Quiche of the Day (redux)

Yet another Apokalipsis!

2007-10-08T00:16:00.000-07:00

In those intervening years, I managed to start another weblog. That old one will just direct you to this one.

So please check it out!

Apokalipsis -- Everything's over!

2005-03-01T08:49:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry, I should have posted this here sooner. I've finally started my long-promised new weblog at slowseason.blogspot.com, with a goal of posting once a day (so far, only one day has slipped from my grasp without a couple of written words), and if you have the time, I'd love for you to check it out. So please change links and bookmarks for me. I'm sorry I keep moving around so much, it's just sort of the way I live.

xoxo
Aaron

RETURN! . . . and a sort of farewell.

2005-01-28T03:00:00.000-08:00

I'd hoped to upload some road trip pictures tonight, but find that I have left my USB cable at home in Oregon. oh well for tonight.

So Erin and I made it to California! Freezing rain on the border between Oregon and Washington cost us another day of traveling, but earned us a wonderful stay with my Uncle Mark, Aunt Holly and their kids, who welcomed us into their home, fed us (multiple times!) and let us look through old photo albums documenting their own youthful cross-country trip (they went much further than we did -- on bicycles -- but not in the winter, at least!) and my mom's probably-not-as-goofy-looking-in-1983-when-everyone-had-perms-anyway hairstyle.
We were able to spend a few days in Dallas once we finally got there, spent a wonderfully misty afternoon hiking to waterfalls and around snow piles in the Columbia River Gorge, ate my mom's banana creame pie while playing cards with my sister and her brand-new roommate who came over for dinner, and I shaved off my beard.
Then, we headed straight SOUTH, with only and overnight stop to see my relatives in Medford between us and Orange County. Uncle Gordon, Aunt Monica and their daughters were our gracious and very generous hosts, and we were also able to see my wonderful Aunt Lori. We had a great time hanging out, chatting, and watching old Peter Sellers movies. I also think I ate almost all the M&Ms they had in the house.
We were expecting a 14 hour drive the next day, but made it in twelve. Our destination: a house closer than some of the Chapman University dorms to the Chapman University campus where a few of my best friends live, and where I was happy to be staying for the spring semester. Occupants of the house (which either has or NEEDS a sweet name besides just "the house") include Alec, a CU freshman I met when he moved in last summer, my old roommate Grant, my old roommate Ed, Ed's current roommate, and my former roommate, Aaron Choate (nicknamed AC to avoid confusion), and Brett, a med student who used to play in Ed and Grant's band that I named, and now plays with them in band at church. The first people we met when we pulled into the drive way were memebers of a band I had never met before who were practicing in the garage.
They said, "are you here for the 'show'?"
I said, "no, I'm here to move in."
"Oh, hi," said the lead singer (??), "I'm Aaron."
"Hello," I said, hardly phased by this sort of thing at all any more, "My name is Aaron, and I'm here with my girlfriend Erin."
Later in the evening, me, Erin, AC and band Aaron all joined hands in a circle and chanted our name together.
Even later in the week, I found out that one of my ex-girlfriends is interested in another guy named Aaron. We are everywhere.

I'm going to be taking AC's place in the house when he leaves to study abroad in Austria in a week or something, but while he's here, me him and Ed are all sharing the room, which means I sleep on the floor. Which I don't mind.

Erin, howevere, arrived in California without a place to stay, without a job to earn rent money at, without much except what was in the trunk of her car, and me (Awwww), although she did pack an awful lot in the trunk of her car(she'll tell you differently). So the first order of business was to find her housing and employment! As it turns out, she ended up moving into the house right next door to "the house!" And then she went to Hawaii.

So I moved out here with Erin, but have been without her for a few days now. I've managed to stay out of too much trouble, although after dropping her off at the LA airport I went to go see my pal Peter at LMU and we ended up getting horribly lost coming back from a comic book store on Sunset Blvd and drove around Beverly Hills and Venice Beach for about two hours before we finally just bought a cheapo map and found our way back to his campus. I also had to buy a new engine belt and air filter for her car, which were quite worn down after 3500 miles through mostly freezing weather since we left Wisconsin, and have gone grocery shopping and sort of unpacked (although it's a bit hard in this crowded room). I helped run one of Ed's shows at the Ugly Mug (I sold tickets and took pictures), have started a couple of new screen plays, and also played a lot of Mario Kart. But most importantly, I've gotten to see and hang out with a ton of my cool friends down here. I have cool friends all over the world now, but it's been great to see everyone down here again . . . it sort of feels like home.

