Learn Spanish, In FRANCE!

This is what I´ll be doing tomorrow. Finally participating in the food fight I´ve dreamt about since I was a child. Nothing ever looked as fun as the foodfight during the opening credits of ¨21 Jump Street¨and my favorite Cheers episode was the Thanksgiving Food Fight Episode (Shelly Long Dressed as a Pilgrim, getting a bowl of mashed potatoes to the face. Comedic Genius).

My school has organized a trip to the Tomatina for this event. On a TEST DAY, no less. My list of instructions is hilarious. NO SANDALS. NO DIGITAL CAMERAS. Wear a Bathing Suit, Goggles and Ear Plugs. Underwater Cameras OK, but BRING NOTHING YOU CARE ABOUT. (Love that last line, and I didn´t even add the caps.) According to Wikipedia, no one has any idea WHY the festival started, but only that it quadruples the population of a tiny town for one day. The tomato throwing lasts about an hour and cannot begin until one of the participants climbs a greased pole to pull down a ham(!?!) (All holidays should begin this way)

But That Post will be written when I return...if I make it back.

Soooo,

I fled the Country for the weekend. Heading with Ben to St Etienne, his beloved home town for some good French food, a tour of the neighborhood and the BIGGEST FOOTBALL MATCH OF THE YEAR (for this small town, anyway).

St Etienne was lovely, and completely empty. Everyone in Europe takes August off (where do they all go? most likely the outlet malls in Leesburg).



I visited two of St. Eteinne´s three museums. (Contemporary Art and Industrial Art, I skipped the Mining Museum). The employees of said museums were flabbergasted that anyone not on a school fieldtrip would actually be visiting on a sunny day, and an American, no less!

One way to feel better about my level of Spanish, go to France. Its a nice reminder of how far I´ve come. I´ve been able to ask for bathrooms and more bread for WEEKS in Spain. In France, its back to hand gestures and bugged out eyes. Benoit´s parents own a gorgeous condo on the Main Street of town. The house is long and full of windows and warmth.

I stayed in Ben´s room and he stayed in his brother´s room. The first day was like any first day with a host family. You say your pleasantries run out of common language, and then play a form of ¨memory¨ and ¨name that tune¨
¨Dustin Hoffman?¨ they would ask.
¨Jean Reno¨ I´d reply.
We also made a trip to Ben´s old restaurant. The food was incredible, definitely up to the billing.

The highlight for me was the Foie Gras course. They were stunned that I´d never had it before. (but, I assured them, I loved salads, so this shouldn´t be a problem.) It was delicious of course, but more importantly, any time I ever see Foie Gras on a menu again, I get to say ¨You know, the BEST foie gras I ever had was at this amazing out of the way chef owned French Restaurant in....¨ that alone is worth the price of admission.

The restaurant is located on a tree lined cobblestone walkway that collects a good number of other restaurants and bars. As Ben has been out of town for 3 months his return equates to the biggest event of the month.

We couldn´t walk ten feet without the servers and owners of places stopping us and shepherding us in for a drink.

¨Metallica?¨
¨Air.¨
And on and on.


Once we ditched the parents it was on to more clubs. One called Pushkin, which had white padded walls in its interior (made more and more sense as the night went on).

We finished off the night at ¨The Mine¨ where hearing Eminem´s ¨Without Me¨ followed by the The Jackson 5´s ¨I Want You Back¨, is frankly, to be expected. Also, I give my new friends props for knowing more of the words than me.

The football match was Sunday night and ended up being a let down. The next door rivals (Leon, those scum) were clearly bigger and faster and just wore St. Eteinne down. At the end of the day, I was okay with that. Didn´t know if I could handle a victory celebration on top of everything else.

I gotta save something for the Food Fight of My Dreams.

See you after I´ve taken about ten showers.

Forrest

Note from the Author

There actually IS a new entry. Its found under the last one. The long awaited sequel to Artistic License.

Interlude (Cop Out)

Before resolving the cliff hanger from my last post entry, and to break up the artsy/toursity posts, I´ve decided to add some more photos on to the site.

