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 68th 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 21st 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 21st, 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.
