Yo Tomaría Su Clase

While I continue to work on my other blog about Madrid which happens to be taking a long time because I don´t have pictures to job my memory, I will write a little bit about more recent things. First of all I was elected by my the chapter of Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia as president of the chapter for the 2008-2009 school year! I was definitely not expecting to be elected as such and it really makes me feel good about everything I´ve done in PMA. This past year was a difficult one in terms of planning and paperwork, not to mention brotherhood... but I strongly believe that I´ll be returning to a very well organized and strong group of brothers. I must say it´s a difficult thing to create a real strong dfeeling of connection to lots of people when you lead busy musician lives and there aren´t very many manditory kinds of service or actions or whatnot... I guess you really have to want to be there. Because of said issues, this semester there was no rush process, all time was spent between the brothers. Of all I read from the chapter this semester it looks like people are really making an effort to be involved and to want to do things together, a good sign is definitely heavy interaction with another group - the women´s music fraternity Sigma Alpha Iota (ee-yota). I really look forward to being able to oversee the functioning of the chapter and keep everything together as best I can - I guess there´s still plenty I´m not sure that the President does, I´m curious to see what I don´t know.
Another thing is my consideration of Tau (taw, like the vowel of 'clog') Beta Sigma. Having been dating Bethany for nearly two years, I consider myself to have been (for a non-member) heavily involved with Tau Beta Sigma, the music service sorority that she is a strong member of. I have thoroughly enjoyed the large amounts of service they do, and the sisterhood events that they have, and the great traditions they have accumulated... not to mention the outstanding organization and participation (all of these things I somewhat envy, and in part have shamelessly plagiarized into the work of PMA... with full knowledge and consent of Bethany of course... so I guess it´s not plagiarism?). As it just so happens, Tau Beta Sigma is in fact a coed fraternity, and I figure having helped Bethany with finances, participated in sister events and fundraising and lots of service - I might as well just join and know all the behind the scenes stuff too. This presents just one problem: timing. All of our meetings happen to be at the same time. You might have been thinking it would be wierd to be the 'sister' of my girlfriend, but KKY brothers date each other so I suppose it´s not as wierd as it could be. Then I suppose there´s the whole denomination of 'sister' for me, which is perhaps a little less normal than a girl being called a 'brother' of a professional fraternity. I´m sure exceptions could be made, I would consider myself a brother anyways. I guess that whole business is a little strange but the bottom line is that I love the work that TBS does and I love the way they do it, not to mention the girls are awesome... although perhaps I´m a little biased.

It was a little while ago that I got a package from Bethany including none other than homemade cookies and treats! I shared as much as I could before scarfing it all down... it seems like no mothers here really make desserts, no cookies or brownies or cakes or anything - they buy all that stuff. I think that´s a real shame, and rather prefer the American home-baked dessert tradition. And I was rather excited to have gotten a baked treat from my far away sweetheart.

Then the other day I got a package from home!!! Thank you very very much mom, dad, sister, d-daddy, Dana and Mountain View! Right when I got them I shot into the pancake mix and maple syrup. I don´t think my madre liked me taking over the kitchen so quickly to make some pancakes, but I cleaned up everything and even shared my precious maple syrup :-). I have also bit into the Thin Mints and downed a bunch of Reese´s. I look forward to playing with the spices and tons of goodies! Thank you guys, I´ll keep up my practice in the kitchen. My next project is chocolate chip cookies!

Another thing that was very exciting for me was the experience of teaching a class. In my political science class, every Wednesday a student must present a scholastic article about Latin America to the class, and this past Wednesday was my turn. I was of course given the economics article which made me a little bit nervous about getting it all right since it is my major after all. But I got up in front of the class and I really felt good about what I was saying and while sometimes less clear I thought I had some good examples and really tried to explain the article and thereafter my thoughts on why it was wrong and misdirected. My favorite part of it was definitely adding my own commentary and analysis. To give a short version of the presentation, I presented my personal thoughts and ideas in Spanish (or whatever I could manage of Spanish) and the details of the article in English (since it was written in English). D.C. economist John Williamson in 1989 wrote an article outlining a set of reforms that he considered to be common agreement in D.C. that Latin American countries should adopt for the betterment of their economies. This list included 1. Fiscal discipline (balancing the government budget) 2. Public expenditure reorganization 3. Tax reform 4. Market determined interest rates 5. Competitive exchange rates 6. Trade laws liberalization 7. Liberalization of laws on foreign businesses buying or merging with internal firms (Foreign Direct Investment) 8. Privatization of state enterprises 9. Deregulation for ease of market forces and 10. Security of property rights. Then Latin American countries tried to enforce some of these ideas, which failed miserably. Williamson himself noted that there was little specification and no organization to it, and further that it was crazy of countries to adopt something written in an article without more research or discourse. My personal argument was that these were all meaningless reforms since the majority of work in Latin American countries is corrupt and black market. No matter how much you dress up the written economic work, if noone follows the rules in the first place you´ll get nowhere. The only way to improve these conditions would be to improve worker´s rights and protection and enforcement of business laws. As unnecessary as it might sound, the higher ups really do need to be paid more to avoid the temptation of bribery and further oversight of leaders and decisionmakers is never a bad idea. Without the education and protection of workers and leaders alike, no economic reform will do good for the country.

That´s the shortened version of my presentation, and I got the feeling as I was standing in front of the small class pointing at my chalkboard notes that I actually enjoyed that. It was an exciting feeling to have people taking notes on what I was saying and writing! I must have been channeling the teacher abilities of my dear Bethany. Afterwards some of them noted that if things didn´t work out I should work as a professor, 'I´d definitely take your class.' That made me feel good.

Depende

This past weekend (well... now a long time ago) was the trip to Madrid. But the night before we left, we went to see a concert - a group called Jarabe de Palo(s?) which means strangly enough Stick Cough Syrup. I don´t know, maybe there´s some cultural significance that I don´t understand - ah the meaning is roughly to cure a problem with a beating. How uplifting, no?

After meeting as a large group under the clock stationed high in the stone facade of the northeastern wall of the Plaza Mayor. The pigeons tend to be unconcerned with the constant human presence, on the contrary they must enjoy the crumbs and treats we leave behind from our churros and bocadillos (sandwiches). Many of them, actually, have grown fat in the winter months, stocking up on these morsels and one supposes resting a great deal.

Talking all the while with Jesús, our program director, we made it finally to the performance place - it was a nondescript large building that apparantly had a concert hall inside. So we went in, and after finding our seats (and several people finding drinks), the lights dimmed and up came a video of someone looking like a somewhat more attractive Spanish Michael Moore. This, it turns out is Pau Donés, the composer for the group, and he gave an introduction to the group and all throughout the performance he was in little video clips inbetween the songs.

Apparantly Jarabe de Palo is a very popular group here, because almost the whole audience except for us was singing along with their songs, very enthusiastically. The group consisted of your basic rock group - guitars, bass, drums and then later the pianist in a very dramatic way came in acting drunk. The performance was pretty much half show and half music. He should have just as well stayed out drinking, I think. Dad, you know how much I dislike the abuse of keyboards - he molested the keyboard sound. The band in general sounded pretty bland to me for the first half. I forgot to mention that they had a saxophone player in the group. There were never bridges, there were never forms to the songs - one key, jam and keep playing. The saxophone never played more than pentatonic or simple showy trills or sustained notes. I was musically uninterested although most of the crowd seemed very entertained and enjoyed it quite a bit, and really isn´t that the point? These guys were obviously not there to create musical masterpieces, but to entertain - made more clear by their theater-istic antics. And so much the better. I could tell that the musicians did know what they were doing, but I suppose in interest of appealing to as many people as possible, they kept the music more or less simple. Oh, and the one thing that got to me in the first half is that every one of their songs was 120 bpm. No change in tempo, no change in form, no change in sound, just a couple of lyrics different here or there. I don´t even have a comparison in mind to describe what they sounded like, it was just like a kids show where the music didn´t matter, maybe they were singing songs about the color blue and the sound that a sheep makes. Ah, but the last song in the first half they played a very Spanish song that sounded awesome! Until the keyboards came in. Why? Why do hispanic keyboardists feel the need to play that descending octave pattern that´s popular in Latin American music? One of the songs that the band played was really catchy - Depende. It was a very basic rhythm and the chorus was mostly just 'depende'. So from now on whenever I hear someone say the word 'depende', I can´t help but think of that song, although I only remember 2 seconds of it.


But you know I´m glad to have gone, it was an extremely Spanish experience, and I was sitting next to a man from Mexico who was studying neuro-surgery at the University of Salamanca. He explained some of the meanings of the songs and how the band had gotten lots of awards and nominations for stuff and how it was interesting that the band was playing on the main stage usually reserved for concert pianists and much more "high-class" performances, and he also noted with a touch of admiration how surprising it was that Herbie Hancock won the grammy for best album. Now that caught me off guard, and made me want to listen to it.

So, it was generally interesting and good Spanish learning experience, but I wouldn´t go see them again. Then afterwards we were turned loose to hunt for our own dinner. I was feeling like pizza and wandered the dark city for at least an hour looking for it. Then I thought Kebabs would be nice, and searched for that, but alas all I could find was unsatisfactory. Being picky can make for being rather hungry. Finally deciding that I should finish the cycle of having had McDonalds in Paris and London and Lisbon, so I found instead a Burger King to mix it up. Welll.... the bun was soggy and the burger had that tinge of burnt - I should have learned by now I don´t really like Burger King. Attack of the missing memory once again. The fries were great.


So by the time I got to bed it was about 1am, since we got out of the concert at something like 11:30. Guess what time we had to be at the bus stop to leave for Madrid? 7am. Hooray for planning! Well we got what sleep we could, then showed up to get loaded and get what little sleep we could on the ride before we arrived in Madrid.


Madrid is very much what I was imagining Salamanca being like - a real city. It was reminiscent to me of Manhattan, NYC - huge buildings on all sides, crowds of people, lots of monuments and museums, beautiful and sketchy people everywhere, Starbucks... Our first stop was the Prado! Tired and a little bit spaced out, we all got out to this beautiful courtyard in front of the large stone building and went around the side to see lots of school children waiting and two members of the policía en caballo - or horseback police. The Prado was full of all kinds of incredible old pieces of art. We were basically set loose after a little while of touring the old pieces we needed to see. I thought of the space as very similar to a wing of the Louvre, just in the space and the kinds of old pieces. It seemed at times like a Catholic anthology - so many pieces depicting Catholic leaders and Christian themes. This makes sense since before they didn´t have cameras it was a matter of documentation and also the Catholic church had the most money in the middle ages and afterwards, so most works of that age would be Catholic - in Europe anyways. So tired of that when we were set free and I found an interesting scene that I drew and wrote about for an art class assignment. There was a girl painting a copy of a painting on display in one of the wings. It seemed like a fairly nondescript old roman scene of a waterway emptying out in the ocean - huge pillared architecture and mostly naked men going ab out their business. Just remembering the Platonic ideals of art as being worthless copies of reality which really exists in forms which we might now characterize as ideas. We have an idea of something, which Plato considered the most pure form, then the real object is a copy of that form, then a painting is a debasement of a copy of a copy and so forth and so on. I was fascinated at something that Plato would have considered an abomination was a very gentile and calm scene, of a woman very patiently and I must say masterfully going about her business of copying the work on display.