Other ideas I had for this post included answering fictional questions in a ¨mailbag¨style entry, but I found most of my made-up questions too offensive for this space.

The day before leaving Sevilla, I went to Malaga to visit the recently opened Picasso Museum there. Malaga is another gorgeous jewel of Andalusia where I wish I had spent more time. Malaga has an awesome grand avenue, which is covered with colorful, heat-diminishing streamers strung between the buildings. Malaga also has a cathedral with some impressive art work slowly rotting in its darkened interior. But, other than the Picasso Museum, which I´ll get to next time, the highlight was a large Moorish Castle and its grounds.

The Castle was a sprawling complex that overlooked the city and overflowed with walkways, fountains and vistas of the city and the sea. One of the bonuses of living in a country without a robust civil litigation system is that there are very ¨do not enter¨signs and roped-off areas in public places.

All this open and unregulated space means that you can really lost yourself wandering along the footpaths and following the gurgle of rippling water. And I´m not talking ¨lost¨in the vein of restorative meditation, but LOST in the ¨F, the sun is setting, I haven´t seen another tourist in an hour, and I´m almost out of Maltesers¨sense.

¨What is that red speck? A living soul, or just another mirage?¨

Barcelona has also been great. My days shift between pre 1L exams and post 1L exams with a impressive speed. (This isn´t entirely accurate, because I´ve haven´t been able to find a 30 pack of Miceholob Light, nor the ¨Best of Phil Hartman, on SNL¨ aka, my only pre-youtube access to Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer)

The people in Barcelona are much more serious than the people of Sevilla. The same goes for their planning and execution of street festivals as well. I just spent the last two nights wandering between multiple music stages (how did all the rappers from 40 Acres Fest end up here, and where is Tone Loc?) following Brazilian drum lines and just generally cavorting in 3.5 tenses: discussing the immediate past, the present and the distant future, with varying amounts of success.

A good number of my friends are leaving at the end of this week, so tonight´s the big farewell. Going to language school for more than a month here feels like working on a cruise ship. My entire life is welcome and going away parties. (without the $250 limit). But hey, at least I get to choose the dorky getup I wear everyday.

Gotta run for now, my purchased time is running out. See you soon.
















No, I did NOT take this picture myself, thank you very little....

Artistic License Part 2

==] Night is falling outside the Picasso Museum in Malaga and I´m neverously pacing in the post modern bathroom. Straining to hear footsteps above the steady hum of the neon lights overhead, I glance at my watch again. This whole idea is crazy, but I can´t leave without knowing for sure, and I can´t know for sure until. Footsteps, boots on lineoum. I listen to the squeaky circles and my breath becomes shallow. I wince as the lights are shut off and I´m left alone in the dark. Unable to believe my own luck (I have no problem believing in my stupidity) I step off the comode and inch towards the door. Outside of this WC, and on the second floor of the Picasso Museum, awaits my redemption, or my undoing. Surely that circular red M can´t mean what the legend says. If I´m right, I´ll be a hero. If I´m wrong...¨====]



OK, so that´s my attempt to crib from the Mixed Up Files of Basil E Frankweiler. But, since I haven´t read the book since sixth grade, I probably screwed it up. Of course, there is no REAL secret, just a realization. (but while I´m stealing from Art Suspense Novels, I must note that I´ve see a TON of religious art over the past two months and the dude standing next to Jesus in the last supper portrayals REALLY DOES look like a Chick.)





Anyway, back to the art. The Picasso museum is relatively new and is completely beholden to the whims of Picasso´s children. Its housed in a converted palace (like everything in this country, nothing ¨new¨is ever built, things are just repainted an renamed. this tradition dates back to the crusades when whichever victorious religion that time around would take the other reliogion´s church/mosque, add a new hood ornament to the top, and reopen it with a bright yellow ¨under new management¨banner).

The Picasso Museum tries to serve a few too many purposes. Its got a great collection of Picasso´s personal treasures, the stuff he kept for himself, or that he painted for his children. But it ALSO has a library, a cafe, an archaelogical dig, a movie theatre and an opium den.


