol could develop its own distinct flavor while the grapes soaked up alcohol, making them just as strong as the shots. How do I know this last bit of information you ask? Because after doing not one, but two shots, she pulls out four grapes, throws them on my plate, and tells me to try them.  Was doing shots with my 67 year old host mom on her 68^th birthday something I had planned on doing when I came to Spain? Not at all, but so happy I can add that one to the list.

That Wednesday night we had some big group meeting and then a few of us went to this one place because they have a Pong tournament every Wednesday night and between traveling and all the work we’ve had I wasn’t able to make it there to check it out yet. Seeing how the 10 of us that showed up there were the first ones, and the only ones, there for over an hour or two, it was basically like, “go to the bar and play pong amongst yourselves until more people show up and we can start the competition but here have a free shot and here have a free beer in the meantime” night, which was a pretty good call. Bar owner was really nice and spoke a good bit of English, and had brought out the tables for us to practice/screw around with while we waited for other people to show up. Long story short, only four of us ending up staying since we didn’t start playing till a while later, and neither of our two teams won that lovely 100 euro prize. Thursday night a bunch of us went out, we weren’t planning on going out crazy that night since it was our friend’s 21^st the next night; however, that plan may have ended kind of quickly when I got home at 530 that morning. You’d think that was pretty late, however when my host mom asked me what time I got home that morning, she replied with, “Oh, well that’s not that late.” Fail. Still hadn’t been able to make her proud at that point, so Friday when we all went out for dinner and then out after for our friend’s 21^st, I had the mindset that maybe I would just finally say “fuck it” and try walking in sometime after 6 to see if I could win the long-desired approval of Maria. Well, the next day at lunch, when she asked me if I got back late and I casually mentioned not too late and that I had just got in a little after 6:30, I finally got the long-awaited for, “muy bien, hijo!” Hell yeah.

Of course, that night I was planning on just kind of hanging out and getting some work done since I had a bunch to finish before leaving for this trip; however that sort of changed when I was persuaded to once again go out, “for a little.” Obviously this was not the case when I got home at a little after 4 in the morning. It was well worth it though, as when we stopped for food after chilling in the bar, by friend Meghan was approached by not one, but two, creepy Spanish speaking men trying to get her number. The first one was basically a Spanish version of Fabio, with long flowing golden locks of hair, only he was from Argentina, was probably about 30-40 years old, and had pure yellow teeth. Well, after he left the first time, he came back in again. He just wanted to double check to see if we knew where we were going yet. We were sure that we didn’t know, and that we’d call him when we knew. Afterwards, we started talking with another four guys. The one took an immediate interest in Meghan, go figure. We sat there and talked with them, since it was kind of humorous and a chance to practice Spanish. Well, at first I thought the one guy was hitting on me when he said something along the lines of, “look at you with these two girls, aren’t they lucky to have a big strong guy around with them.” But then briefly after that, the focus quickly turned on Meghan when the one guy moved closer to her and started talking with her. Kaya and myself were both sitting right next to each other, probably with the same look of, “watch yourself” in our eyes, which is when the guy turned to us and asked if we were a couple. Laughing, we both said no. Of course, Meghan had to chime in and agree with the guy and said that she could totally see where he was coming from. Bad move on her part, because a couple minutes later when the guy was saying the two of them should get married, Katya and I immediately chimed in and said that we could TOTALLY see it happening and that we’d be there at the wedding when it happened. The look of “save me” in Meghan’s eyes were only met with looks of, “should’ve thought about that before you agreed with him earlier,” looks in ours. There was this guy Ángel in the group of them who you could tell was the quiet guy, but whenever he did say something it was usually to shoot down one of the other guys so it was actually really funny. They tried sharing their beer a few times with me, and then laughed and said “it’s only beer” when I said I was alright, probably assuming I wasn’t taking it out of fear there was something else in there. At one point, the one guy talking to Meghan began to ask Katya for “permission.” Both of us being very confused as to what kind of “permission” he was asking for, several times through the laughter Katya was asking him, permission for what!? While we weren’t exactly sure what to make of this and while Meghan say there and asked why she couldn’t make the decision of whether or not he should get “permission,” one of the other guys decided to explain to me exactly what that meant. Apparently it’s custom that if the person you’re talking to is with a couple of other people, you ask one of the friend’s for permission to continue to hang out with that person that night, which is considered polite because the person you were talking to was out with their friends in the first place, and it would apparently be rude to just sweep them away like that. While we would have loved to jokingly give Meghan over to this, late 20 early 30 something year old man, we decided against it seeing how it was actually getting pretty late, and so we said we had to go and headed home. Meghan didn’t leave empty handed though, she pulled two numbers that night. She just makes them guys in the late-night fast-food joints go wild.

Sometimes It's the Little Victories that Mean the Most

So, here we are. In two days under three weeks from today, I will be home. These next couple of weeks will naturally fly by in the blink of an eye, seeing how this upcoming week is my last full week of class, followed by class the Monday next, followed by a 5-6 day trip to Italy, followed by finals the day after I get back, followed by my flight home that Friday. So yeah, the next few weeks are going to fly by.

                So the week I got home from Ireland, I had yet another big paper due for that Thursday. Well, that was until Monday in class she told us we could send it in to her that Friday. Needless to say, having planned on starting that paper that night, I immediately lost all motivation, and therefore chose to start it the following day. Of course, this was fine, because I successfully completed and sent in my 10 page paper on the influence of the medieval-gothic style of architecture in the historical period of the works of Antoni Gaudi (which, funnily enough, it just took me 3 minutes to remember how to spell architecture in English, because it took me two minutes to realize why arquitectura kept coming up with a squiggly red line underneath it. That would be Spanish. Whoops). I rewarded myself my choosing to go out Friday night for a little bit for the first time in a while (in Salamanca…). I’d call it a successful night, up about to the point where I almost knocked out the guy in the Kebab place at 4 in the morning for not giving me my food and then telling me to speak to him in English because my Spanish wasn’t that great. This was mainly caused by the fact that I was a little flustered because he thought he already gave me my food, and then as we started arguing I started getting a little aggravated and well at that point I couldn’t think clearly enough and started tripping over words. And well after he said that to me, in his perfected English accent, and by that I mean I could neither fully understand him nor fully hear him because he knew less English than I knew Spanish, the prick, and so I ended up slightly pissed off and ended up arguing with him in a combination of English and Spanish. Hey, he wants me to speak to him in English, I’ll give him some English alright. After he finally gives me MY kebab, he proceeds to ask me for more money, and which point I kindly replied that I already paid for it when I first ordered, and he could go fuck off, which he would have understood in the first place if he wasn’t such an ass and would’ve let me finished my initial sentence in Spanish when I was calmly trying to tell him he never gave me my food. Don’t tell me my Spanish isn’t good when I can hardly understand you in English.