I grew tired quickly of the Prado, our next stop was the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum. It was gorgeous. I would go back there in a second. There was a wide collection of 19th-20th century works that were very secular and tons of impressionist and some very interesting surrealist work by Dalí and others. But I really couldn´t get past the impressionist art - it fascinated me so much how they could manage to up close have such a nondestinct plotting of basic strokes and vague forms, but when I backed up it became a living picture. Perhaps since it was so vague up close, from a distance my brain filled in what wasn´t there and to me it became more lifelike, more organic, more... versatile. I thought it felt more real than the realist works that worked out a scene to every small detail, those were capturing a specific moment, an exact feeling and time. The impressionist works seemed to me to be adaptable to however I might have felt when I looked at it, it was more an idea that evoked a little imagination - who was going to walk onto this scene next, what is that character thinking? I enjoyed it quite a lot.


After a little break, that night we went to see La Bella y La Bestia - 'Beauty and the Beast'! As we entered it was very much reminiscent of broadway style theater - large amounts of seating in a relatively small place, lots of people dressed up in their very best, some not so much - lots of concessions and gifts. Honestly, I was not expecting a lot from them, and it wasn't broadway quality but they really did a good job. The acting was incredible from the whole cast, the scene of Be Our Guest was OVER THE TOP!! They had lots of showgirls huge set pieces, even some pyrotechnics. There were just little details that didn´t quite work out, for example Gaston had kind of a high not so manly voice and the fight with the wolves was more like an interpretive ballet dance... not a fight. Actually kind of amusing. Anyways, I was definitely pleased with the performance and the singing voices were very beautiful! As it just so happens, Bethany was playing in the pit orchestra back at home to Beauty and the Beast, so I got her a little momento from the Spanish version.


So after being up so late, we were of course dragged out of bed nice and early the next morning to go off visiting things. I believe our first stop that day was at the Palacio Real. Huge building, noone actually lives there anymore - crazily ornamented with beautiful views and a peacock! What? I don´t know. Most of us were feeling sluggish and tired, and afterwards we went to see Reina Sofía collection of Picasso pieces. It was extremely fascinating, but what I enjoyed most of all were the drawings that Picasso drew for himself. Before all of his major works (and many of his minor works) he did study paintings just to get the feel of what he was trying to capture and to try out different ideas to see how they work. I particularly enjoyed pencil sketchings of himself and some erotic work (two figures and a cat... two of them going at it and this cat curiously perched on the side of the bed... very curious). I took the free time they gave us to sketch some of the works I enjoyed most, including psychelic reworkings of some portraits by El Greco and study drawings of Las Meninas by I think it was Velázquez. Needless to say the works of Picasso were not the random playings of a little kid, rather a play on perspective and color in an intellectual jest on classic works, not to mention the development of his own unique style that transcended the realism of the pre-photograph world. Interesting stuff.

That day we were released into the wild rather early - allowed to romp around the town as we saw fit. Kristen and I went out and took a short tour of the Plaza Mayor and had fun diggin up things we liked in a little gift shop (I got a bullfighting poster! woo!) and looked around the Plaza Mayor a bit after getting some Starbucks that she was wanting so badly. As we walked up the Calle de Preciados north of Puerta del Sol, we saw all kinds of street... performers. Living statues, they all had some sort of dress-up to distinquish themselves, some more interesting and tolerable than others. My favorite was this goofy kind of guy dressed up like an American western cowboy, but in all black. He had some sort of whistle in his mouth and made funny noises and played with his toy gun and took pictures with people, he was interesting. Others didn't really do much, I don't know if they were really expecting to get any donations... Madrid seemed to me (as previously mentioned) very much like New York City... and I liked it. I enjoyed that there was so much life to it, things to see, places to go - always spectacles and something artistic. That night we all retired to the hotel and ordered in pizza - at least I did with a bunch of girls. It was a good time, and nice to finally get some hang out and pizza time. That night, however, upheld that the Spanish just don't know how to make a crust for anything.
The next and final morning in Madrid the schedule changed AGAIN! Much earlier still. Thanks for making a good steady schedule. Anyways this day would be spent going to El Escorial, which was a large complex that included a monastery, a small palace, a huge library, a huge cathedral and a royal crypt. It was interesting to note the austerity of the place and the contrasting scale of the palace to even the cathedral. In a time when Spain was arguably the most important country in the world, the king chose to live in tiny quarters in a christian fortress of sorts. The library was stunningly beautiful - marble floors, huge wooden bookcases (all the books were turned spine inwards for preservation reasons, I had never heard of that before) and curiously enough completely mythical and non-religious frescoes on the cieling. The royal crypt was also an interesting thing - a marble and goldbasement that reminded my oddly of a storage area, how all the sarcophagi were just lying stacked on these giant shelves, as if they were holding valuable documents or something. Also it's interesting that the kings were always buried in full royal detail... with their mothers. I guess they were halfway serious about that commandment - honor thy father and mother. Everyone says good things about their mother and defends their mother's honor... which is definitely a good thing and called for by all means... but what about the father? Assuming that the father did a good job and supported a family well, he deserves a lot of credit too. Oh well, can't argue with those royal types.

We were again released into the wild for lunch this time, and so we wandered the small town ouside of el Escorial (it is a little distance from Madrid, up on the side of a nearby mountain) looking for something reasonable and filling. What should we come across but Chinese food! Actually we passed by it in checking out various cafés we were interested in, but ultimately I said hey, if you guys (actually they were just girls... why am I always just with girls? not complaining or anything) don't pick the next one, I'm going back to that chinese place. And then they decided since one of us actually wanted to go there that why not, let's just go get chinese food, it had been a while anyways. GOOD CHOICE. That was amazing, some chinese stir fried pork and vegetables and sticky white rice. I love that sticky white rice. It was still strange to see Asian people speaking fluent Spanish, but it goes to show how still uncultured we are. It was delicious and enjoyed every bite, down to the inexpensive price. Lovely. Afterwards I decreed that we must go to the pastry shop across the street. Unfortunately I don´t have with me at the moment the notebook that I wrote down all these details in, but this was a perfectly lovely little shop. The shop worker was nothing but helpful and patient and the pastries were just heavenly. I got two kinds of pastries - a kind of creme filled pastry roll and this thing that was kind of like a a minibar of a gooey (local, he said) and positively fulfilling creme, and a very soft cake layer, then a soft and delicate but powerful chocolate layer. Delicious. They made the ride home pretty sweet. Was the trip the best it could have been? No. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Would I go back? Depende.

El Razón de Vida

Today as I was walking to class, there were lots of Guardia Civil guys (police) everywhere around the university - as it turns out the Prince of Spain was coming to Salamanca University today. I have no idea why or exactly where, but noone could go within a certain perimeter. I found it very interesting. The Prince is the heir to the throne of the kingdom of Spain, which is a very important role here. In Britain we have become accustomed to seeing the King of a modern country as simply a symbolic figurehead, but the King of Spain is far more than that - as recently as 1980-something he personally stopped a coup led by a colonel who held the Spanish parliament hostage for over 24 hours. He also confronted President Chávez on television, asking him '¿Porque no te callas?' or 'Why don´t you shut up?'. King Juan Carlos I was nominated by dictator Francisco Franco himself but has interestingly turned out to be perhaps the most consistent supporter of democracy in the recent political development of Spain. King Juan Carlos I speaks Castillian (what most call 'Spanish'), Catalán (an indiginous language of the Eastern edge of Spain) and Portuguese, including the language Gallego, which is said to be a variation of Portuguese and belongs to the region of Galicia in Northwestern Spain. The King is revered within the country by most as a just and formidable leader, and since he is growing old (very recently turning 74), the country will soon enough be handed over to his son, Prince Philip - who happened to be visiting Salamanca today. There is a lot of question whether or not he´ll be able to do as well as his father at leading the country, but we´ll only know when he takes the reign(s).

This morning I also went to a café called El Café Don Quixote. I had some coffee relatively cheap at €1.10, which turned out to be many times stronger than I´m accustomed to. Thereafter I was wired as I don´t remember having been in a while - there must have been enough caffeine in that cup to kill a small woodland animal. My body ordinarily can accept caffeine without any unnatural effects, many times without any extra energy either - which can be disappointing. Not so this morning, all through art class, I could not stop moving or asking questions or drawing like a madman. Nor through siesta could I sleep at all, which is incredibly unnatural. So during my siesta time I watched a video on my iPod, a movie called Waking Life. I hadn´t watched it in a long time and it asks lots of philosophical questions and discusses lots of subjects:

What is the difference between waking and sleeping life and how does it blur?

The character in the movie described how there is some mental mechanism that distinguishes between a mental thought entity of something and an actual extra-personal entity of 'reality' so that we are not frightened by our ideas like we would be of a real hungry lion right in front of us. But when we sleep, this mechanism is suppressed so that we can actually believe that something is happening while we are sleeping. I am kind of alienated off the bat simply because I never really remember my dreams except for once every rare rare rare blue moon, which is to say I only remember dreaming 4 or 5 times. Ever. So I´ve had about as much experience in the dream world as I´ve had in political affairs of Japan. So it makes me curious to consider the idea of this lucid dream world, I must satisfy myself with daydreaming, which I suppose I tend to do often. But my lack of dreaming makes me wonder if I simply actually don´t remember it, which wouldn´t surprise me, or if I simply don´t dream. I wouldn´t be able to tell.

Can existentialism, or self determination, deliver us from the eternal mechanics of prepackaged function?