Contrast this with the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, which is just wall to wall pictures. With a line that stretches thru two times zones, and taunting pedicabs who shout (in English, no less) ¨No A/C in the Picasso Museum! Go to the Beach! Its not worth the price! Buy some crayons and scribble on a napkin yourself!¨


Now, the Picasso Museum in Malaga hinted at this, but the Barcelona Version of the Picasso Museum drove home this fact for me: Picasso truly was just messing with us for the last 40 plus years of his life.

His early work is achingly perfect: luminous and startling. And then, as time and global wars pass, he just stops caring. All his pals went cubist and he gave it a go, but even that seemed like too much work. Besides, French Villas and mistresses aren´t exactly going to pay for themselves, so he needed VOLUME. And the best way to achieve that was to toss all the painstaking detail and realism out of his pictures.

Even the Picasso Museum itself acknowledges, in its roundabout and pretentious way, what everybody who visits the museum can see for themselves:

¨The aim of all this is to immerse oneself in a world where brazenness, alternated with the most profound ingenuity and where what appears to be bad taste attains the grandiosity and beauty of a new athsetic beyond modernity.¨

(The proceeding was a verbatim quote from the wall placard in the Picasso Museum. Needless to say, I confused the heck out of the security guards. They couldn´t figure out what I was doing, but since I wasn´nt taking a picture, and I wasn´t actually talking on my phone (just typing these lines quickly with my thumbs while snickering) they had to let me be.

So, basically, the Picasso Museum agrees that this late art is terrible, BUT, only if you measure it against OTHER art. If you think of it as being something completely new, which doesn´t have to following rules, than hey, why can´t it also be great?

HERE is my revelation! THIS is what I should have been trying to tell my bosses for YEARS now!

Sure, if you look at this work against any objective standard, or even, that of my peers you could say that.....but, YOU CAN´T DO THAT! Think of each memo/email/project as part of a NEW paradigm. One where ¨accuracy¨and ¨spell check¨are arcane concepts!

(Let´s see how far that argument gets me.)

Artistic License, Part I

I just got back from the Picasso Museum in Barcelona. Its the second Picasso museum I´ve been to, after the lovely, if quaint, Picasso Museum in Malaga, his birthplace. After seeing all this Picasso, combined with my tour of the Dali Museum yesterday, I´ve figured out how to get ahead in the world.

Now, both of these artists established themselves early as blazing prodigies: mastering and tweaking their studies and training. But both went on to ever greater success by bending, breaking, and leaving for dead the conventions they´d been taught.

Dali got a head start on breaking the shackles of convention by being stark raving mad. His crazy pencil thin, curled tip mustache wasn´t just an act, this dude was nuts. He couldn´t be bothered with reason, meaning, or taste.

{{Of course you balance a loaf of bread on the naked-spider-elephant-thing. What else are you supposed to do?}}

The Dali Museum is in a city called Girona. Or maybe its called Firona, or Fironas. Don´t rely on my spelling. Or anything else, for that matter. Now that I think about it, I´m not a 100% sure what city the Museum was in. But I definitely went to two different cities yesterday, and I´m almost certain that only one of them had a Dali Museum.

What made the Dali Museum especially interesting was the fact that Dali himself had been involved in the design and layout of his museum, and donated all the art himself. He had a very specific vision for how he wanted people to view his art:

High as kites, squinting in the black lights and trying to unfocus their eyes long enough to just see the sail boat, already.

The brochure to the Dali Museum boasts to that there is no rhyme or reason to the layout of the museum (awesome) and that there is no ¨right¨way to move through the museum. While a recommended path is provided, its only to make sure you see everything, and should not be viewed as adding meaning to the objects viewed.

{{No, we aren´t going to explain the 8 ft eggs that line the roof of the building, or the black Cadillac with a 20 foot totem pole hood ornament topped by the bust of a multi-eyed woman. Just loosen your tie, Man. And pass me the Pringles.}}

I´ve never been a huge Dali fan, but it was fascinating to see in flesh and blood the paintings which had been rendered into posters and tacked up on the walls of every Dungeon Master I ever knew growing up.