                This probably wouldn’t have been as bad if I hadn’t been getting increasingly frustrated lately with trying to speak. I can read, write, and watch an entire movie in my cine class and understand just about everything, but when it comes to talking I’ve found that the more I seem to learn, the more crap gets all crazy in my head, and the stutter I have has reverted back to as bad as it was when I was in gradeschool almost.  Although as I was realizing this I also came to realize that sometimes it’s really just that I talk. Spanish is a really fluid language and the problem is when I talk a little faster the next thing I know my head is five steps ahead of the rest of me and not only do I forget what I just said, I forget what I was going to say and my train of thought just dies on me. In English this is “ok” because, well, I’m not being judged on my ability to talk and so it’s become something I just sort of came to live with and not think about I guess. But here in Spain, any stutter, stammer, pause in thought, confused look on my face, etc., all give the inclination that I don’t know the language that well. So all this in Spanish has made me more aware of how I actually talk in English as well, which again just makes things more complicated. And of course the fact that now I’m overly conscious about the way I’m trying to talk just makes it worse, because the more I think about what I need to say the more I can’t spit the words out when I need to say it – which leads to some frustration, which leads to more stammering. You’d think after 20 years of that crap someone would be almost unaffected by it. So, needless to say, when the guy in the place decided to tell me that my Spanish wasn’t good, I almost reached across the counter and knocked him out. Lucky for him though, hunger > anger, so he was spared for the sake of finally getting my damn food.

                Of course after this night, I woke up late the next day, had lunch, and then hung around the rest of the night because I had to get up the next day to actually work on things, since I had yet another big paper due for Thursday. All of these papers wouldn’t have been as bad, you see, if we weren’t also getting pounds of other work at the same time. And at least half of this work was just work for the sake of giving work, which just made it 100x worse. So, needless to say, the entire group of us was kind of a little aggravated with our program the past couple of weeks for planning things kind of poorly. We had almost nothing to do the first month and a half and then all of a sudden we’ve got 3942804983 million things to do. This obviously inhibits our ability to go out and do other things, like, I don’t know, learn more Spanish through experience. They encourage us to go out and do this or that, but there’s not really much time to if we’re all busy doing all the stuff we have to do for our classes. Needless to say, all this work, combined with frustration, combined with all the talk about Thanksgiving, but just about all of us in a little bit of a fight with Spain.

                This also made me a little bit more nervous for the presentation I had to give in my one USAL class, where my two friends and I are the only non-Spanish students. And again, while for any person it’s completely acceptable and OK to be a little nervous for something like that, I can’t, because as soon as I get nervous the stutter almost comes in full-blown. To combat that as much as I could I decided to do my presentation on the topic I did for my art history class, since after writing ten pages on it I knew I could talk about it pretty confidently. I also hopped on the chance to go first.

                The funny thing is, I was less nervous giving this presentation than I was when I had to give on in my IES class with my fellow classmates from the US. Why? Maybe because a part of me knew I wasn’t actually being graded on how well I could speak Spanish, just on my ability to give a presentation. What’s the best way to combat a weakness? – Make it a strength. Over the years I’ve found that I’m actually come to be one of the calmer people in regards to giving presentations, because, well, I had to be. My professor in my drawing class is also, well, great. My two friends and I are the first three students in our program to actually take classes in the Fine Arts faculty, and that always leads to some doubt about it because our program usually pushes us towards classes with professors who have dealt with foreigners before. So, we were sort of the three pioneers in this, building the first bridge between the two. We probably ended up getting really lucky with our professor, because he’s been awesome. Usually in class when we’re all drawing he’ll come over and ask us how his “three Americans” are doing (Y como estan mis americanos hoy?) So, needless to say, before the presentation he comes over to me, tells me to take my time, relax, and don’t think about it. I started off by just lightening the air a bit by telling everyone to please feel free to ask me to repeat anything if they don’t understand me. And from that point on, I just gave my presentation, like I would any other presentation.

                My other two friends also gave their presentations as well this past Thursday. I think the best part about all of this was what our professor came over and told us after class. He felt we all “taught the Spanish students a lesson,” because a lot of them have been “taking the presentation like a joke.” He told us (pretty much word for word, translated of course) that this obviously wasn’t the easiest thing to do, but we showed a lot of effort, that we had a lot of information, and most importantly that we showed a mastery of a language that wasn’t our first, and that he was very happy with all three of us. Needless to say, we stood there slightly glowing, speechless, and extremely happy. It was probably the first time since I’ve been here that I actually felt like I had accomplished something.

                What was even better was that after this class, we had our Thanksgiving dinner at this one restaurant that our program had set up for us. It was actually awesome, and not a letdown in the least. I was pretty surprised by this because I thought I was getting hopes up way too high. The only thing that was a little different was the pumpkin pie – it was a lot heavier in the pumpkin than it normally is in the states, but this is probably because it was more like, actually pie made from a pumpkin. So not exactly the same, but still good, and since I wasn’t expecting it to be as good as it was in general, I was completely content with it. So content that I had three plates of turkey and mashed potatoes and then had to help some of the girls eat their pie, after eating my own piece.

                Afterwards, a few of us went out for a little bit and chilled at a bar. I did not have to get up the next day to do anything for once, and so I slept like a baby for the first time in quite a few weeks. Also, Spain and I have repaired our relationship a bit, and I’m confident that we can get along for the next couple weeks before heading home.

                Friday night we went to see “El Gato con Botas,” aka, Puss in Boots, at the movies. It was a cute movie and really funny, and unlike typical US movies turned Spanish movies that are dubbed over, since it was animated it actually looked/sounded a lot better. Plus we understood everything which is awesome. Afterwards we grabbed tapas, and then pizza, and then headed out for a bit.

                Saturday was a late start, but I managed to be a little productive. Have the rest of my Italy trip booked, so I’m excited. I’ll actually be leaving the night before my flight since it’s at 630 in the morning, and so I’m just going to sleep in the airport to save on money. I will also have to do the same thing on the way back from Milan, so I’ll have a couple hours to check some of the city out before taking a bus to their airport and leaving the following morning. However this is good, since when trying to book a hostel in Siena I couldn’t find anything with a shared room so I had to go with a private single, which obviously costs a little bit more. That night, I wasn’t planning on doing much. A few of us went out to eat at this one Mexican restaurant for dinner, and then went to this place called Valor afterwards, which is like a place with all this types of chocolates and whatnot. And then as we were on the way to chill at this one bar afterwards, we ran into a few other friends of ours, went to a different bar, and well the night just kind of progressed from there.

                I woke up at 2:10 today after going to bed at 6:00AM, my host mom knocking on my door asking me if I was going to eat lunch. She’s so proud of me…

                I also went for a 40 min run, so go me. It’s also really foggy out and was getting dark when I went out, and I still managed to not get hit by a car. Bonus points.

