Two of my good friends from Wisconsin- Erik and Willie- made a 6 day stop in Madrid on their month-long trek through Europe. We all met each other cutting cartilage and breaking rabbit knees in the Kaplan lab, so of course, we have a lot to go on. Oh - and we also SHOULD have won the intramural softball league last year, but we all keep the trophy in our hearts.
I gave them a two day tour of Madrid - I think I've gotten to be a much better tour guide now, and it's a lot easier with two people versus eight, like when my whole family was here. We ate tapas at El tigre, little sandwiches at 100 montaditos, and all saw our first bullfight. Which we all enjoyed...but a definite guilty type of enjoyment. We had to scalp the tickets in front of the Plaza de Toros because they were sold out. Haha, never want to do that again... the boys thought that Ali and I were about to be thrown in the back of a black Ford Falcon and never to be heard of again. Yeah, it was pretty sketchy.
After Madrid, we left for San Sebastian. It's a six hour train ride north, in the top east corner next to France, sitting on cliffs overlooking the Atlantic (bigger region = Pais vasco). A huge surfer's destination, and we did meet a lot of Californian and Australian tourists there with their wetsuits and longboards. It was beautiful, but we never mustered the cajones to jump into the ocean because it was pretty cold and cloudy the whole time. At night time we discovered the Tas Tas, a sweet little bar tucked into the Old Town in San Sebastian. Roberto, a super friendly bartender poured us a few free rounds of beers and shots, which was more than enough to get us all to stay later, and come back the next night.
In that part of Spain, vasco is spoken, which is totally it's own language with no roots in Spanish, English or French or anything spoken now really. I put up a picture of a street sign to show how distinct it is. We couldn't even learn Thank you or another beer or please or anything. It all sounded like gibberish.
Well the boys left, early flight out to Rome to continue their marathon trip. And I started writing this paper for my literature class. I'm comparing the novel La verdad sobre el caso Savolta to its movie version. It's a horrible movie but a great book, and I probably wouldn't have picked this topic to write about it I knew just how terrible the film it... but it's due in a week, so too late for second guessing...I guess...haha
And I'm studying for the poetry section of the test. Luis Garcia Montero is the poet who I'm going to focus on- and all of his poems in the anthology Habitaciones separadas are themed around time, love and the city. This is the last verse of his first poem in that book, called Las razones del viajero or the "Reasons of the traveler."
Sabe que le resulta necesario"He knows that it will become necessary to learn to live in another age, in another love, in another time."
aprender a vivir en otra edad,
en otro amor,
en otro tiempo.
I do feel like I have been living in another time (aka no dryers or dishwashers, haha) and in a whole new world. I am starting to wonder how it really will feel to go back home in July. Excited and sad at the same time.
Leave you with what I've been listening to all day... ingrid michaelson...you can find her at myspace.com. I really like "Breakable"
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=11436578