The very best of Dali´s work reminds me of what MC Escher would have done if giving a box of high end watercolors, and a bag of seriously wack mushrooms. The very worst of Dali´s work is strewn about randomly, unlabeled and unloved except by the pigeons.

Of course, even at his worst, Dali is still 1,000 times better than Cy Twombly. An ¨artist¨, who for some unexplained reason, evokes an overwhelming level of anger and outrage within me. Its true, I hate that guy.

If our paths ever cross, that dude better watch it or he´ll end up with a mouthful of teeth, and an eyeful of monacle. Stupid Cy Twombly. Wait, where was I?

Oh yeah. The Dali Museum was more fun house than gallery, with patrons forced to climb ladders, interpret holograms, and squint into random peep holes. While I enjoyed the Dali museum, it was almost a relief to exit onto a nice, ordinary street, with non floating, non melting non incongruous (I´m in Spain, I get to use double negatives) objects.

The Picasso Museums were quite the opposite. Straighforward and serious. So imagine my surprise when I discovered the secret waiting for me at both locations.... But, we´ll get to that next time.

An estrella in my own mind

I´ve settled into a comfortable routine in Barcelona, and the time is starting to fly by. I got to class from (roughly) 9:30 to 4:30, hit the gym afterwards till around 6 or so, and then head home to study, watch odd Spanish Sports programming (horses racing on a beach, anyone? anyone?).

The gym here is light years better than the place I was going in Sevilla. In Sevilla, the A/C units were decorative at best, and noisy heat generators at worst. The cardio equipmemt was stored in a room without windows and the one ab ball was actually an old inner tube filled with broken glass.

In Barcelona, I stumbled upon a gym with strong A/C, decent machine selection and, believe it or not, A POOL. The other spectacular feature I discovered last week was an indoor basketball court. I somehow convinced my moping French roommate to join the gym with me, and his eyes lit up when he saw the bball court. You could actually see his inner Pau Gasol (or Tony Parker) flicker for a moment. The gym loaned us a 1980´s era purple and gold rubber ball and off we went.

Its pretty obvious that Frenchie hasn´t played to much bball in his day, and so i took it upon myself to teach him the ways of the turnover and the elbow to the groin. In spite of his inexperience, he still plays like your stereotypical european: disdains the paint, ignores rebounds and smokes during time outs.

It was kind of fun teaching Frenchie the fundamentals of basketball. In my head, I was the down on his luck Scout, banished to Europe to watch scrubs play pick up games in the weird trapaziodal shaped key. When, all of the sudden, I stumbled upon a diamond in the rough. An urban legend, who with enough cajoling and dedication could change his life, and the world of basketball.

Of course, NONE of that was going to happen if Frenchie couldn´t hit a layup to save his life.

Teaching was required here, not merely discovery. So, I proceeded to walk Frenchie thru a life time´s of acquired basketball acumen. This took, in all, about 20 minutes. I lived the sports movie cliche. I went from atheletic prodigy, to 4 yr starter, to reluctant mentor, to begrudging friend, to avid supporter, to player-agent, to footnote to the legacy of a legend....in the same amount of time as a Spanish TV commercial break.

But that whole first day on the court was a blast. We were shooting (and missing) from everywhere and just basically running around with our arms flailing. The unexpected rush of adrenaline and sheer novelty reminded me of my first day of fencing class.

Now, as a freshman in college, I took fencing. As I recall my thinking at the time, my reason for taking the class was ¨holy crap, I CAN TAKE FENCING!¨

Fencing was taught in the football stadium at UT, deep in its bowels. On the first day, we met our fiercely serious teacher, learned the names of everything and even got to see a little fencing demonstration. With the hour almost over, and with barely enough time to change out of our ¨white¨ fencing gear and to hang up our mesh helmets, the teacher surveyed the 20 odd students sitting indian style on the floor and said ¨alright kids, you´ve got 5 minutes, go nuts¨

FINALLY!