“If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”

                                                                                                 — Thomas Alva Edison

Video Clip of Ireland

Well, it's taken me a bit of time to have the internet functioning for me long enough to put this little video up. It's a few of the clips from Ireland thrown together, played to with a wee bit 'o Irish music.

Dia duit Éirinn!

So I was going to attempt to do some of the homework that's due tomorrow but my pen has exploded so I guess that's the universes way of telling me to start  writing this. I have a ten page paper due on Thursday that I haven't even begun to really think about yet, so this will probably actually be the only chance I even get to update you on this most wonderful of tales. Luckily the iPod is pretty much self aware at this point, because I didn't bring my laptop but can type everything up on this. Nifty, I know right? You want to know what else is nifty? My iPod somehow knew to set the clock back an hour when I got to Ireland, despite being connected to the internet or anything. Still trying to figure that one out. But anyway, on to Ireland.

It was effing amazing.

I spent the entire day on Thursday actually getting to Cork, so I'm really glad I decided to take the day off from school to get that extra day. My initial flight was late coming in so i missed the bus I was supposed to take to Cork, but i was able to use the ticket on the next bus out so no worries there. The bus itself was pretty nifty. It had free wifi on board. Some hostels that I've seen/been to don't even offer that, and fuck if I've ever seen a bus with wifi let alone FREE wifi. This was the first sign of the majesty of Ireland, and certainly not the last. Cork itself is the second largest cities in Ireland to Dublin, but by like a lot. Dublin's got about 1.5 million to Corks 500 thousand. It's a beautiful city, with a river wrapping around the center of town. Our hostel was about a five to ten min walk to the center of town, which was great for the price we paid. Speaking of the hostel, we got lucky the first night as there were no other people in the room of 10, just my friend and I. The beds were actually quite comfortable, as well as the blanket, which we didn't have to pay for as some hostels tend to get you for. Oh, and there was free Internet and light breakfast in the morning. In other words, this place was gold for what we actually paid for it.

Later Thursday night I met up with my friend who's studying in Cork and we walked around a bit while waiting for another friend of mine to show up in Cork. After he got there, we stopped in a bar for a little, and then headed home, because I was on 3.5 hours of sleep from the night before due to the fact I had so much work due on Thursday that I had to get done and the next morning we had to get up around 7.

Cork at night.

View from hostel window.

Friday morning was an early one, but I was surprisingly awake for it. We got picked up for a day tour at our hostel around 815 or so and we were off to the Cliffs of Moher, as well as a few other places. I'll let the pictures do most of the talking, but seriously this day trip was absolutely amazing. It was raining at first in the morning when we woke up, but it cleared up as the day went on and was absolutely perfect by the time we got to the Cliffs. I really can't put into words how awesome it was, and well not even the pictures can fully capture it, so you'll just have to make your way there yourself someday. I'll map out what our tour was like with some pictures and explanations below.

St. Jame's Castle in Limerick on the River Shanon

Cliffs of Moher

Castle on the Cliffs

Another shot of the Cliffs of Moher

My continuation of the series that I like to call, "Drinking Things on top of Things"

It just so happened they were selling Mead in the gift shop, so what better thing to drink than a little bit of Irish Mead while standing on top of the Cliffs of Moher?

Finally found some apple cider. Thank you Ireland.

Double rainbow that decided to pop up right after lunch in the town of Doolin.

The lunar landscape of the Burren. It's the only place on Earth where Arctic, Alpine and Mediterranean flowers grow side by side.

On the coast at the lunar landscape of the Burren, where the two rainbows were still extremely prominent.

Another shot at the lunar landscape of Burren.

 One of the most famous stone age burial sites in Ireland, the Poulnabrone Dolmen.

A shot of some of the surroundings at the Poulnabrone Dolmen.

Bunratty Castle

When we got back that night, we discovered we weren't exactly as lucky to have the entire room to ourselves again. But what was prob the worst part - they were French, everyone's favorite type of people. Actually, these people weren't that bad, actually pretty nice, as we we're not expecting too much seeing both of our experiences with the French haven't resulted in much friendliness. But anyway, that night we walked around a bit, and actually walked out into the residential areas which was pretty cool. That night we passed the time enjoying the glorious Irish stout while in the oldest and longest running pub in all of Ireland. It's older than our country. Boom, how's that America?

The next day we slept in till about 930 when we both sort of randomly woke up. I was kind of expecting to be passed out for a bit longer. We walked around Cork for what seemed like a while looking for gift shops and whatnot, but when we realize it was only a little after one and we had been around everything twice and had stopped in an old Irish church, we decided to think of something else to do. So, taking out the map I had of the surrounding area, I noticed that Blarney was actually not too far outside of Cork. And there's a bus that runs there. So boom, impromptu trip to Blarney to see the castle and the stone. Nothing like a random decision to casually knock off something that apparently the discovery channel has on its list of 99 things to do before you die - kissing the Blarney stone. The castle itself was really cool as well, and had a lot of other places to check out on the grounds, including an old witch's cave and stuff, which was kind of neat cause we got to that stuff as the sun started going down, so we got to be in the woods, a little after dusk, checking out the witch's stone, witch's den, druid's cave, and a couple other very folklore-ish things.

On top of the castle of Blarney with my dearest sister.

Blarney Castle

We finished up the night back in Cork relaxing a bit in a cozy little pub.

On a few side notes, the Irish are incredibly friendly people. I don't know if it just seemed like that because people can tend to be a little colder in Spain, mainly just because of their culture, but almost everyone there in Ireland was incredibly warm and friendly. Also, they're pretty laid back, and you sort of need to make sure you're not in a rush to get anywhere because of the slight transition you go through from normal time to Irish time. 

In other news, I had a bunch of work due last Thursday, including a ten page paper. I'm so lucky as to have yet another ten pager due this Thursday for my art history class, woohoo.

My host mom still continues to say some of the most hysterical things imaginable coming from a woman in her mid-60s. I keep saying that we need to start writing them down so maybe I'll eventually start doing that and I can just list a bunch of the things that have come out of her mouth.

It was nice to casually be able to walk through the airport to my gate seeing how we were a couple hours early and it was pretty quick to get through everything. I won't be able to say the same after we land as I have to move very quickly to make the train back to Salamanca that I have a ticket for. Not exactly sure if it's exchangeable. I don't see why it shouldn't be but frankly I don't want to be stuck waiting in the train station an extra couple of hours.

Well apparently my luck ran out when I left Ireland. I did not make it to my scheduled train and the lady at the desk told me I could not still use my ticket, although I don't think she fully understood what I was trying to tell her or she thought I didn't know what I was talking about. So right now I'm deciding if I just want to get on the train and pretend I thought I bought a ticket for that train or just ask the conductor if I can get on with my perfectly good ticket that hasn't been used yet. When I was in Ireland the ticket I had for the return back to the airport in Dublin was an open ticket. This again shows the superior thinking of the country.