This last semester I took a class which ended up being 90% discussion on Free Will. So it looks like each of us have histories and influences that have determined the majority of our lives and unless we can decide that at any point we made decisions that were spontaneously and independently invented by us to the determination of our future decisions, we are just results of previous actions. What can occur to us is that perhaps it´s a state of mind? Existentialism is the idea that we each create our own humanity, future and state of being - our essence. How can we all of a sudden decide to brush aside our influences, well we can´t, but we have to take into account this interesting thing we call the mind or spirit. It´s such a non-physical entity, the causal laws of the physical world, one supposes, don´t necessarily have to apply to it. So in the case that we have an intangible mind possibly indenependent of the causal strains that apply to our limited corporeal selves, we can determine our own lives and futures, and thus take responsibility for our own lives. This is my impression of Existentialism, and sounds reasonably good to me.
So what does this mean to meaning in our lives - we go about our business, we love, we work, we play, we consume... where is the humanity and meaning? Can we just live for the sake of living, or does the have to be some meaning to our existence? Personally I have come to be of the opinion that the meaning of life is to love and be loved in return - thank you Moulin Rouge. What is love, you may ask? Humanity itself. Not the physical act of living, but the happiness derived from experience and perspective of a community and outsiders. What can we achieve in our lives but to understand more about ourselves and the people around us and be happy? Some people seek happiness only in themselves, how happy do they turn out to be? Some people seek only the happiness of others, which some exalt that - unless you personally derive pleasure, what kind of life is that either? There is a balance, and the important part is the passion and all-consuming interest and almost physical need that extends outside the self. The most recent experience I´ve had of this was to visit Caroline - I found such fulfillment in being able to relate to someone in a complete and wordless way. It was what I understand to be a familial love, to happily give freely without necessarily wanting. To have been able to relate to her feeling of international isolation while at the same time enjoying the new experience of being there and seeing those things - not to mention hearing and speaking new things. What made it complete to me was to be able to cook for Caroline and her family. You all know about me that I have a compulsion for cooking and food, it perhaps goes a little beyond obsession into a sort of addiction that can be fulfilled healthily and I arguably selflessly. Actually selflessly isn´t correct because I get so much gratification out of cooking for someone. But it was that moment that Caroline and I sat down to the barbequed chicken and seeing her host Madre cheerfully bite into the spinach salad that I could see the meaning of my life. Everything happened in that moment - innovation, discovery, understanding, acceptance, love, friendship, happiness, freedom, reason. What´s the meaning of your life?

p.s. this is a two-way informational medium, I welcome responses and arguments alike

Café con Leche

The University of Salamanca has a program called Intercambios, which more or less means exchanges. The program is kind of a lingual eHarmony.com... without the creepy spokesman or anything romantic, in my case anyways. What they do is they ask your name, your age and waht you study, then what language you speak and what language you want to practice. They then put you on a list of people with the same lingual qualities and match you to the exact opposite, which is to say a person who speaks the language you want to practice and wants to practice the language you speak. Then they print you out a list of everyone who you are matched to with their names, ages and information and then you are free to contact any of them. The office is a little place right across from the Catedral Viejo (old cathedral... a major point in Salamanca which is easy to see from anywhere because of the huge spires and towers), with large old wooden doors that lead one into a stone passageway and to the left is an office with a rather beautiful and interesting modern two-way swinging glass door. As I walk in, I say 'Intercambios?', which apparantly is vague since I then had to define further lingual intercambios, but the nice lady sat me down and asked me the information then printed me out the names and stuff. The next day, nothing. Some other people who had done it got e-mails within the first several hours. I had nothing. But the next day I had 7 e-mails from people for meetings! Gotta wait for everything I guess.

Since I tend to have an easier time talking to strange women than strange men, I responded to several Salmantinas (Salamancan girls) somewhere around my age and set up meetings, the first of which was today! I got an e-mail in somewhat poor English describing how she, Natália, would be wearing a red jacket and jeans and to meet her under the clock in the Plaza Mayor at 16:30. So at 4:20pm I walked slowly into the plaza under my umbrella, attempting to keep as dry as possible as the rain nonchalantly showered all over the old tired stone. There was a little bit of a mist around the ground where all the rain droplets impacted and rebounded a little bit of moisture. It was surely wet, but it wasn´t overpowering or even cold, just rainy. So under my umbrella I watched around for this red jacket and jeans. Some description. There were lots of people running around with all kinds of red jackets and jeans - I saw some red P-coats, some red snow jackets, some red wind breakers, some red wool coats, all sporting the Salamancan fashion of jeans and some form of boots or flats.... or boot flats. But there was only one girl with a vaguely red coat wearing jeans under the big clock in the plaza. I personally think it was closer to orange, but I decided I might as well ask and so I walked up and asked her in Spanish, '¿Perdona, se llama Natália?' (Excuse me, do you(respectful form, usted) call yourself Natália?) Sheepishly she smiled and said 'Yes, and you are Kip?'. I put out my hand to shake hers, and she seemed a little confused but unconcerned. Then I remembered that it´s normal in Spain when meeting anyone to give a kiss to the left and the right. Oh well, both smiling we agreed to get some warm coffee out of the rain in a café in the plaza. Into a café we went and after asking for some café con leche we talked. The café as always was brought to our table in little mugs on tiny platters with a spoon and tube of sugar on the platter. There is always about 3/4 inch of really dark strong coffee in the bottom, and after the waiter has passed around all the coffee cups with the coffee in the bottom, he pours from a metal pitcher hot steamed milk to the brim of the glass, creating the lovely café con leche which is very soothing and relaxing while not too strong at all. It seems reasonably clear to me that she does not speak English as much as I speak Spanish, but oddly at the same time she has perhaps a wider vocabulary in English than I do in Spanish because she explained that she is taking an English writing class right now, but they do not speak English in class which I found a little strange. We talked about what we like to do in our free time and after a while I figured out that she plays racquetball and works in a sports equipment store on the other side of the river from Salamanca. Extremely friendly and attempting very hard to understand my English, she stared in a very focused manner at my lips (as I assume I do to Spanish speakers) as I told her about what group I´m with here and what our classes are like and where everyone likes to go at night. She was very amused by the cheap and tourist-oriented places that the Americans visit regularly and then proceeded to describe various places that she goes with her friends. It would be fun, I think, to go out with some Spaniards and hear normal conversations of people our age instead of literary Spanish and proper forms like we always practice. After we finished our coffee, we looked outside and the rain had very determinedly started coming down harder. Natália unfortunately had forgotten her 'paragua en el coche', so having tons of free time I decided it would just be more time to practice Spanish to just walk with her to let her use my umbrella until we got to her car. So we walked and talked about boyfriends and girlfriends and here´s to hoping that Bethany gets better, unfortunately she had to miss work today with 102ºF fever. While it´s nice to not have to go anywhere, a 102ºF fever rest assured does not assure rest. Anyways, we finally got to her car in the northwest of the city, with which I am still unfamiliar and she offered to drive me to the JMU office where I would write this and print out some homework, as long as I could give directions. Ah this will be fun, I thought. We only took one or two days to talk about directions in the first two weeks of intensivo. So I did the best I could to count blocks and describe landmarks and turn here turn there, and finally we did make it there. With the standard Spanish kiss to the left and right we promised to meet again for coffee to talk some more and here I am.

It was a nice experience and I do look forward to another encounter of the Salmantino(a) kind. I wonder what I can learn about Spain from these intercambio meetings? Perhaps things about food or customs that I might have questions about, for example Spanish people never moving out of the way, perhaps Natália can explain that. Perhaps she can also explain the European idea of kids making out in public. Strange but not always a bad thing. Ah well, any excuse for another cup of café con leche I suppose.

Le Poisson

Well the losses seem to accumulate, last night I thought about it a little bit and I seemed to be missing something? As I kept searching, I could not for the life of me find my beloved Irish cap! Well... joder. Whether by robbery or by simple absentmindedness, the thing that made me easy to distinguish, the thing that kept me warm, the perfect gift from my parents, the rain protection and fun accessory, my cap has left me. Fortunately, caps of that sort are very popular here as all old Spanish men wear them, so there must be cap stores somewhere. Perhaps I will go in search of a new one, or perhaps I´ll just wait until I get to Scotland. I don´t know, it´s a difficult thing to attempt to replace, lots of sentimental value - very similar to my camera. Ugh, why am I cursed with the ability to lose anything? I guess that makes me smart for deciding not to get a laptop... that would be gone.

To top it all off, last night I also discovered that I couldn´t find the adapter (€1 or less, not worried about that) to plug in my stuff to the wall, so I was going to take my iPod to the nightly internet café to plug into the computer to recharge. As long as the computer doesn´t have iTunes, the iPod should just recharge and not be messed up. But... it froze. It just stopped, right in the middle of an NPR Food podcast. I wanted to hear the rest of the story about faulty Chinese exports! Whatever would happen to that cut of tenderloin that is infected with the aviary flu? Well, I was not happy at all: no cap, no camera, and now no iPod. That was definitely the last straw. I went and walked around the city for an hour just to chill out and think about where I am. It was wet outside, dark but lit but lots of street lights. I had become familiar with the various routes and people that I might encounter. Frustrated as I was, it was also abundantly clear what kinds of habits Spaniards have in large groups - they never move out of the way. Ever. And they´ll stop in their tracks randomly, even if they´re in the middle of a crowd. And they´ll walk down the street in long lines next to each other, blocking the whole avenue, no matter who´s coming the other direction. I do not like this Spanish trend. I do not like it, Sam I Am. Others have advised pushing people out of the way, they don´t seem to mind and in fact seem to simply ignore being pushed out of the way. But my question is, why aren´t they just courteous enough to move a little bit so that I don´t have to push anyone? I guess the Spanish are more used to contact than Americans are, they´re ok with being touched by a stranger a little bit, but we definitely aren´t. Either way I still find it rude for someone to stand in my way when I´m very clearly moving that direction.

And right now it looks like I have about $888 at my disposal, having started with about $1,843 and $250 having very nicely been augmented by my parents and strangely $450 added by ORL - I just e-mailed them to make sure they´re aware of that issue and to see if/when they need that back. And if I have done my math correctly, $500 more should be coming along later to finish making up for the $750 that was subtracted from my account at the beginning of the semester to help pay for the semester. So all in all, subtracting ORL money, I seem to have spent about half of my total money and approaching halfway in my trip, that´s none too bad. I suppose as a poor college student I can always ask nicely from my parents for a little extra to finish off the trip, but realistically I´ll be with them for that finish so who knows, I may be just fine yet.
Oh yes, but I forgot one very interesting piece of international trade, at the beginning of the semester, we all paid that €100 ransom for our cell phones that will be paid back at the end of the semester. So actually depending on how things go, I could actually make money on that deal... very little, but still it´s an interesting concept, kind of a forward contract without any express interest except in the wayward possibilities of international trade within the currencies of the historically strong US dollar and the more modernly explosively strong Euro. I might make as much as $5, which would be cool, even just in theory. But that also means I´ve used less than half of my real total money, which is nice.

As far as the iPod goes, right now it is happily charging in this SalU computer lab, no problems at all. So at least I have my music. Last night I felt somewhat lost without music to listen to, I was about to whip out my penny whistle, or go in hunt for a piano. But alas there are no such things available at midnight. As long as I have good stuff to listen to, I really don´t feel much of an urge to play music. But I do have a strong urge to sing along, which is difficult to do here without some wierd looks. There just aren´t any places to let loose and belt out a fun song from a musical, which I can usually do in my car at home. I do really miss singing, particularly with the group, all us View Crew people (GH) . I can make do, however, just singing to myself willy nilly in the streets of Salamanca. Most of them have no idea what the lyrics mean and it´s fun just to let loose every once in a while, particularly since I´ll probably never see any of them again and definitely never talk to most of them. What do they care if I am singing 'Le Poisson' from Little Mermaid? They might even like the melody.