We´d sat there wide eyed all hour, nodding our heads and thinking ¨ok, so that´s what that is called; ok, so that´s how you score a point...¨ while our hearts were screaming ¨just let us play with the SWORDS already!¨

Class was never as fun as those last five minutes of the first day: when nobody knew the rules, nobody thought about form, and blissful in our ignorance, we just tried to kill each other with all of our might. (Am I getting sentimental in my old age?)

Now if only I could convince Frenchie to let me teach him how to fence....

A Lesson in Fear

For those who assume that my three months in Spain are a paradise of carefree sun and relaxation, let me assure you that this is far from the truth. I have an annoyingly odd level of Spanish comprehension. My accent leads people to believe I know far more than I do. Granted, there are tons of words and phrases that I´ve picked up via osmosis thru the years that have made the transition to Spanish easier, but at the same time, without formal instruction, things like accents, indirect objects, connectors (besides, still, although) are foreign objects, and trip me up with regular frequency. Although I think I´m mastering the three main ways of formulating hypothesis for events that are either happening now, happening in the recent past, or happening in a concretely older time, I still have to ask for pepper at the grocery store as ¨the opposite of salt.¨ See, annoying, right?

Class therefore is an anxiety provoking ordeal, where panic sets in with each new twist of the unending mountain pass. Last week for example, we were forced to do word problems, MATH word problems, in SPANISH.

¿¿¿Math! AND Spanish! ???

Why don´t they just blindfold me as well? or have me solve them while padlocked in a submerged safe?

Spanish Math Problems? Who am I, an Einstein-Houdini hybrid?

Gimme a break, and gimme back my dictionary, while you are at it.

My other biggest problem, aside from general cluelessness, is my fear of vosotros. In the U.S., or at least in Texas, vosotros (or the informal version of ¨you guys¨ y´all, essentially) is not really taught. It seems that the whole informal tenses don´t really fly in Mexico, and my Spanish one teacher in 10th grade went to great pains to illustrate this for us.

First of all, she explained that we wouldn´t even be learning the vosotros form, and that we should black it out in our textbooks to avoid the temptation of referring to a group of people in an informal fashion.

Then she told us a story about a drunk kid in lock up in a mexican prison who mistakenly used the ´tu´(informal) tense when speaking with his jailer. Well, this would end up being that kids LAST mistake, because, according to my Spanish 1 teacher, the cop shot the kid.

Now its not as gruesome as something from the movie ´Touristas´ but, it was plenty enough to have me swear off the informal tenses, for good. I didn´t want to be that drunk kid in a Mexican prison...at least not the one who used the informal tense.

My teachers here sense my lack of comfort with the vosotros tense and revel in terrozing me with all of the vosotros questions in class.

Add to all this concern the developments of today, the entrance of my new classmates. Classes here run on a weekly basis, and every week students come and go, and sometimes even the teacher rotate in and out. Today we got two new students in my class: one brazilian and one russian.

The Russian is named Katrina, and is studying Math and Physics in college. I think she said she was 23. Well, our teacher made a big deal about her studying such tough subjects and asked her what she wanted to do when she graduated. Did she want to be a professor? Katrina laughed and said, no, I hate kids, I could never teach. So, the natural follow up was, so what DO you want to do? Her out of nowhere, record scratching as the needle is pulled off the album response was ¨I want to build weapons for Russia¨

WHHHHHAAAAAAA?

Next question: And, why are you studying Spanish then?

Actual and further jaw dropping response ¨we have lots of Spanish speaking customers to sell to¨

THAT IS AWESOME

This girl is slight, weighs maybe a buck five has giant glasses and a ghostly pallor, but she OWNED the room. We really couldnt get off the topic of her future employment for the rest of the day. My question ¨¿porque hacer guerra y no amor?¨went unanswered, although the teacher did bother to correct me: ¨haz el amor, no la guerra¨

Now, I´m not a 100 percent sure she´s legit because why on EARTH, if you actually WERE building bombs for Russia, would you go around blabbing about it? For the street cred? I kind of bailed her out on another question that would´ve helped determine her legitimate claim to Russian Arms Maker. When asked by the teacher, what was the strongest bomb she was studying, I blurted out ¨¡es secreto!¨ which Katrina quickly agreed with, ¨si, es secreto¨

Well, there went TODAY´S lesson. I spent the rest of the day wondering about her life, and marveling about the high stakes world I was entering.