Well that was a bust. Conductor tells me to go back up to ticket sales and I try one more time to exchange but no dice. So once again I'm out an extra 20 euro. What's even better is that the train was actually full and so now I'm stuck here for yet another hour. I would really prefer to be back in Ireland right now. So what am I going to do now? Drink the apple cider I brought back with me from Ireland, listen to music, look at the pictures from the trip, and find my happy place. I actually would not care that I was stuck here if it were not for the mound of homework I have and the extra money I just spent. I guess that's what happens when you're country's economic status is slowly plummeting - you try to nickel and dime someone at any chance that prevents itself.  But you win some, you lose some right? It's fine, I just can't spend any money now over the next few weeks in order to make sure I have enough money for Italy, which again, rationally speaking I should really have nothing to complain about. And on the positive side, I am not once again stuck overnight in Madrid in an overpriced hostel, as I will in fact make it home tonight.

All in all, my friend and I had gotten extremely lucky on this trip, as it seemed that pretty much everything worked in our favor, and every time we turned around we found ourselves facing more or less the best possible situation. Ireland rewards it's own I suppose. It also just kind of goes to show that the best way to travel is just not to have a set plan really. While the trip to the Cliffs were scheduled in advance, this was to make sure we got the most we could out of the two days. But the trip to Blarney, which was completely by chance and on a whim, ended up being almost if not just as awesome as the trip we took the previous day. This sort of reminds me about something I read about and Irishman's philosophy, which I find pretty appropriate:

In life, there are only two things to worry about... Either you are well or you are sick. 

If you are well, there is nothing to worry about, but if you are sick, there are only two things to worry about...

Either you will get well or you will die. If you get well, there is nothing to worry about,

But if you die, there are only two things to worry about... 

Either you will go to heaven or hell. If you go to heaven, there is nothing to worry about.

And if you go to hell, you’ll be so busy shaking hands with all your friends... You won’t have time to worry!

Videos of Paris

Eiffel Tower

Random band playing in the subway

Inside Versailles

Another Hall inside Versailles; Paintings of more or less all of France's most important victories in battle

Arc de Triomphe

Notre Dame during the day

Walking towards the Eiffle Tower at night

Tiny video during the boat tour

Notre Dame during the boat tour at night

Hope you enjoyed this lovely little look into Paris.

Désolé, je ne parle pas français.

“GOOD MORNING WORLD!!!” is most definitely not what came out of my mouth this morning when my alarm went off at 430 in the morning.  You think they’d make cheap flights a little more convenient, but I guess we can’t win them all can we? Anyway, my flight out of “Paris” was at 9, and I had to be at a bus station to catch a bus by 6. I say “Paris” with quotation marks because this airport is actually an hour and a half outside of Paris. Ipso facto, if I had known that beforehand I probably could have just found a slightly more expensive flight into the city itself and saved on transportation and made things a little more convenient. But again, can’t win them all. I also had to figure out how to use the Night Bus system since the metro stops around 1 and doesn’t start up again until 530 in the morning there. Well long story short, I only ended up taking one of three buses I thought I was going to have to take because by the time I got to the one transfer station it was 530 and the metro was easier to deal with. Of course, the initial bus was later than I thought it was going to be, which meant a – I could have slept in 15 minutes later and b – I wasn’t making it to the bus station at 545 like I had wanted to, or by 6 like I needed to. So as the clock slowly ticked away the minutes on my ride through the Paris metro one last time, all I could do was hope there would be other buses leaving around the time I got there for the airport. And well, there were, so thankfully we have no Germany repeats. . (The buses to the airport leave 3 hours before each flight so luckily the airport is actually fairly busy and doesn’t have like 3 flights a day.) Anyway, here I am, currently sitting on the train back to Salamanca for my last 2 hour 45 minute stretch back home, attempting to update you beautiful people on the wonders of my life over the past couple of weeks.

So basically, Paris was gorgeous. Don’t think I would ever be able to live there for an extended period of time, but definitely an awesome trip. I’m going to let the enormous amount of pictures do the talking for me, but I’ll go through an abbreviated version of the weekend.

The language barrier was interesting. The French language is completely and utterly distinctive in its manner of pronouncing things. Between Spanish and English, it wasn’t too bad when reading some things – you could get the basic idea, which was good because in some of the places we went to (like the Louvre) there was no explanation of the pieces in another language other than French, which I was a little surprised at seeing how usually at really BIG places like this, there’s at least one alternative translation. But anyway, I seemed to just fall on Spanish as my default foreign language. Whenever someone asked me something in French, my first response was always in Spanish. Which was probably better actually, because then I would just ask in Spanish if they could speak Spanish or English, since they take to that better than just assuming they should know English (as most Americans seem to assume). Also whenever trying to ask for something I would pronounce it like I would in the Spanish language, and then just result to pointing if I had to. I think I can say I successfully avoided being the typical ignorant American while we were there. It was also interesting to be somewhere again where you literally did not know any of the language initially. We ran into this family from Chile on the first night, and it was like a breath of fresh air, because we were like, WE CAN UNDERSTAND SOMEONE YESSSS.

My plane arrived on Friday around 1230-1245 and I met up with Shank at the airport. Almost started to worry in Madrid (and by worry, I meant I started thinking, well here's yet another race to get somewhere in time, challenge accepted) because I had 30 minutes to get through all the airport security and crap and get to my plane. I had taken the 550 train to Madrid (the first one leaving in the morning) and then the subway to the airport, and well realized when I got there it was still cutting it a little close. However I'm also starting to realize getting through everything in Europe is not nearly as much as a pain as it is in the airports in the US, so I got to my gate with 20 minutes to spare. When we got into Paris we met up with two other friends and checked in at this hotel/hostel to get our information for where we were actually staying. The hostel we booked is more like a string of random apartments in the outskirt ghettos of Paris, so we had to check in at one place and then go to our actual apartment. Needless to say, when we arrived I felt like I was back in part of Philly, and as we looked around we further realized how bad we stuck out seeing how we were the only four white kids in the area. The room wasn’t too bad; I forgot to take pictures now that I think about it. We had a little kitchen which was nice and the beds were decent so hey, no complaints for what we paid for it. Although, we were supposed to have internet as well, but after trying to get that to work and calling the main desk and getting nowhere we just kind of gave up because it was kind of useless. So during the weekend we just resorted to crashing a McDonalds to borrow their free WiFi whenever we actually needed the internet to figure something out. Also, we had a pretty good location in respect to the metro station. We only had to hop on the metro right by our place and make one transfer, maybe two pending on where we were going, and we could be right in the heart of Paris. Friday night we went out and walked around a bit, and grabbed dinner at this one place.