Right now it doesn´t seem like we´re doing very much in our classes - in Cultura e Identidad Latinoamericana (the class taught in English), we´ve been looking at the Spanish conquest of Latin America, using examples like food of the mix of cultures and what the great differences were between the societies. I quite enjoy the food aspect of it, particularly since I get to do a research paper on food in Latin America. In Political Science, we look all the time at political articles in the newspapers and talk about the Spanish political history and heirarchy. It´s quite interesting and I think I´ve learned a lot from our Argentinian teacher. Yesterday to distinguish the difference between someone working for the state as opposed to the government, we watched an episode of a British show called 'Yes, Minister' about a permanent state secretary working with an appointed cabinet member. We don´t have such distinctions in the US, President Bush can appoint up to 4,500 people, whereas the British Prime Minister can appoint only 100 and to popular demand that number is declining. It´s pretty ridiculous, right? In Spanish Civilization, we´re slowly learning about the layout of the country and what each region does and really what the country as a whole does as far as working and thereafter consuming. Quite interesting. In Art, we continue to look at the history of art and architecture throughout Spain, since before the Romans up to Dalí. Our teacher is very biased towards what he thinks is good art and therefore will not take much time to look at the works of either Dalí or Gaudí, a grand shame if you ask me. In my final class, Cine y Literatura, we continue plowing through our miles of reading and watching to discuss major literary and cinematic moments in Spanish culture, from the living in illusion character of Quixote to... well I don´t know to what, we haven´t gotten there yet. The only real work comes along in the great amount of reading for my film class and for Van Norman´s latin American class. But both look to be interesting, and the rest of the classes are generally pay attention in class and get an A. I just wish I could take a picture of something and keep my head warm, but at the very least I can sing to myself in the streets like a crazy person :-).

Porto 2

After my lovely post-arrival nap, Caroline and I talked a little bit with her host-padre about my cooking and apparantly Caroline had been setting high expectations that I would be cooking there. Hehe, well I am not one to disappoint with food so I agreed one of the days to make an American meal and afterwards we headed out to Porto where Caroline was supposed to meet one of her friends.

After a long metro ride and some catching up Caroline and I arrived to find a tall thin blonde-streaked guy looking just a little younger than me dressed in a nice European style. This apparantly was Johannes from the Ferro Islands, which come to find out is a territory of the Dutch, with its own language and mythology and songbooks! We fascinated ourselves by taking a little tour of Porto complete with a trip to a coffee shop where I tried a Mokachok - served in layers, I think it included whipped cream (chantilly in Portuguese), thick thick chocolate and something else. It tasted like chocolate gravy, outrageously thick and chocolatey with a light and ever so slightly spicy flavor. I personally got a mixture of this chocolate drink with coffee, since I needed a good waking up.

After enjoying this refreshment, we toured around a bit. Porto I would describe as similar to the London of the movie Sweeney Todd just with more monuments - same sketchy people all over and really dark and dank with stone streets and buildings. Several times I asked the two of them where we were and very nonchalantly they would say 'eh, I have no idea... where does that alleyway go?'. I was not feeling good about this. But we stayed out of trouble and spent a good amount of time hanging out by the riverside, which was pretty wide open and nice. I liked having open space with good lightinig and not-sketchy looking people around. Across the river we could see the buildings of different Porto wine producers, and as well there were some boats in the river and as we crossed to the other side, we amused each other with international swear words and the various translations thereof. I think Johannes won out with his Ferroese phrase meaning something like 'damn you to the flames of hell'. It had a nice ring to it. But we circled around a couple of times, found some Spanish speaking girls from Catalunya to take pictures of us, got some Portuguese pastries (Johannes wanted chocolate cake... and he wanted it right then. It was very out of the blue... C: '...yeah, so I told him I wasn´t interested...' J: 'I want chocolate cake.' K:'What?' J: 'I want chocolate cake, is there a cafe around here?' ). We had a nice time walking around Porto and Caroline and Johannes even bought tickets to the Nightwish show in Porto for mid April.

I had told Caroline that I wanted Chinese food for dinner, but her host Padre had told us we needed to be back home by 9pm which in Spanish time is dinner time, so we just went home and discussed food options. Her host Padre of course was very friendly and pointed out some nice places we could visit along the seashore. Well we went out looking and toured around the beautiful plazas and seashore and eventually settled on a café reasonably close to her house that had pizzas. I got a pizza wth egg on it while Caroline got a tropical pizza.
The whole time we were walking and talking, we discussed what we missed from home, who we missed from home and crazy things for the future - for instance Micajah, he is the first child to kind of enter into our group at home, the 'View Crew' if you will (or VC for short... not VietCong, none of us is named Charlie... or Asian for that matter). In as short as 5 or 6 years, some of us in the VC may be getting married or even begin having children! That´s just too soon! We discussed it at length and heck I couldn´t even decide who my best man would be at a wedding. The point is, we´re getting older and even though we still get together as much as we can, the dynamics will continue to change and I don´t know if I´m ready to be called Uncle Kip, you know? We talked also about what it will be like when we got back to the US, and as we talked about it, there aren´t any hangout places or cafés in Forest. So Caroline and I talked at great length about a café that we would like to make in Forest, a place with enough space for a dance floor and a band, good tapas and snack foods for students and people on a hurry, good generally inexpensive coffee for people on the go (there is no such thing as a to go cup here, we miss that). My thought for the name was Iberia, but who knows. We could have pastries and scones and good bread and tapas and snack foods (not junk, real food), it would be an awesome meeting place and hangout place, especially if it were out by Sonic or Carol´s or something.
We entertained ourselves a great deal talking about that until we finally got home late and got some rest before the next day.
I was a little bit lazy after all my travels and so I got up about 11am to shower and be ready for the day. We resolved to be cooking lunch which could be ready about 2:30 and so we went out to tour the Vilha do Conde area. We went out to the seashore where we hungout on a pier above some rocks. We watched the waves and admired the shells, it was a beautiful and peaceful place, not to mention the pretty awesome weather. I commented that sometime we should come out for a little cookout of all the mussels hanging out on the shore. There were also tons of little gastropods such as limpets and tiny conch-like snails with curled shells. It was beautiful and peaceful, and we also went out to see a 16th century high seas exploration ship called the Nau. It had realistic mannequins inside that were for lack of better words creepy, but all in all it was an interesting boat with lots of robe and barrels and rocks in the bottom (supposedly for road paving in the 'New World').

When we got back, it was time to decide what lunch would be! We had already told them that we wanted chicken, spinach and a couple of other things, but we finalized the menu to: grilled barbeque chicken, roasted potatoes with onions, spinach salad and my fruit parfait dessert. There were two interesting things about this meal. First was my invention of a barbeque sauce, the second was their complete revulsion to the idea of eating spinach raw. To create a barbeque sauce, I pretty much rounded up everything in the kitchen that looked like it could fit and cooked it together for a little while. I think I used apple cider vinegar, ketchup, sugar, salt, black pepper, hot chile powder, oregano, and some other stuff I couldn´t name. But you know what, it actually turned out pretty good! I was very surprised and pleased with myself, it could have maybe used some mustard or brown sugar or molasses or cumin, but it worked! Then the host madre had already very nicely cut up the chicken for me, so I just let the sauce marinade with the chicken for a little bit while we prepped the potatoes. Caroline, of course was my very deft and helpful assistant every step of the way. I quite enjoyed being able to cook again and have my own dominion of flavors and construction of something delicious and beautiful. It was a very freeing and lovely feeling to be creative with what I know best. Caroline even added to the atmosphere by bringing down her laptop and playing some musical songs that we could sing along to. It was just like being back at home cooking :-). We cut the potatoes into cubes about an inch wide, along with semi-circle thin slices of onion and a dressing of olive oil, salt and this pesto that the family had (it could have used more salt all in all I think). That we just tossed together and put into the oven at 400ºF, which as it turns out is 205ºC. Then I made a little vinagrette for the spinach salad. The spinach, I should note, was much tougher and darker in flavor than American spinach. By itself I could understand why they were not very pelased with the idea of raw spinach, but I think with my dressing it was going to turn out just fine, and I was excited to have them try something completely new to them. I whisked together some apple cider vinegar with olive oil and honey to emulsify it, then I added some slices of tomato meat to give it some body and texture. Then it was time to face the chicken. Some of the pieces that were cut off the whole chicken were definitely not what we would be interested in eating grilled in the US - chicken ribs, the keel bone, the neck and several other things I could not even recognize. I asked the host dad if I could give the neck to the dog, and he very vehemently (though friendly) insisted that he would eat it himself.

I must point out that this family has a dog in their little back yard, he´s a very friendly golden retriever that generally seems to not be treated with love. The family hardly ever pets the dog, much less lets him in the house and never gives him treats and the host padre at least handles him very roughly, by the collar and with harsh words and always dismisses the dog from anything. Meanwhile, Caroline and I are generally hoping the dog can come over so we can pet him and give him little snacks and stuff. It was very different treatment from what I´ve even seen in Spain. All across Spain, dogs I´ve seen were treated very nicely, usually even without a collar, just running around free. All the while Spanish dogs are generally really really well trained to voice and signals to stay and come and get down and all that. Caroline´s host family seemed to really enjoy the trick of having the dog shake their hands... but other than that he only had commands to go away or get back in his little area of the yard or to be pulled over and chained to a tree. I did not really agree with the handling of the dog, but he is under their care and seemed to still like people and very healthy, so it´s not a great violation of anything I guess.

Anyways, after sifting through a couple of methods, the host padre showed me that they do have something similar to a grill - it´s very much like a cooling rack set right on top of a heating element, set overtop a pan to catch the runoff juices. Having the heating element set right underneath the rack on which the food was set made for lots of charring, but in general it looked very good and cooked nicely through. The smell of it and the music and the company of Caroline brought both of us back to our summer tradition of fourth of July festivities at the Ballard house, which we tried to describe to the host Padre who was most curious about our yankee culinary creations.

So there it was! We had a nice salad dressing for the spinach, which they seemed most curious about, as well as beautiful grilled barbeque chicken and roasted potatoes and onions. It made me miss my mother´s home cooking but at the same time I was satisfied to be there with this beautiful home food with Caroline to enjoy and also the wonderfully pleasant and welcoming company of Caroline´s host family. The entire family was very very receptive to the meal and even rather enjoyed the spinach salad, despite their preoccupations! Then it was time for dessert!