What if I piss her off, will she be even more encouraged to build giant bombs? what if she gets to know me and realizes, hey, we´re all not so bad, and maybe there is another way? And, maybe most importantly, has she SEEN White Knights, with Mikhal Berishnikov and Gregrory Hines? What did SHE think of that daring fusion of different (dance) worlds?

Forget about tenses and questions of formality, my performance in Spanish class could now CHANGE THE BALANCE OF WORLD POWER. Great, like I need the extra pressure.

Having a Russian Arms Dealer in my class, is just another notch in my belt. I´m actually surrounded by spies. I know it, its cool. My first year of law school roommate who mysteriously vanished from a highpaying corporate job for two years, and then came back speaking fluent German and hightailed it back out of the states the second the JD was pressed into his hands? SPY.

The best friend since 5th grade who speaks fluent Arabic and travels across the globe meet with foreign scientists and government officials for weeks on end? SPY.

Hell, the woman who is now renting my apartment, who actually WORKS for the state department, who has a husband studying in Afghanastan, and who speaks Chinese, Russian, and Derka Derka Muhammed Jihad? SPY. SPY. SPY.

I joked in class today that all of her tests are going to come back with perfect scores on them, but there is a hint of concern there. I don´t want my experience tinged by the presence of hostile forces. I don´t want to have to temper my humor or my comments, for fear of further encouraging her along a path of death and destruction.

I don´t want to facilitate global conflict, but I still couldn´t help answering for her today in class.

We learned how to express repent in class today. (Arrepentirse). When the teacher asked Katrina how you say ¨regret¨in Russia, I pounded my fist on the table and said ¨there IS no Russian word for regret!¨

Sorry, World.

Bright Lights, Big City

¡BARCELONA!

I made it, and it was no easy feat. For as hard as it was to get here, and for as different as this place is, I might as well have traveled to another country. I knew that things were going to be different here before I even left Sevilla. There was some confusion regarding my arrival date, and unanswered questions about the keys to my new house. Well, I´ll be danged if Enforex in Barcelona didn´t have a 24 hr Hotline, and IN ENGLISH, no less. The only thing in Sevilla that ran 24 hrs a day was the horse and buggy station.

Getting here turned out to be a massive ordeal. First of all, I´ve got too much stuff. Last thursday I mailed myself a package (some souveniers, some spanish books I´ve now outgrown, all my undershirts and all my ´...for Dummies´books, untouched). Didn´t matter, I still had about 35 kilos of luggage. Converting that to English measurements, my luggage weighed A THOUSAND POUNDS. Add to the luggage problem the traveling with another guy (Benoit, hereinafter Ben, or Frenchie, or Lance) who also had too much luggage.

And just for funsies, sprinkle a bit of ¨we have no idea where we are going, nor how to get there.¨ shake the mixture vigoursly, bake in the Spanish Summer for four hours, and you´ve got me, scarily mimicking Ken´s experience in Barcelona, wandering about in a new and strange city. We ended up flying on Vueling Air (Motto: We make Southwest Airlines C Boarding Group feel like British Airways World Class) On Vueling, you have to PAY for your soda and crappy pack of peanuts. Once we got to Barcelona, we had to take a bus to a subway, a subway to a plaza, and then had to look at 5 maps and ask one kind soul where a street with 3 different names was. And all of that, just to meet someone to give us our keys to our house, which was another cab ride away.

The flight was 80 minutes long. The door to door time was about 8 hrs. I was hurting the next day. I hadn´t been that sore since I moved into my current house, and my neck froze up for two weeks and I walked around with clenched teeth muttering ¨No, I´m not ´doing the robot´i´m just paralyzed from the waist up¨ By Monday, I was moving more like a G.I. Joe than a Star Wars figure (elbows? why?) but my neck is still kinda stiff.