Saturday we hit the Louvre, Notre Dame, and the Eiffel Tour. The Louvre is split up into three parts, and it’s freaking huge. We started out looking at almost everything in the first section, then during the second one we went to we got a little more selective, and then by section three and hour three we were basically on a mission to find the Mona Lisa and maybe one or two other things in that part. The place is large enough to make a day trip out of. Notre Dame was neat, it was free to get into that day so the line was huge and we hadn’t eaten lunch yet at that point so we were pretty content with grabbing some food and sitting outside of it instead. We spent a good 3 hours at the Eiffel Tour, 2 and half hours of that basically consisting of waiting in line to get to the top of it, but it was definitely worth it. By the time we got to the top, it had gotten dark, so we got to see the entire city lit up, which was awesome. There was also a slightly overpriced champagne stand at the top, and well I couldn’t really resist. When I was in Argentina we drank wine at the end of a hike way up in the Andes Mountains on top of part of the mountain overlooking, like, everything, so I figured I’d add champagne on top of the Eiffel Tour to my list of drinking things on top of really, really tall things. We ended the night at this really (apparently) popular steak place for dinner. They only serve one plate – steak with their signature sauce and French fries. You get two plates of that, plus the initial salad and bread. It was absolutely delicious, and completely worth it. Naturally we complemented it with their house wine and dessert. We’re not going to discuss what the bill came to, and just leave it at that was the first and the last time I’ll ever spend that much on food in one sitting. But again, so freaking worth it.

Sunday we went to Versailles and spent a decent part of the day there. I’m definitely going to let the pictures do all the talking for that one, but it was a good time and definitely worth the trip. The visit ended with a race against time to get through the giant line to buy tickets for the train and then hop on before it left at like 5. We successfully boarded at 459. Win. Later that night when we got back we ventured out to walk around a good bit more.

On Monday two of our friends left so it was just me and Shank left. We went and checked out the Père Lachaise Cemetery, which is supposed to be the prettiest/most extravagant in the world. I went to another cemetery that was modeled after it in Argentina, so I was a bit curious to see the differences between the two. Monday was also Halloween so I guess it was also most appropriate to head there that day as well, and it was actually the first time I’ve been somewhere where it really felt like fall. We walked around a bit afterwards, and at one point we walked past a bakery and did a simultaneous head spin while still walking, and naturally at that point we had to buy some sort of magical pastry item. Later on met up with a friend of ours from school who’s studying in Paris for the semester. We grabbed dinner, which was not as expensive as the other night however was still really good, and then afterwards we headed to this place to do a river tour of the city, which was really cool.

And that leaves us back at this current point, as I’m slowly starting to fall asleep from the lack of it last night.

Hopping back to last week in the days leading up to the Paris trip – I was so fortunate as to have my midterms this past week. My two longest and hardest were on Monday, and Shank came up to Salamanca to visit me last weekend from Friday to Sunday. Naturally it was a good time, and naturally I pushed most of the studying back until Sunday. However, I was a good boy and I started some Friday before he arrived. But yeah, seeing how this was one of two times all semester I really had to study, it sucked and I didn’t want to do it, but I wasn’t complaining. However as we’re getting our marks back on all of them, we’re finding that the grading was a little more specific than we had previously anticipated, which is kind of ridiculous. When you have a midterm consisting of 5 essays, in which you have to “write everything you know about [insert title of work/picture here], you just start spitting out whatever information you can remember. Unfortunately due to my low attention span I also get really bored halfway through from writing down everything I know. I think after the two midterms during my four classes on Monday, my hand was ready to fall off from writing unnecessarily large amounts of information. If you’re grading on specific things, tell us! Don’t have us fill an entire page up with one essay and then take off random points because you failed to mention this or that, but remembered to write something else down that was completely unnecessary to remember.

Anyway, I took a bunch of short little videos of different things around Paris that I’ll post after this. Sometimes they come out better than the pictures themselves, especially if you’re moving around a bit.  

Campagne, anyone?

“The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible, and achieve it, generation after generation.”  – Pearl S. Buck

A Little R&R Never Hurt Anybody

So now that it’s been around two weeks since I last chronicled my journeys through this foreign land, let me update you on all the crazy, wild, death-defying adventures that I’ve been on. Just kidding, it’s been a pretty chill couple of weeks, and with the exception of a day trip yesterday it’s been spent in Salamanca. There will probably be no actual chronological order to this so yeah it’ll probably be more of just a list of random thoughts that pass through my head.

We’ll start with the most recent. Yesterday a couple of us headed to this nearby town of ávila. Very pretty town, and not that big so it was a good day trip. It also just so happened that we ended up there on the same day as their big festival for Saint Teresa, so there was a bit of an awkward schedule for when things were open/closed, but we were able to hit up some of the “must sees” of the city, like the giant medieval wall that surrounded the city and a couple of the cathedrals. Pictures can be found on Facebook per usual.

Last week was a complete joke. We had off on Wednesday. So basically, I had my four classes on Monday. Tuesday, I had my one class, from 1-2pm. Then, no class on Wednesday, and my three classes on Thursday, one of them being my drawing class from 4-8, which, obviously, we drew in basically the entire time. And then, bam, it was the weekend again. My plans to go out Tuesday night failed miserably however when I accidently passed out after dinner around 1030-11 and woke up at 12am, and decided that I really didn’t feel like moving, so I went back to bed around 1. Probably was a good idea in hindsight since when I went out Thursday night for a little I woke up feeling like death on Friday. Apparently I still wasn’t completely over whatever cold I had had and going out Thursday night kind of kicked my ass even though I really didn’t do much, I just needed to get out of the house. I say “needed to get out of the house” like I was actually extremely overwhelmed with work during the week, but in all reality it was because I had done nothing but sit around and do… nothing… I mean I did do stuff, just nothing that productive. Whoops. This country has an uncanny ability to take any attempt at productivity, crush it, and turn it into free time to chill. But at the same time, I’m completely on top of all my work. So maybe sitting at a café or bar doing homework with friends doesn’t really seem like you’re doing anything when you’re so used to being in the library basement for days on end. I feel like I probably won’t get past this feeling for a bit. Although, I can say that I was very productive this weekend, and got a couple papers done for my one class.

The other day we also got a reading assignment for my lit and cine class. It was about 90 pages long. Seeing how this was huge compared to all the other work I’ve been getting, we were all sort of like, really, we have to do ALL OF THIS READING. 90 PAGES OF A SPANISH PLAY?? OH MY GOD!?
And then, it kind of smacked me in the face. This is a literature class. What the hell was I expecting, I knew exactly that we were going to have to, I don’t know, READ things. And then seeing how at least 1.5 hours of my 2 hour class every Monday morning at 1040 is watching a movie, and that 90 pages of reading really isn’t that much, my attitude changed in about 2 seconds and all I could do was laugh at the sad excuse for the amount of work I’ve had thus far. Side note: probably going to bite myself in the ass for tempting fate with all of this “I have no work here” talk, as I actually have several longer papers due in the middle of November that I should probably start looking into. But for now, I’m enjoying (attempting to, sometimes I’m ready to bounce of the walls) the nothingness.