The night before they had brought out some frozen raspberries which were by this time thawed with some liquid. They then had some fresh strawberried which we sliced up. All of this we macerated in the liquid with a good deal of sugar and a little salt to taste, to let thicken and marinade (I guess) in the fridge. We then crushed up some portuguese cookies (important note here... the Iberian peninsula does not have soft gooey cookies. They do not exist. There is no such thing as a hot soft chocolate chip cookie to eat with hot chocolate or milk or whatever. It is a sad state of affairs, and something that everyone mentions from time to time missing from home. I think some day I may simply make a lot of soft chocolate chip cookies to bring to the JMU office. They will be gone in a flash, but it would be nice I think.) and we set the cookies in the bottom of single serving bowls. Then we whipped up some Portuguese natas, which I guess is like heavy cream into chantilly, or whipped cream. This was laced with sugar and a little bit of vanilla, then set on top of the crushed cookies. Then we brought out the macerated fruit and spooned that on top of the whipped cream, then topped it all off with a swirl of honey, just for that extra touch of home. If I do say so myself, it was my favorite part of the meal, and very well received by the family. In response, they told me that 'next time I come' I should bake some bread, too! I can definitely do that. I think they liked it, and I do dearly miss my bread.

The rest of the day we just spent walking around and discussing our future café for Forest and relationship stuff. It was just nice to have a friend to talk to who knows me well enough to finish sentences and knows exactly who I´m talking about and what I mean, not to mention what I miss. Then again Caroline is kind of a special case in any way since she´s my little sister, eu ermão or mi hermana.

It was sad to go since Vilha do Conde was such a beautiful and open place, not to mention friendly. I hope to go back sometime and actually I might be dropping by at the end of my spring break to Santiago de Compostela and then maybe later again on my last weekend free, the first weekend of April.

It´s nice to see your friends.

Porto 1

Having already bought my bus tickets, I was prepared on Friday to head off to meet Caroline (Ballard) in Porto, Portugal. I had class as usual until lunch at 2, and afterwards I took a long long siesta before meeting up with Katie for some coffee and a walk. We tried something really interesting - MacDonalds café con helado (coffee with ice cream). It was good until the ice cream all melted and the coffee was cold, I think that idea still needs some tinkering. Katie and I walked all around the city, looking at some interesting points on the western side of the city, along the protective wall by the river. After the river, we found a big interesting cathedral, I believe the one that I accidentally walked into in the middle of a mass one time. We were admiring the incredible carvings on the front of the façade when we turned down a path to find a little convent, and we saw an open door. Katie was very skeptical as to whether or not we´re supposed to go inside, but generally unafraid I walked right on in and found another open door, and upon going inside I saw a couple of directional touristy signs, so I knew I wasn´t anywhere I shouldn´t be. But as I walked in, a nun came through the door, apparantly just ready to close the place up. Very nicely she informed me that the visiting hours were coming to an end and Katie and I went on our way. Around the corner, we found this incredibly little shop that sold lots of wine and hams and specialized ciders and lots of cookies (so naturally Katie was all over that) and after enjoying some of the cookies, we made our way back to the plaza mayor where we parted ways. After that I don´t quite recall what I did, except probably wander the city a little bit, taking my time to get back home for dinner at nine.



Madre was making some filets of white fish! She had a delicious tomato sauce with it too, and I was getting really excited watching her dish it into this glass bowl for service when all of a sudden the bowl exploded. Glass shards popped every which way, the fish falling among the dangerous pieces. Well we had leftovers that night, which were good. And at the dinner table Ian and Austin and I had some good natured joking and talking, and all was well. After dinner I went as is my general custom to a local internet café to talk to Bethany for an hour or so.

I try to talk to Bethany just about every night, it´s kind of my time to talk away my worries and feel connected to someone and to get some positive feelings.


You know I think I´ve learned some things about myself while I´ve been here - what I miss. What I miss from home tells me what´s important to me, it tells me what things mean to me and what I like and want. What I miss most from home is Bethany. Our relationship has grown really strong and she´s really my best friend, the person I would run to with anything and talk about anything. I can´t wait to meet up with her in Rome and have fun adventures together! The next thing that I miss is self determination - saying hey, friends are coming over to my place right now or hey I want to eat out tonight or I think I´ll spend the night at my friend´s place or let´s watch a movie at your house or my house or someplace. It kind of feels like we´re back in elementary school, go home for everything and only in special circumstances get to have people over or go play for long times. And it´s really kind of lame how little the JMU office is open - 4 hours, 4 days a week. Anyways, the next thing I miss is cooking. I want to play with my food. I want to be able to sleep in on a Saturday and make a loaf or two of bread. I want to come home and make eggs and bacon. I want to throw together a fantastic meal just for the heck of it, but I have to eat whatever madre gives us - which is usually awesome but not always what we want, you know? Give us pizza one night or chinese food or sandwiches or something other than Spanish ham. Yes it´s good, but so is variety. And I miss just the act of cooking, while I´ve been here I eat a lot of oranges because it gives me a chance to prepare something - peel and clean and neatly pick apart. People think it´s wierd and why would I just not eat oranges if it´s that much work? Well, I just like working on food. The next thing I miss is being able to joke with people. I just don´t know Spanish enough to be able to be funny, and it definitely makes it less fun. You may be wondering why I haven´t missed music yet? I think JMU burned me out on music, I just love listening to good music, I haven´t really had any cravings to play it. Whatever, I´m going to need to play next semester, so it´s not the end or anything.

So I talked to Bethany and then went back and got prepared for the trip. I left rather abruptly at around 12:45 so that I would be on time, and I got there and waited for a while - I had brought a large blanket that Bethany made for me, and it kept me very nice and warm, I´m very glad I have it with me :-). And I got on the bus no problem and sat next to a quiet guy who slept the whole time. The entire trip there was a movie playing in English with subtitles in Portuguese, a lame ´80s movie with Steven Seagal called Above the Law. Anyways it was a long trip and I was probably asleep half of the time, or at least half asleep most of the time.

When we finally arrived in Porto, it was still pitch black and they just kind of left us there in this little plaza. So walking with my somewhat heavy backpack and messenger-style backpack. First I asked some cab drivers where the metro was, and I tried to follow their directions, then I came along two guys walking, one of them about my age, one of them kind of old. The guy my age asked for a cigarette, but I didn´t have any. I asked them in Spanish where the metro was, and they seemed nice enough to want to show me where it is. So I was following them and talking to them as best I could about where I was from. I couldn´t understand a lot of what they said, but they kept talking to me and we got to these stone steps that led down to a stone path and a bridge across a stream to another road. I figured they must know the quickest way to get to the metro apparantly was through this shortcut.
When we got to the bottom of the stone steps, however, the old guy stopped me and started asking me for a little donation for the trouble, so I gave him a Euro, but then he said that he needed more than that for coffee or cocaine. Ah, we seemed to be getting to the heart of the matter. I emphatically told them no money for drugs, and then that I simply had no money. The younger guy seemed to be distracted and not very interested in asking me about anything. As I tried to walk away, they got in my way and wouldn´t let me pass. But the older guy seemed to be very impatient about asking for money and all of a sudden grabbed one of the straps around my chest and would not let go despite my continued demand for him to let go. Then he began making slicing motions and I think was telling me if I didn´t give him the money he would cut me. The younger guy to the side seemed somewhat disinterested but still involved in keeping me there. The older guy began to reach through his pockets, I suspected for a knife. Fearing the worst I began to reach for my multi-tool to try to get the knife, but this seemed to distract him from his search and he began asking what I was looking for. Then he lost his patience and started pushing around and I fell to the ground. While the younger guy was not really that involved, the older guy was trying to push me around and grab at things, so I then started to really fight back and push him back and around and I tried to grab him and turn him around. I felt right then more afraid than anything else, so I completely forgot everything that would make sense to do - trip and push down, break one of his arms, break his nose, knee in the groin. All I did was wrestle off the old man to the ground as best I could and made sure the younger guy understood I didn´t want to fight him and ran off. As I was running away I realized that there was a puncture wound on my left index inger and a large scratch on my middle finger. The only casualties I was sure of.
Later I could not find my camera, which perhaps may have been left on the bus to Porto. Either way, apparantly they don´t make that kind of camera anymore, nor the charger nor a PC cord... so even if they did steal it, the camera´s no good to them. Some small conscious compensation.
Even as my heart was racing, I walked around the city for a while trying to find the metro station, asking some shop-keepers who were really friendly and eventually finding that I had gone to the right place and turned around once before. But I got to the metro station and made it out to Vilha do Conde where Caroline was living and when I arrived there was a map right there. So already having her address I just decided to find my way to her house, even though I had told her to meet me at the stop what would be an hour later.
After a wrong turn or two, I found her house and rang the bell. I wasn´t sure to expect since by then it was bout 8:15am. Caroline´s host Padre answered the door and very kindly let me into a very very modern looking house with broad colors and clean smooth surfaces. He very nicely asked me to put my stuff down and brought me coffee and bread and butter and went to wake up Caroline. So I, sweaty, heart still beating a little funy and tired as anything first saw Caroling sitting at her table drinking coffee as she surprisedly looked up at me in her PJs. After hugging and saying hi and everything, she was nice enough to let me go sleep for a while. So I went up into a guest room of sorts and woke up to Caroline´s nudges at about 11am, whereas we went out to see Porto after some discussions with Caroline´s very nice family. Her mother is rather attractive at her age, very friendly and her father as well is very distinguished and speaks Spanish very fluently, so I had no trouble communicating with the family. Caroline´s host sister seemed very friendly and pleasant and her host brother seemed a difficult teenage boy but nonetheless an interesting and generally friendly guy. This was going to be an interesting trip, stay tuned for more!

¿Todo Que Necesitas Es Latin?

(written last night before bed)

Today was a day that I needed. Today was a good, happy, carefree day. And I think that I´ll have a really good weekend. After classs, lunch and a nap, I went and finished writing a blog or two (finally, right?) which actually began as just an e-mail for Bethany... I just edited it to make a blog post later. I think there are more things that I can add to my blog about daily life because there are a lot of things that I see and smell and hear that are pretty unique. But tonight was good. After going to the office, I went out to my night of Tapas (this whole week, Jesús has been taking small groups out for dinners of tapas at two different restaurants) and I tried to enjoy myself. I sat with Kim, my very awesome smart Spanish speaking friend and fellow RA, and Jesús and Dr. Van Norman, and I just had a fantastic time talking about the food and about Spain and classes and I spent a great deal of the time speaking Spanish to Jesús. It was really nice to be able to just ignore the negativity and live up the interests I had and discussed. It may have been because the night was all about food, but regardless it was fun. Afterwards, we went to the Plaza Mayor for the celebration of Rachel´s birthday. I thought to myself that I´d have a glass or two and head out. Well... even if I wasn´t so moderate in my approach, at least it was a happy one, as later I was walking home singing 'Spamalot' like it's my job.