But whatever, the apartment is great. Its newly renovated, and I mean NEWLY. They just installed the second bathroom and washing machine yesterday. I´ve got a shelf in the fridge all to my self (first purchase? ICE and Frosted Flakes) and better TV reception (although, the TV is still the same size as the one I had first year in law school. there is a chronic shortage of big tv´s in this country, i wonder if Best Buy knows this). Benoit agrees that this apartment is much nicer than his last one, ESPECIALLY since, as of yesterday, he doesn´t have to share a room with me anymore. Poor bast-rd didn´t realize he´d traded old and busted for new and impossibly loud. (I think I just gave Mike ´Nam flashbacks, and I bet he just broke out in a cold sweat, sorry bro.).

School is a different world as well. In Sevilla, the school was in a converted aristocrat´s house, complete with winding staircases, enclosed terrace, ivy running down the walls, and colorful tile rising up from the floor to meet it in the middle. A/C was on a room by room basis, and was usually off. Sevilla only had one remote control for all the A/C units and harried teachers and panting students would go room to room looking for it. I also taught my teachers how to get --just a little-- more juice out of the rusty batteries by rubbing them back and forth quickly...judging from their reaction, you would have thought I´d brought back the sun. There were maybe 10 class rooms in total, each named after a different character from Don Quixote. Since the A/C was generally off, classes were taught with the windows and wooden shutters thrust open. Our earnest and funny teachers shouted over barking dogs and mothers taking wayward daughters to task in the streets below.

Classes were more like a social gathering, with the teachers openly disparaging the text and preferring to squeeze all of the gossip from our foreigner bodies. The teachers were our friends, and by the end, they were going out with us, if only to better understand why we were always late for first period.

On Planet Barcelona, the Enforex School is nestled between a 4 star hotel and government offices. The school has a long, neon lit, opaque glass and shiny metal foyer and blond wood, free floating stairs in between the three floors. The class rooms are numbered, and I´ve lost count of how many there are. There is central (freaking) A/C and nutty exterior shades that automatically (and I´m pretty sure completely randomly) move up and down, shading the classrooms for 5-37 minutes at a time.

The place reeks of business, and the teachers follow suit. No dilly dallying in this school. Our teachers are focused and commited to the text. Ben complains that it ¨doesn´t feel like vacation¨but I have to admit I kind of like it. Reminds me of home. But then again, so does the Metro here, which has the exact same graphic design for its maps as the DC Metro. I would not be surprised to board the L1 today, bound for Sagrada Familia, accidentally miss my stop, and exit at New Carrolton.

All in all, I´m really happy with the move. I pretty much was from the second I arrived in my apartment. Saturday night, Ben and I went out looking for some food and stumbled across Plaza Espana. Milling around Plaza Espana were more people than in the entire city of Sevilla. As soon as we finished our first loop of the place, we were greeted, as if on cue, by a spectacular water and light show, set to music. We sat on the ground amongst the blinking trinket selling set, drank a couple of Estrellas and shook our heads.

When had we gotten to the future?
Who are all these people?
(And, after a few more cervezas)
Where do they all go to the bathroom?

RANDOM THOUGHTS

**There is no blue tooth technology in Spain. If someone appears to be talking to themself in the street, they probably are.
**I miss quoting things, nobody here gets ¨okay, no deer for a month¨or ¨do you have anything besides mexican food?¨
**I am going to spoil the surprise now and tell everyone what they are getting as souveniers: .01 and .02 euro coins. I´m bringing them all home, because here, I can´t even give those tiny b-stards away.
**Why do they show dubbed A Team reruns in Barcelona? That show shouldnt have been on network tv 20 years ago, forget about now, and in a foreign land. Its still kind of fun to watch though. As Ben and I sat on the couch yesterday watching BA Barakus duck tape a machine gun to the side of a truck, to which Face had welded metal plates for protection, Ben turned to me and said ¨Siempre las mismas cosas¨ Couldn´t have said it better myself.