Not this past week, but the weekend before that, I had gone out Thursday and Friday night. You’d think this was enough, as I was completely OK with staying home and chilling in Saturday night. But no, my 67 year old host mom basically told me to screw work, I’m in Spain, go out and do work the next day. Needless to say I felt like a complete failure when I sat in that night because I was a little sick, and a little tired. But hey, I wasn’t the only one. Also, this past Saturday night I spent in a bar with a friend doing some homework, which I was ok with. I woke up today and didn’t have to be like, OMFG I HAVE TWO PAPERS AND AN ENTIRE PLAY TO READ BY TOMORROW. However, when my host mom asked me if I had gone out last night, I said yes, because, well, I did go out. May have left out the part about the homework though… whoops. It was probably the most productive four hours I’ve had since I’ve been in this country though, so, yeah.

I’ve met up with this one friend I made through the intercambio thing they have here a few times. She’s cool, although the last time we met up it was Sunday morning (last Sunday) and I was so out of it that I could hardly comprehend or talk back to her in Spanish until about 45 minutes after we met up, but I didn’t feel as bad when we spoke in English briefly and she was having about as much trouble as I was. But the intercambio thing is a decent way of meeting actual Spanish people and getting a way to practice speaking so it’s pretty cool. There was also this intercambio night the other day at this one bar so we made a few Spanish friends through that as well.

It’s been unusually hot here for this time of year, and it actually hasn’t rained, or even had a single cloud in the sky, since the very first day that we got here. That’s a month and a half of straight sunshine. I feel like there’s laws against this sort of stuff but at least I know why water is so expensive here now. I am dying for some fall weather though seeing how it’s probably my most favorite time of the year, and well, I’m sick of the heat on top of it. I think it’s finally cooling down a little bit this week, so tomorrow should be only in the high 70s and then high 60s by Wednesday, which I am looking forward to. The weather here is extremely awkward because it’s really cold in the morning and then hot my mid afternoon. Also, the sun is really strong for some reason, so there’s like a 10 degree difference in temperature between the walking in the shade and walking in the sun. Basically this means you leave for the class in the morning in pants and a jacket, and by the time you walk back home for lunch that afternoon you’re sweating profusely and need to completely change. So yeah, excited for the weather to be leveling out.

Just as a follow up, the food is still awesome. My host mom can cook, oh can she cook. Also, I find that my level of self-control on what I eat has completely dropped. Normally I’m not too big on eating chocolate and other sweets that often, however everything is just so readily available here. Like ice-cream. There are so many ice cream places, and it is SO good. How can you say no? I also have pretty much adapted to the Spanish time on eating. I’m actually able to last on a cup of coffee and some toast in the morning until we eat our huge lunch at 230, which is no longer a challenge to eat all of hahah. In fact, the other day when she asked if I wanted more, I said yes. This was followed by a sudden, “Did I really just ask for MORE food? Oh God what’s happened to me.”  

Insert Seemingly Interesting Title Here

This past Saturday marked the one month point since we all arrived here. Crazy. I'm not sure if it feels like we've been here longer than that or if time has flown by. I think it's a bit of both.

Either my allergies are really acting up or I have a bit of a cold – regardless, I’ve been really congested and have a cough brought on by a never-ending trickle down the back of my throat. I should probably make it over to the pharmacy to get something for it but that would require spending money and I’m not sure if it would even do anything anyway. Also, major thanks to my allergy medicine for majorly failing.  

My Tuesday night class got switched to Thursday, to a time where I cannot take it. When did we find out about that? As we were sitting in class waiting for almost 30 min for the professor to walk in, and when he didn’t, decided that even 30 minutes is late for a Spanish professor and we should figure out what the hell was going on. And what did that mean? It meant that I was screwed, because it took me an entire day to figure out a schedule that worked. I was tempted to take an intro Italian class since I already know a little bit and it was going to be almost the only thing that would fit into my schedule. Luckily, and by chance, I ran into my friend Matt as I was walking back from what should have been my class Tuesday, who’s taking some basic drawing class at the university. This drawing class happens to be the only thing to fit into my schedule, and well I used to draw a decent bit, so hey why not. So there, problem solved. Of course, the facultad de Bellas Artes is on the edge of town in the completely opposite direction from the rest of campus. This is actually only a 20 min walk from my actual home, but we went to something during lunch that Thursday and so we actually had a nice 40 min walk to the building. And this is why I don’t feel bad about eating so much here. The professor for the class talks really fast but it’s a good thing that over half of the class is drawing. Of course, seeing how the title of this class is Dibujo 1 (Drawing 1), I assumed we would be starting out small and working our way up to things. Nope. First day, first class, right after the introduction we moved into another room and started drawing the naked model. I haven’t drawn anything in months, and this is the first thing we’re doing. Needless to say, I also had no idea that we we’re supposed to use the entire sheet of paper we had, and so my drawing was a bit small to scale. Well as it turns out, my friend Matt’s turned out to be a bit larger than it should have. So what happened when the professor was talking to us after we were finished drawing? Both Matt and myself were pointed out and used as examples, at which point the other 18 Spanish students turned around to check us out… “Hi, we’re the apparently retarded foreigners. Nice to meet you.”

I really can’t remember anything specific I did during the week last week. Classes are going well, minus the fact that I’m still teetering on vacation mode and school mode which has been resulting in extreme procrastination of schoolwork. Although, the most work I had was last Wednesday night and I finished everything in like 2-3 hours when I had started around 10 at night and didn’t have to be up until like 9 the next morning anyway, so it’s not like I feel inclined to hop on everything the second it comes up like I usually have to back home.

This past weekend we went to Seville and Granada. The timing was perfect seeing how it was Shank’s 21^st birthday Friday night into Saturday and that was the night we were in Seville, so major win there. We left early Friday morning, around 730, which was unfortunate for my housemate when I was waking him up that morning because at 715 I realized he still hadn’t gotten up. It was a nice little 6 hour ride down to Seville, and after checking out the cathedral down there we were done by 5 and had the rest of the day to ourselves, at which point I met up with Shank. We had walked around a bit and grabbed some food with a couple friends of mine at a bar and chilled. Seville is a bit hotter than Salamanca which was kind of unpleasant; I’m dying for the fall weather to kick in. Anyway afterwards we checked out more of the city, pictures of which you can see on FB. They had this fair type thing going on in the one park, with like areas with tents for food/beer from a bunch of different countries, which was pretty sweet. There was an Argentina tent which I got extremely excited about and naturally had to grab a beer from there for nostalgia’s sake. A little bit later we met up with my friend Sean, also from home, and grabbed dinner at the fair thing. Then we walked the 15-20 min back to my hotel so I could shower and change, then 30 min to their house, and then after hanging out for a little bit, another 15-20 min to the club that we were heading to because it was free to get into before 1, and everyone loves when you don’t have to pay for things. But yeah, it was a good night, minus the like 40 min walk home, but that didn’t really seem too bad especially after stopping for food.