There could not have been a better birthday girl than Rachel. Perhaps the least controversial and most easily liked person, she was very cute all dressed up for her 21st birthday night. When she first showed up, there were a bunch of us there and we had wine and stuff but then her house-mate and inarguably best friend and constant companion Allie (who´s very simply adorable - short, always smiling and well dressed) had arranged for some people to go off as a kind of distraction for Rachel while Allie and others brought out a cake with candles and little presents.
As Rachel, P-Coat covered with a homemade yellow birthday crown, click clacked with her dressy heels into the plaza, all eyes from the usual corner of the illuminated stone square looked up from the café tables set outside in the chilly night air covered in plain green tablecloths and now an assortment of half-full glasses of wine and a motley crew of student-priced bottles of wine. Smiling with the honest happiness and excitement any birthday girl deserves, Rachel hopped, skipped and practically jumped around the arches to finally see the lit candles set atop the mousse-cake that Allie had found for her (I would ponder 'somehow', but there are a million pastry shops here, I guess it can't have been too difficult to find). With all cameras towards her, she blew out the candles, plunging the group into a strangely shady but familiar darkness and commences a short celebratory dance to the tune of 'Cumpleaños Feliz' in a semi-drunk manner, remeniscent of Irish drinking songs. There we were: all of different types, preferences, religions, and social classes celebrating the birthday of a commonly loved one in the cold winter air. It was our own personal Christmas, with the best girl of all shared amongst us. A gift not often enough given and in these times of isolation from most things we know, something highly sought. Tonight we shared love, and as the Beatles might say, that´s all you need.

(written much later last night)

The other night Ian wanted to ask me about what I think of Jazz. Because he´s Ian I got a couple minutes in and he just interrupted and talked for 15-20 minutes about Led Zeppelin and Lynyrd Skynyrd and why they´re the best bands ever. It was nice of him to ask - not a good listener, but he can talk.
But it got me thinking about how I think of jazz. I think I have a pretty interesting view of it because I see it as a language, a beautiful language that I speak and understand very well, though I cannot write or read very well. When I hear someone playing jazz, I think of it in the same way some might a poetry session or a lecture or speech or what have you. When I go to concerts it's to me like hearing a book on tape. If there's a really interesting or complex story, I like it. It it's an unhappy or surrealistic or small-cast or religious or 20s era story, generally speaking I will dislike it. Also if the performer only reads the language some and therafter thinks they can speak it, inevitably it will be an excruciating story. Unfortunately I think that the teachers at JMU try to teach people to read the language first and later just hope that they listen and pick up on how to speak. Most never do and it's both frustrating and painful to listen to when you know they haven't really practiced using the language nor have they listened to the language being spoken correctly. The most interesting thing about the language of jazz is that every bit of it is contextual and it say different things to different people But the context is the important frame of reference for the sentence structure of jazz. The chord changes are very similar to situations, there are things you say and in certain ways, depending on the situation. A lot of singers, for example, keep msucially saying 'Hey you guys! That's the bomb?' even though that phrase is outdated an generally out of context for most songs. That is my view of the language of jazz.

I think it would be a most beneficial study of the lanuage of jazz to spend the first year of study entirely listening, as a final at the end you should be given a certain set of chords and by ear you should be able to hum a workable improvisation over top of it. Once a person has the feel of what the language sounds like and basically how it´s structured, it should then be important to teach a vocabulary of different chord structures. For example, a major chord can be similar to the English word 'yeah' in that it's used as a first or last term in a phrase or as a random interjection. A diminished chord is similar to the work 'but,' it begs more and resolves beautifully to many different things. So on and so forth an assortment of vocabulary terms should be taught in writing. unfortunately, I never learned the names or writing for this vocabulary, so really I only know how they sound and how to respond to them. It must be very nice to be able to read jazz as one reads English. There are not enough fluent speakers, and then again there never were. It is similar, one supposes, to Latin these days: popular, elegant, easy to se randomly, but few really know it and it is hardly spoke fluently with grace. Jazz, the musical American Latin.

Leesh-bo-ah

Unfortunately I did not take great notes nor did I even take my camera with me, (totally by acccident) so I will have to rely on my memory (god help us all...) to write about my trip to Lisbon. To begin with, it was a long 5 hour trip to Lisbon from Salamanca... but it was a very interesting trip because 1. we were watching Man In the Iron Mask in Spanish and 2. the scenery is just unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I made sketches of some of beautiful sights we saw along the way including gorgeous arching bridges across the mountain-sides and the seemingly fictional sight of the old side by side with the new. It seemed like most of the trip was through mountains and from the sides of mountains we could see other little hill tops in the distance. Besides the luscious (unbelievably so in the cold weather) leafery and innumerable treetops there were perfectly white plastered houses with red tile rooftops bunched on the tops of these hillsides with the inevitable cathedral or big church close to the top. To the sides of the villages, it was interestingly commong to have huge wind turbines reaping precious energy from the ferocious winds that at times threatened to topple our precariously speeding bus. Sometimes there would even be a castle-like structure in the middle of the clay-topped homes... it looked absolutely like a disney movie, there ought to be a dragon flying in at any moment. Alas, not it was not a disney movie and we carried on our trip for several more hours before arriving in Lison, which reminded me of a non-sketchy version of Richmond, VA.

A large flat surface surrounded by mountains, Lisbon, being the capital of Portugal, was very business like with many buses, many people, and many shops. There were also lots of absolutely gorgeous sites to visit, which I will describe shortly. When we arrived at the hotel, it was less than expected and it was a lot of work to check in 25 people since they had to take all our passport info down as a government ordered measure of all hotels and the only portuguese speaker in our group was taking care of all of it. Poor Filipe worked hard but eventually we all got it done. The hotel looked like kind of a hole in the wall, red brick front expanding vertically with a rather narrow entrance in the front. Once you go in there’s a pleasant reception area and on each floor is a number of rooms and on the top floor there is a lovely breakfasting area which in the morning hosted a juice machine, fresh soft rolls, hard crusty rolls, ham, cheese, fruit spreads, butter (delicious on the crusty rolls) and a coffee machine. After briefly planning and talking to the very nice man at the front desk who seemed to appreciate the little bits of Portuguese that we knew, we decided to use a tour bus to visit the sights we knew we were interested in. I was skeptical about the cost of the tour bus but we went on our way out to the nearest bus stop and waited. And waited. It took a good 15 minutes of standing around a giant very interesting statue in the middle of a traffic circle before the double decker open top blue tour bus pulled up.
The tour bus as it turns out had a closed top but lots of windows so we could look out at every but not get cold, and furthermore it had a multilingual free tour guide audio thing that played Portuguese music in between narrations. Katie, Kristin and I (K cubed, if you will) made our first stop by the seashore where sat the Torre de Belém. Hundreds of years old and functioning as a lookout tower and prison at various times, it is a formidibal fortress, dominated by a large castle-like tower. More important than the tower though was the view and surroundings. Again I tasted the bitter saltiness and cleanliness of the wind and felt peace. Open sea... which means fresh fish! We walked up that tall tower for a spectacular view which was hopefully encapsulated in my Oktograph, or whatever that awesome 8-pictures/exposure camera my sister gave me is named. After seeing that and a short walk, we found the Monasterio de los Jerónimos which is HUGE. The first thing we came across was the nice garden in front of it, which sported a giant pool-sized fountain and several quarters of a nicely pruned and arranged garden. The first part we walked into was the cathedral part of the monastery what was a good example of European cathedrals: giant picturesque stone structures studded by incredibly ornate carvings and surrounded by reverent enclaves decorated and dedicated towards some particular saint with candles, paintings and other beautiful artwork. Another factor of European cathedrals that it exemplified was the usage as a sort of mausoleum, whereas this particular cathedral was the resting place of Portugal’s famous navigator: Vasco de Gama. The structure of the monastery was similar to the Louvre with the center and two long arms stretching out. In the middle, though it had cloister gardens instead of a big glass pyramid. In the building there was also an archaelogical museum with old pots, graves, and stone structures, and also a maritime museum with all kinds of old maritime equipment, clothes, weapons, paintings and ultimately ships! It was very interesting and best described in pictures which one will have to check on the Facebooks of Katie Reed or Kristin McNamara.

After we visited the Cathedral, it was time for lunch, which was then followed by the archaelogical and maritime museums. For lunch, I had looked in my handy-dandy Michelín Guide and found a delicious-looking inexpensive restaurant to visit. Unfortunately when we found it, inexpensive to Michelín translates to way out of the price range of students. So after a short search we found a nice looking eat-in café with Portuguese people eating there, and we figured it was a nice place to find lunch. On the menú of this restuarant by the shore was indeed fish, and lots of it. I decided on roasted Salmon, while Katie got bacalão (cod, the Iberian staple) and Kristin got a roasted golden fish. While waiting, I decided while in Portugal to try the Portuguese wine, so I got a cup of the house Porto. I have by now tried a reasonable variety of wine from Virginia and I have tried to have a little Spanish wine by now, but I have never had anything like that porto. Very dark with strong tannins and bite that would have a dog running, it was unique and addictive. It had a very nice fruity aftertaste that has otherwise been difficult to find, but boy was it strong. I guess that’s why they served it in tiny little goblets - almost like a round double-shot. Since I could by no means drink it outright, it was a sipping wine and lasted me the whole meal. When our meal arrived, my salmon was served as a steak more or less sliced straight off the body with large potatoes, cooked spinach and a small salad. The salmon was moist, fresh and just as tender as it could be, helped by the delicious garlic oil served with Katie’s very salty fillet of bacalão. Kristin seemed confused by her plate, as it was a whole roasted golden fish. Whole... eyes and gills and skin and fins and all. I thought it looked beautiful and so happily filleted it for her in return for a taste of its white and fresh moist meat. Something interesting that I’m not sure I’ve noted yet is that in Iberia one does not get a glass of water, one only gets bottled water. Waiters and bartenders are confused and skeptical if you dare to ask for ‘un vaso de agua’, because it’s only ever served bottled. Since there is never free water or water fountains, it is somewhat expensive to keep hydrated, but we manage and I do my best to keep with me my water bottle. Unfortunately I did not have my water bottle with me either on this trip and so we went through many a bottle in there. The girls decided to get some dessert as well: Katie found a really interesting marshmallow meets cheesecake pie with a delicious crust, and Kristin had a chocolate slightly dry (not meaning alcoholic) cake. Both delicious, though that was a very unique marshmallow-ish pie.

While we were in the maritime museum, I really enjoyed looking at the old maps. I’m not sure why exactly that I like them, maybe it has something to do with my fascination with the old way of writing things, much like illuminated manuscripts. I think that style is incredibly beautiful and mesmerizing that a person actually did all that work by hand, paying such incredibly attention to the detailing and reasoning. To see that kind of attention on an international basis on a world map of the 1600s is fascinating to me mostly on the errors made and the extranneous notes made, for example pictures of sail-ships and monsters and random little islands. The colors are incredibly and surprising, given the difficulty of long distance commerce in those times to get materials to make inks and pastes of those incredibly colors. Anyways, my point of mentioning this is that I bought a print of one of the really old maps on show in the maritime museum, so now I have my own map of the world that can help me keep track.