We headed to Granada the next day, about a 3 hour ride, which I naturally passed out on from lack of sleep the night before. We went to this giant palace called La Alhambra, which, again, you can see pictures of on FB. We grabbed lunch at a buffet at a hotel/restaurant nearby and then went to our hotel. Took a siesta at the hotel, grabbed dinner with some friends afterwards, and then that night we went to a Flamenco show, which I’ll post a video or two of below for you guys to check out.

The next day we visited the “molinos de viento” (windmills) in Castilla La Mancha, and had a like 6 course lunch of food typical to that area at a place not too far from there. The ride back was around 8 or so hours in total not counting the stops we made, but I slept for about half of it or so.

I feel like I’m forgetting something, but oh well if I remember it I’ll randomly throw it in later.

Here’s a clip of one of the flamenco dancers. Also, I have no idea how to rotate it back to the upright, so I suggest either a- turning your head or b-watching it on a laptop and just turning the computer.

Here’s another clip of the like the woman who was in charge. She was by far the best out of all of them but every time I stopped recording she did something really cool so unfortunately I can’t share the best of the show. Guess if you’re that curious you’ll have to go check it out yourself.  

Wait... I Have Weekends Now?

So three of my classes started this week, and so far everything seems like it’s going to be great. I think everything seems even more of a slight joke when comparing everything to the classes I had last year, but I don’t want to speak too soon yet seeing how my hardest classes will probably be the two I’m taking in the university, although both of those are only once a week for two hours, so again, it’s not something I’m overly concerned with. I’m already fully aware I’m going to be at a little bit of a disadvantage my first week or two, but again, fully aware means expecting and expecting means I’m not going to be like, OH SHIT. Furthermore, my weekends start every Thursday at 2PM. Seeing how I don’t normally even have a one day weekend during the school year, my level of concern for any workload I get this semester is about a 2 out of 10, and it’s only that high because there’s a chance a project or something could conflict with something else, and that’s no fun. But anyway, I’m going to have major issues next semester when my three day weekends and lack of any commitments during them just suddenly disappear. But, I’m not really trying to even think about that right now.

I finally got my phone unlocked the other day, and well by that I mean after an hour and a half in the Vodafone I was finally able to get a new SIM card. What had started out as something that should have been real simple turned into a complete headache, and the fact that the girl in the store was speaking a mile a minute made things slightly more complicated. It got even more fun when I had to call some number on Vodafone from another Vodafone to get some magical 4 digit number that would allow them to do, well I’m not sure what exactly. I just love how they assumed I would have another cell phone in my pocket that I could whip and call this number, and why the hell couldn’t they just do it themselves, it’s what you’re getting freaking paid for. Also, you think computerized messages suck in English? Try deciphering what you’re supposed to be doing when it’s in another language and you can hardly hear what they’re saying because the phone service itself is less than sub-par. Luckily, I had two friends with me – one with a Vodafone-serviced cell phone, and the other one who is actually a native Spanish speaker. At this point, she took over for me, because clearly she could get way more out of it than I could. So after talking on the phone, running into the store, talking on the phone again, running back into the store again, having the service rep on the phone wanting to talk to the client in the store, and finally getting him to break out this magical number that would allow my phone to be reinstated, the computer in the place freezes, we’ve got 5 minutes to get to class, and we have to come back at 5 when the place reopens. Luckily when we did return later that day, I was in and out in 5 minutes with a new SIM card and a new life lesson: do not try and guess an 8 digit number several times on your cell phone, there is just no way in hell you’re going to stumble upon the right answer.

Got my MCAT scores back this week. A little bit of a letdown but still pretty decent so we’ll see where I land in the future.

Also, was talking with my host mom earlier and showering her some pictures of the family and whatnot. She agreed with me that Christina could pass for a College kid and looks way too much older for her own good (I think her heart almost stopped when I told her she’s only 16). She also thinks that both of my parents look very young, so there ya go mom hahah. Also, Fran and Marie, she said the same about you two, in fact she was very surprised to hear that the 8 children I just showed her pictures of are your children. So yeah, apparently it’s official now that we have a muy guapisima familia. Go us.

Thursday night was a lot of fun – finally got to celebrate the end of the MCAT phase of my life. Although I was extremely hungry by 3 in the morning and everything that sold food was closed.

Friday a few of us went to this giant mall equivalent to a department store of some type, called El Cortes Ingles. This would be the only one in the city because basically every store here is specific to what you’re looking for, and seeing how I needed a new pair of sneakers, new socks, a hair buzzer so I could give myself a haircut, and I wanted to pick up a book, naturally this would be the most efficient place to go. So yeah, found a buzzer for 20 euro, so I can save on haircuts. Of course, I almost paid 50 euro for it since I paid with a 50 and walked away completely forgetting about my change. Luckily the clerk found me a couple minutes later otherwise I would have been out 30 euro. I also bought the 5^th Harry Potter book in Spanish, which of course is also the largest of the series and so we’ll see how long it takes me to get through it. Later that night a bunch of us went out. A couple of us ended up having to walk my housemate back because he ended up having just a little bit too much to drink and would definitely not have made it back alive without assistance. After we got him back we went and finally found the food place that’s open decently late, so I could finally get my 3AM French fries and cheeseburger I had desperately wanted the night before, and so obviously I was an extremely happy person at that point.

Saturday night a few of us went to a bar to watch the Madrid game and then went out to this Mexican restaurant afterwards. Then we headed to another bar to watch some of the Barcelona game, and then headed out from there. I spent a decent part of today trying to figure out flight and hotel plans for a trip to Paris at the end of October, and then started reading some of that Harry Potter book. To answer my question of how long it’s probably going to take me to get through this – probably a while, as ten pages took me a little while to get through seeing how there were new words every couple sentences. But oh well, gotta learn somehow right?

Murphy's Law

(Brief note: the first part of this post is the post before this one, although one does not necesarily need to be read to understand the other.)

Of course, I spoke too soon, and while that may have been the best story of the day, the best story of the weekend probably comes about when I was trying get home. I write this part as I sit here, 8 am in the morning, waiting in the Charmatin station in Madrid to take an 8:46 am train back to Salamanca which will arrive around 11:22, and my first class today starts at 10:40. I probably should have seen this coming yesterday when I got into the airport at Frankfurt (a little over an hour before my airplane was supposed to take off) and couldn’t find where the hell the Spanair check-in was. After looking up and realizing I was actually in Plaza C and had to be in Plaza A, things came together a little better but at this point I had spent a little bit of time walking around aimlessly trying to figure out the set up of Frankfurt airport (which is big, so shut up). After going through security, having the metal detector go off, and having my other bag quickly searched because I forgot I had an empty water bottle in there, I finally got to my terminal about ten minutes before check-in. The really fun part starts when I check my IPod during the flight and realize that we are not going to land in time, and the 45 minutes I had to get catch my bus after landing started to dwindle down, minute, by minute, by painstaking minute. We finally landed at 8:50, and I only had a vague idea where the bus station was, so this was going to be interesting. Until, that is, I realized we landed outside the airport and as we left the plane we were boarded onto a shuttle bus type of thing and then we were taken to the terminal – ipso facto, another 8 minutes of my life taken from me. So at this point when I got into Terminal 2, I had 2 minutes to find the bus station… in terminal 1. Madrid’s airport is extremely large also. And no, this isn’t some tale of how I miraculously made it to the bus station last minute and hopped through the door James-Bond style and everything was butterflies and rainbows. I finally arrived after rushing there about 10 minutes after 9 and well, there was no bus there. In fact, there wasn’t even a window or kiosk there to try and exchange my ticket for the next one. I know this because then I proceeded to walk around for a half an hour trying to find someone/something, and came up completely empty. So much for my 23,45 euro ticket, which is now completely useless. Moral of the story at this point? Stick with transportation that’s easily flexible. Of course, not even this may always work out, as you will see as my night continued to unfold in a manner consistent with Murphy’s Law. So, OK, at this point it’s 930 and I figure I’ll take the train home, but I have to leave now to catch the last train back to Salamanca. So, I take the metro to the Charmatin station, it’s about 10, and the next and final train to Salamanca doesn’t leave until 1038. Awesome, I’m home clear, right? Nope. I go up to by my ticket, and the lady tells me there aren’t any more tickets for the train back. The next train leaves the next morning around 830. And just like that, I became a 5 year old little boy who just went to buy ice-cream and found out the shop closed three seconds prior to my arrival, and I wasn’t getting any. So of course, at this point I’m completely screwed. I think if you recall from my previous post, I don’t even have a working cell phone to call anybody to tell them that I can’t get back. So, what else is there to do but start to wander and think about WTF I’m going to do. Luckily, there’s a hotel right next to the station. Of course, I knew that meant it was probably going to be a little on the expensive side but a) I do not know the area and have no internet therefore I don’t know anything close around here and b) I do NOT want anything to cause me to be late tomorrow morning. So, I head in and see how much it is for the night. 75 euro. Of course it is, why wouldn’t it be? So I reluctantly hand over my credit card, and what happens? It get’s rejected. For some unknown reason, it just won’t go through (thank you Murphy). At this point I had stammered on a word and the lady started talking to me in English I guess thinking that I wasn’t competent enough in Spanish to talk to her, but the problem with that was, Spanish people tend to word things weird in English, so I would have been able to understand her better in her own language. So after she says something about which I only vaguely caught, I begin to walk away, and she calls me back with a little bit of an attitude and asks if I have money to pay for the room. Money as in cash, which I had no idea you could even do in a hotel, but maybe she felt sorry for me or something, who knows. Actually, she probably knew there were other cheaper hotels right by, so I kind of wish she just let me go and I would have saved some money. But anyway, I paid, I had a room, bueno. At this point, I’m out of the money for my bus ticket, I’m out the 75 euro for the hotel room, and the next day I’d be out another 20 euro to get home. So, there goes one of the trips about Europe I was inevitably going to take in the future sometime. We still have one problem left though – no one knows I’m still here, and I desperately need to tell someone. I can’t even get into my phone to check my contacts because it has COMPLETELY locked me out of it. So, now I really need internet. And of course the hotel doesn’t provide it for free, the cheap bastards. So now I have to pay for an hour of internet. But, of course, my credit card doesn’t work. So, in a last ditch effort I use another card, which I wasn’t sure was going to work or not because I had never called to tell them I was going to be out of the country. But, thank God, it worked. So I hopped right onto Facebook to try and get into contact with my housemate, and let a couple of people know what was going on – aka, anyone in my group here that was online. So, I left a post on my housemate’s wall, another two people were trying to contact him for me, and another friend is going to let the professor know today that I’m going to be extremely late. If I’m lucky I can still catch the last hour, so we’ll see. After getting mildly settled I proceeded to go find food because I hadn’t eaten anything in the past 12 hours, and that never turns out well, and was definitely contributing to the fact that I was pretty out of it at this point. So, I got food. And as a way to get back at the overpricing bastards I took a decent long hot shower afterwards, which I can’t do when I’m home, so it was the first shower longer than 5 minutes I’ve had since I’ve been to Spain. So at least I’ve had one win in all of this. I also won’t lie and tell you that I was half tempted to take some of the towels just on principle.

So yeah, that’s been my eventful weekend as I turned into a prime example of Murphy’s Law. I almost had a mild heart-attack this morning when I went to buy my ticket and the machine took credit card but wasn’t doing anything and then froze. But it ended u giving it back to me, but was still frozen, so I moved to the machine next to it and tried to just pay with cash, and had another mild heart attack when that machine took my money and did the same thing as the other machine, finally spitting out my 20 euro bill five minutes later. At that point I just went to the ticket booth and bought one. But hey, at least I’m still alive, right? Moral of the story – never buy transportation that isn’t flexible, and never assume your transportation is going to be on time. Most people would say that I should have planned better; however, the fact that I had everything planned to a T (that expression looks really weird written out) was actually the reason why everything ended up the way it did, so I really just should  just swung it per usual. I say this as I sit here assuming this train will be on time and I’m still going to make it to class with an hour left. Maybe I’ll get lucky and it’ll be early, since I’m pretty sure the universe owes me some time and money back. But I’ll have to look into that later.

Well, apparently an hour was a little ambitious. I made it to my first class with 20 minutes left. But hey, I made it, and the professor was really cool with everything. Awesome.

On a final, brighter note – while in Germany, I obviously knew absolutely no German and thus couldn’t really communicate well. A lot of people spoke English in the main section of the town but I’m so used to almost no one speaking English in Salamanca I kind of reverted to same means of communication – hand motions, confused looks, and pointing. This brought me to the realization of how much Spanish I actually do know since everything I couldn’t do in Germany I knew I could do in Spain, and so I left there with a mild confidence boost when it comes to speaking in Spanish. Bueno.

I feel this following quote by Annie Besant (no I have no idea who she is either) rightfully sums up my adventure this weekend, and all the wins and losses that went along with it:

“Never forget that life can only be nobly inspired and rightly lived if you take it bravely and gallantly, as a splendid adventure in which you are setting out into an unknown country, to face many a danger, to meet many a joy, to find many a comrade, to win and lose many a battle.”