From there we took the tour bus back to the end of the bus’ route, which ended up carrying OTHER students from the University, also international students from the US on a weekend trip. What are the odds that US students attending the same university in another country would be meeting us on a tour bus in Lisbon, Portugal? Very curious indeed. From St. John’s I believe (a private Christian college at any rate) they walked off with us as we walked off the bus in a brilliantly large plaza reminiscent of Paris because of the 1800s horse-borne statue person in the centre, with lots of buildings and facades all visible from the edge. We didn’t know how we were going to return back to the hotel from there, so we asked the St. John’s students who happily told us that there was indeed a very close subway system that works very well and is very cheap. We said our goodbyes and took the very clean and spacious subway back close to our hotel.

That night I thought to myself, why not, I’ll go out and have a good time. Invited by many people, we decided it would be a good night to find something fun and enjoy ourselves with some Portuguese drinks and perhaps find some good company. It was difficult at first since we were taking a subway to a place we didn’t know until others from the group came along and told us that we weren’t in fact going straight to a club but going to some bars beforehand for some unique Portuguese drinks. Excellent, I would enjoy myself at the bars and head back to the hotel. Well we arrived in these very narrow streets, many having already pregamed to a heavy buzz if not a little drunkenness. I must say though this caused a very interesting situation in the subway. There were some 15-20 of us, trying to move together in the subway… drunk… in another country… where we don’t speak the language. Personally I found it embarrassing to be with some of the people since they were unabashedly loud drunk Americans, while of course there were some others interested in peacefully moving from one place to another. On the subway I heard one or two other passengers speaking accented English, and so in a kind of Portu-glish I apologized to them for the loud and obnoxious actions of my friends for being stupid Americans. Very nicely and curiously he responded with the question, ‘Why are you ashamed of your nationality? Don’t apologize.’ It was not angry, it was not even annoyed, just very matter of fact and curious. That really caught me off guard, and I really had no response. I suppose I have the assumption that all Europeans think in the back of their minds whenever they see us ´hey look, stupid Americans, let’s see what they do next’ or I suppose ‘hé le regard, Américains stupides, voit qu'ils font prochain’ or 'Mira, Americanos estúpidos, mira que hacen'. Perhaps not? A question for me to ponder.

At any rate, eventually we reached several streets absolutely packed with our-age students and young adults, all with drinks and cigarettes talking with each other in a large variety of languages. We somehow went straight for a bar that seemed to have reasonable prices and standard Portuguese drinks. Our guide of sorts, Felipe, helped many girls order drinks and furthermore initiated many conversations, probing for Spanish speakers or I suppose for him, interesting Portuguese speakers. Looking at the bar’s menu, I saw lots of drinks including the very Portuguese ingredient – cachaça. Caiparinha, caipamiel and many others. I shot for caiparinha first since it was a familiar cocktail name and caipamiel to hand to some friend I meet or one of our companions who did not have a drink. I honestly don’t know what’s in a caiparinha, but it was a very very strong drink with lime and sugar. The cachaça tastes kind of like a mulled rum, brunt and very strong, with the Caribbean cane-based flavor. The malt-liquor of Brazil, it tasted very strong but very interesting, I’m glad to have tried it. While we were talking, I just happened to have met some very interesting Spaniards from Galicia! We talked about politics and regional idiosyncrasies, El Camino de Santiago and so on and so forth. I was really really excited to be speaking Spanish in a useful way and I must say that was one of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had so far in Spain! I really must spend more time with Spaniards, particularly of my age group. To get home we did the one thing I have been hesitant to do anywhere, particularly in a foreign country renowned to have the worst drivers in the world: we took a cab. I think we may have been as lucky as we could have been to get a reasonably safe an d sensible drive who was also friendly. Not overly so, in fact he didn’t really say more than a sentence, but he smiled in what I thought to be a genuinely warm and friendly way as we managed to say goodnight and take care in Portuguese. The whole ride back costs all 4 of us in the car €5. For a safe ride back from perhaps the one safe cab driver in all of Portugal, I’d say €1.20 is a steal.

The next day we got up early, ate some more of the delicious breakfast and set off for our daytrip, but we made a short stop on the way there. It seemed like very randomly we paused and stopped at the side of the road after passing some beaches. In a very democratic manner, our bus driver, Antonio, asked in his very southern and heavily accented (and therefore difficult to understand) Spanish if we were interested in spending some time at the beach. Predominantly beach bums, our answer was resoundingly affirmative. I asked him where we were, he shrugged his shoulders and told me 'En ningúna parte - el campo,' or 'nowhere - the countryside'. It seemed almost aimless how we meandered off the bus, as if there were in fact something wrong and we had to get out to fix the problem. Luckily there was no problem and after a short paseo (walk, as in to take a walk) we arrived at a semi-deserted beach. Several people were playing with large triangular kites in the brisk wind, and several people were playing with their undeniably cute dogs, but other than that the beach was like a small private enclave. In the space of a football field the little beach was surrounded on both sides by rocky cliffs, sharp and heavily angular stretching into the distance. Smelling heavily of salt and somewhat sadly cool and windy, the beach was sort of an awkward escape. Of course there were JMU kids all around, but I felt like I was sitting alone on a sort of purgatory beach. Strong, windy and wave-driven silence flooded my ears with the peace they had sought for some time. I felt as if I should sit down and resolve my life. With the white crests and rocks as my counsellors, I wanted to grab pawful after pawful of solitary peace. The white noise silence was relaxing and haunting. As I had wanted to so many times in Paris and London and even Salamanca, I wanted to have my eternal companion at my side to point and say 'Look, the sound of beauty and sadness!'. But there was no one to see the noise, all eyes were pointed inside, transfixed by the crisis of feeling as a fish out of water. But the sound was beautiful and sad no matter if anyone was watching it - indeed, this tree in the forest made a haunting and wonderful sound perhaps if anything because no one was listening.
After a short while, we were told it was time to leave and though I did not listen the water waved goodbye at us sadly as we left. You may be asking how can someone look at a sound or listen to a someone waving? I would argue this is a matter of faith, but that is for another day.

Our day trip was to a tiny little town nested in the mountains called Sintra. Before I describe the city I think it’s important to note how insane our bus drivers are, how impossibly close they can make it through tiny mountain roads, bending around curves as if by magic, narrowly avoiding running straight into hundred year old walls or falling off huge cliffs or even hitting all the cars around us. It is still a mystery to me how our driver managed those roads. Sintra is very exactly a town on the side of a mountain. Everything is steep and at the very top of the huge hill was a castle which was incredibly difficult to reach, particularly by foot into the forest surrounding it. Within the city it seemed like all they had were houses, restaurants and touristy shops. Without a tour guide or any such thing, we were more or less floundering about without rhyme or reason. While I was walking with Katie, though, we did come across something very interesting to me. As we approached, I saw a little enclave with kind of a 3 foot high guarding stone wall. Within the enclave were many people with groups of large water bottles and further inside was something that appeared like a little tiled bath, with two taps continuously flowing with water onto rocks whichj seemed to act as disseminators of some sort, to deflect the water into a kind of fountain whenever people weren’t gathering the (one assumes) fresh water into their water bottles (easily 3-4 gallons per bottle). The tiles were white and blue and yellow and very few reds. It did not seem to be in any particular arrangement except on the back wall which made Romanesque portraits of who knows whom. This was interesting to me, but as the people appeared bothered by our curious approach, we moved on quickly. Later we attempted to ascend the mountain to find the castle at the top, but it was a long hike, curiously obstructed by caution tape in various places, cutting us off to the point that we simply gave up. Along the way I found a cork tree, which I took a sample from with my awesome little multi-tool I got in my Christmas stocking. I have used that multi-tool for a million and one things, from peeling all the fantastically 3000x better than the US oranges that I’ve been eating, for cutting just about anything, and for just about anything every day that takes specialized tools to do right. Except for a wine bottle opener, it does not have that. I shall have to remedy that sometime.

Anyways, it was a curious lost day with lots of walking and eventually I found a vendor as I have seen in all of the past cities: London, Paris, Madrid - roasted chestnuts. They seem to be a really big deal. The vendors always have a little plume of smoke ascending from their little carts. With a collection of paper serving cones to the side, the form of their carts are always similar to that of a New York hot dog stand, but instead of a griddle and hot dogs, they have pots full of burning embers and holding lots of chestnuts roasting away. Their hands appear blackened and calloused from many hours tending and serving charred and fiery chestnuts and coals. Their faces look tired and blackened from some sort of surrender to the fact that their hands are covered with soot all day, so to 'pick, scratch wipe' as Mr. Webb my high school band director used to say during hot marching band practices, these vendors spread the soot all over. To be fair, it was a hefty €3 or 4 for a cone of maybe 5 or 6 chestnuts, so they’re making pretty reasonable profits. But on appearance it seems like one might say a demeaning task to be covered in cinders tending embers all day. Perhaps it is less so than our beloved story of Cinderella because of the economic benefit, but I can’t even imagine how satisfying a cool shower and perhaps a nice dinner must be to one such grime-grabber. But the chestnuts, they were certainly a memorable taste. First of all it was fun to peel off the singed shell as a sort of game, perhaps playing again with my multi-tool. Second it was such a strong starchy but sweet stone of the chestnut. It seemed to me very much like hard sweetened gnocchi… perhaps a little larger. Anyways I enjoyed it and enjoyed sharing it with those around me. I don’t care to elaborate more on the day-trip, but I must say it was an interesting place, Sintra, as was the escape of our bus through those tiny winding roads.

The day following was the day that we were to leave. Everyone was interested in getting assistance from the bus driver to find places around town, and so he drove us to the city center where the stock exchange of Lisbon sat, as well as the ‘LOVE’ statues. So we got out and walked down and down and down and down. It felt like a mile long descending track, but sunny and New York-like. I must say this was the type of city I imagined Salamanca to be – a place of business and suits and shoe shiners and monuments. Alas, not it is perhaps more similar to a monastery – solemn and drowsy. Anyways, we enjoyed walked down the large sidewalks, looking at all the interesting stores with the (I thought) easy to read but unintelligible to hear Portuguese signs etc. I thought about the fact that I hadn’t found anything yet to bring back to my family, so what would be one thing that my family would like? The answer of course is a Hardrock Café pilsner glass. We have many of them. Not many, a museum of them. What best than to add to the collection? So Katie, Kristin and I shared a very strong and delicious cocktail from the drink before taking one along with me. Before we left, we also took some time to look at the big ‘LOVE’ monuments in some deep central plaza, although not as much as I’d like and unfortunately not enough to write a real description. I guess you’ll have to ask Caroline about that.

Un Día en la Vida

Really I don’t want to talk about classes because I’m already really tired of them, but not really I guess. (that’s three ´really´s in one sentence, a masterpiece) I just dislike the process of going to classes, especially when I feel like I could be doing something better with my time. It’s so much easier to talk about places I’ve seen because I wanted to go there to see them. Likewise I will enjoy writing about things I enjoyed and wanted to learn in classes, I do have several of those things. But in general, I just hate being talked at. It is a very interesting psychological thing I suppose. When I am at a job, I take great pride in fulfilling whatever task I am assigned and seeing it done completely and to the expanse of my total satisfaction. I really enjoy being able to present something I have worked hard on, especially if I learned something in the process. I really like working hard. This may be because in work I am usually given some sort of freedom to do as I see fit, which I enjoy exploiting to my personal satisfaction so that I can present not only something satisfactory to my superior, but also something satisfactory and interesting to myself as well.

In school, it feels like professors are working for the satisfaction of themselves or the university, not in the most remote sense the satisfaction of the student. It is tiring and sometimes not insulting but... I don’t know, a feeling of completely wasted time when a teacher is lecturing on and on about something that no student is interested in enough to actually remember. Besides those who have the incredibly gift to just remember whatever is said to them, I know I am one of those who easily forgets unimportant or obscure details that don’t interest me. Even things that do interest me are easy to forget, unless they hold some strong personal connection - to food, culture, history or random music, movie or theater trivia (fascinating what people value, eh?). I think there must be a much better way of teaching things, a way to make things relevant and interesting enough for people to have some sort of drive to actually want to learn things: for example, to make anything interesting at all to me, you can make it relevant to food. Relate something to the historical or anthropological or traditional aspects of food and I’m all over it. Yes, you can say so easily ´So why don’t you make those parallels yourself if it will help you? ´If I could do it myself, there would be no reason to go to school, would there? I think it is the teacher’s job to demonstrate while teaching. I can go to the library and informational is available. Helping students to understand concepts and information by relating it to the students in a useful way should be the work of a teacher. Too many teachers are under the assumption that they are there just to make information available to students and that the students have to do all the work. It’s true absolutely that it is the work of students to want to learn and to have an interest in what they’re observing and make an attempt to learn the materal, but there is only so much interest that one can attempt to pay to paint drying.

Every morning I wake up still dead tired after about 7.5 hours of sleep at about 8 or 8:15 or 8:30, whenever I decide to finally get up, then I decide what I’m going to wear, then eventually settle on something that I later think is stupid looking and wish that I had Spanish shoes. Then the past two days I would head off to Latin American studies, which looks to be an interesting class, It’s being taught in English by a teacher that came with us from JMU and goes with us on all our excursions and hangs out in the JMU office. Dr. Bill Van Norman. Above all I believe him to be trying really hard to be our friend, which is helpful and unfortunately can be taken the wrong way by some of the girls. Unlike most of us, he is actually quite fluent in the language having spent time in Cuba and Spain before to do research, but like many of the students he has a very American accent, as if someone who took Latin were just reading written Spanish. I suppose as long as Spaniards understand, it doesn’t quite matter what accent you have. Although in some cases it can seem somewhat disrespectful to me how some people don’t even attempt to pronounce the Spanish words correctly, perhaps figuring they’ll get the idea and they don’t need to inconvenience themselves with learning the local pronunciations. I would liken this personally to how insulted natives can be if you say ´Stawn-ten´, VA instead of ´Stant-n´, VA. Also some people I guess don’t realize that their bad pronunciation can in fact be saying different words than they mean, which can be entertaining to watch unfold, but still the disrespect is aggravating.
ANYWAYS, the beginning of this class on Latin American culture was with some discussions of pre-Spanish cultures of the Mayans and Incas and Aztecs and so forth and so on. We got to read this really fascinating and interesting article about the culinary habits of the Mayan and Aztec people. Corn or maíz was the most important thing to their nutritional lives as they had gods that encouraged the growth of their crops and if they were properly fed with sacrifices, their crops would grow, if not, then no food. It is also a part of daily life that the men would work with the women to sow and harvest the grain while it was the work of the women to grind the maíz into masa harina, a kind of corneal that was generally mixed with lye, a basic (in opposition to acidic) chemical derived from ashes originally, which would remove the hard and indigestible outer layer of the maíz so that the cornmeal could then be mixed into thin rounds and made into tortillas! It was also popular to mix this mush with vegetables and if one was particularly lucky, wealthy or attending a festival, some meat. The Mayans and Aztecs, however, did not have domesticated animals so they could not eat meat on a regular basis, only the nobles and rich people could afford the scarce hunted meat - which helped them to grow on average up to 10 centimeters taller than the common folk who did not have the protein from the meat. Very very interesting stuff I think.

After class, usually I come here where I am to the computer lab of the University to check mail, write mail, whatever. Then at noon I ran back to class to business Spanish, but Monday I couldn’t find it so I just walked around the city and want into a HUGE cathedral, took some awesome pictures, then went to bookstores and such. Yesterday I did actually go to business Spanish, and it looks like it’s only vocabulary, not a real study of business in Spain and how it differs from the US or anywhere else for that matter. So I think I will drop that class in favor of Spanish Civilization which I will describe later. After the Business Spanish that I no longer have is Spanish Politics, which is taught by an Argentinian man named Agustinus. He looks Russian and speaks a very difficult to understand dialect of Argentinian Spanish whereas he slurs a lot of things and does not pronounce d’s or s’s at the end or middle of words, instead sometimes he uses an ‘h’ sound to us or a ‘j’ sound to Spanish speakers. His class is extremely freeform and is based on getting newspapers and reading articles to discuss politics. He has interesting stories to tell, although he’s awkwardly not very funny, but he tries and in some other way he is amusing. I really enjoy talking about political structures and figures, so the class will be interesting to me, I think, since I don't really know a whole lot about Spanish political structure except what I found myself this last semester for that research paper. I also sat next to Katie and she is very friendly and after class ends, it is 2pm, so we have to rush home for dinner. Walking with Katie, however, we pass by all the confiterías (pastry shops) and inevitably go in one or two of them to try the delicate delicious and very sweet treats that we can’t get from our madres.

The past two days, because they have been festivals there was no school and the whole extended family came over for the largest most important meal of the day here, lunch! It is fun to talk to the family and ask them questions about the culture and tell them stories and hear them tell me what they know about it or if they agree or what’s normal to them. They’re also just a fun-loving family that really obviously cares a lot about each other. It is quite interesting to me the usage of a kiss in Spanish culture. All older relatives or friends always ask for a ‘besito’ or little kiss from their younger kids. It is almost an expectation to show love and affection here, as open kissing and schmoozing in public between young or old lovers is considered beautiful and right. I must say one thing I miss from home is physical affection from Bethany or hugs from friends or whatever it might be. Because we’re so uncomfortable and we don’t really know lots of Spanish people, there is generally little touching between the JMU kids unless people have grown to be pretty good friends... it’s somewhat depressing. Just to feel comfortable to put your hand on someone’s shoulder or to give a hug or to touch someone’s arm or muss someone’s hair or to shake a hand or high-five or pound it... touching is an important thing between people and maybe that’s causing some of the tension and withdrawal I have from home. I just want to be in contact with someone.

After lunch, I usually take a nap until it’s time for another class or when I’m just ready to go out and do something. The past two days my last class of the day at 6pm was Spanish Civilization. Taught by a woman María, I think it will be my favorite class since she is teaching helpful things about the society and geography and traditions and history, all of which I’m absolutely dying to know about Spain! She is also very very friendly and makes quite clear what we need o know for the test and is open to any questions and does not dwell on seemingly unimportant or irrelevant things, something you no doubt have noticed I value in teachers... although I guess that is a relative thing, as things that are culinarily relevant to me that I may ask questions about quite frequently would not be relevant to you in the least. But that is the nature of perspective. Yes, we looked at geography quite a bit this last class and I´m rather excited to see what it will be like on Friday. Yes, Friday. I guess I should explain that each of our classes consists of three 50 minute periods during the week, but they are not consecutive. There could be two periods in a row on one day for the same class and then a third period on say Wednesday. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the arrangement of the periods for each class, they are more or less just shuffled throughout the week. Unfortunately they are shuffled in just such a way that I have to get up every morning for 9am classes. Wednesday through Friday, though, I have no classes after lunch, which will be good I think. I am not a morning person, but then I can dedicate that afternoon and evening to resting and doing whatever. So then after class I usually just walk around and maybe find a bookstore to stand in and read a little bit about Spanish wine and food. But inevitably everyone clusters to the JMU office between 4pm and 8pm during the weekdays. There we can talk to each other about what’s going on and how things are going and for some people make arrangements for their vacations. Then we have to leave at 8 and take our time getting home for dinner at 9pm.

Several days ago, I decided to start a tradition I hope to continue in Spain and perhaps beyond – a glass of wine with dinner. I went to the store, took time to look at the selection and find something that looks new but different and settled on a Ribero del Duero red wine with Tempranillo grapes from I don't remember where that said it was aged for 6 months in oak and has a full red flavor with hefty but not overwhelming tannins. Sure, I said to myself, and after asking madre if it was ok, popped it open for dinner. MAN is this an interesting wine. It seems like a whiskey of red wine, very smoky with traces of fruitiness – which tells me it was indeed aged for quite a while and was made with very sturdy grapes. I must be getting used to wine because I can drink it instead of just the occasional sip of the past. I really enjoy a glass or two with dinner, not only for the unique flavor and warm feeling, but also because I am starting to notice how it can complement food. This is what I’ve been waiting for! I’ve been curious for many years how this pairing of wines and foods is supposed to happen, it just takes a knowledge of grapes and vintner methods to determine the flavors of a wine and then take that into consideration when deciding how to balance a dish or meal. I am by no means proficient with this yet, but hopefully in due time I’ll learn more and be able to match wines reasonably with dishes.

Dinner is an interesting time since usually it is just Ian and Austin and I. Lately things have grown tense because Austin and I seem to have made clear our differences from Ian, as have many others from the group. I generally attempt to hear him out and really talk encouragingly while attempting to point out reasonings or points of view or whatever it may be. Ian has a habit of talking whenever he feels the urge, particularly when someone is in the middle of making a point. He is trying to tell us that he’s comfortable with who he is and no one needs to judge him and why can’t we all just get along. He is right, but at the same time there is such thing as courtesy and empathy. Taking into consideration that something you’re doing may bother someone else and so thus refraining to me is a matter of courtesy and respect. If you make me aware that something I’m doing is bothering you, unless I have particularly strong convictions about it, I’ll generally attempt to accomodate and refrain for you. We’ll see how that progresses.

Anyways, usually after dinner I will run off to an internet café for as long as I can until they close to IM Bethany and then I go home and read or write or just go to sleep. And every night to help me go to sleep I watch an episode of Good Eats on my iPod, when get to sleep about 12:30, only to wake up tired again at 8am.