And since I'm back in Orange again, with no out-of-the-country quite yet on the horizon, this blog's sort of come full circle. I'm going to be starting a new, perhaps more permanent one soon, so this may be my last full post here. I'll let you all know how to find me again when I settle on a spot to be found.

xoxo

word balloons

2005-01-27T01:42:00.000-08:00

Instead of updating tonight I came across this website which comments on the daily funny pages. When I lived at home and we had newspapers actually delievered, I read the comics every single day. I often didn't find them funny, especially as I got older, but it was sort of an obsessive thing I guess. I'm too tired to think of something actually clever to say, except that it was cool to get caught up on old strips and to be reassured that they're still not funny. The commentary on the website, however, made me crack up multiple times and I had to stiffle my laughter to not wake my sleeping roommates.
I'm back in California now, by the way. I'm living in a four bedroom house with some good friends. The housing breakdown is basically one guy to a room, except for my room, which has three of us, and I sleep on the floor.
A more proper update will be written sometime after I get up tomorrow morning.
the end.

Extreme Road Trip 2005!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2005-01-13T21:20:00.000-08:00

So I'm on the road with my lovely girlfriend Erin. We're snowbound at her aunt and uncle's giant house near Billings, Montana, enroute from Wisconsin to Oregon, where we'll visit family and friends before heading down to California for the spring. This part of the country is so cold (Erin tells me to add "beautiful," and it is) that I think I'll appreciate the warm Cali sun that much more.
We've had a good drive along the way and managed to stay unfrozen, although I did sort of get the car stuck in the snow at one point. Fortunately there was a police officer there to help us. Unfortunately he was also writing me a speeding ticket at the time.
But I wasn't driving dangerously, I swear. We were just going down a hill and I didn't realize how much speed we'd gained!
Other adventures:
*Visiting Erin's grandparents for breakfast and being greeted by fresh french toast and their dog. We ate the french toast, but we did not eat their dog. In fact, their dog wanted very badly to eat our french toast.
*Driving around Minneapolis with a car full of kids from Erin's school (North Central University) and having to convince them not to take us to Canada.
*Getting locked out of the room I was supposed to be staying in at NCU in Minneapolis when it was snowing and freezing outside and ultimately sleeping in the room of a complete stranger.
*Staying with Erin's cousins Bruce and Fernanda where we were treated to homemade dinner, then all fell asleep while watching Troy, and woke up to homemade breakfast! (Erin told all her relatives that I love french toast, so we have had it three time already since leaving her house!)
*Stopping at a tiny Mom + Pop diner in Buffalo, ND and listening to the locals invite our waitress (the only employee in the whole place) to visit a pig farm with them. And man, the sandwiches there were great!
*Making a detour through Beach, North Dakota where there was no water or sand in sight. There wasn't much in sight at all, in fact. Just a really, really fancy new visitor's center pointing us to . . . well, a quilting shop downtown, mostly.
*Stopping for pictures in the snow covered Painted Valley, where we saw real buffalo, and at times because of snow blowing all over the highway, not much else.

We are safe, we are sound, we are quite happy. Spent a good part of today cooped up indoors playing and Uno version of Rummy ("All the fun or Rummy, with the magic of Uno!" proclaimed the box"), watching Singing in the Rain and drinking Chai. Also, the cat here keeps trying to slash my foot open. But I have faith we will make it out of this alive.
...
THE EXTREME ROAD TRIP WILL CONTINUE!!!

another sort of New Year

2005-01-06T20:45:00.000-08:00

Today is my 22nd birthday! I've felt kind of sick ever since I work up (to a phone call from the lovely Erin), and now am running a fever. A lot of plans were sort of wiped off the board since I haven't felt like eatting, or even really moving at all. So I've mostly just layed around and slept today, although I did go into Salem with my mom and sister, which was fun, and people have generally given me sympathy and let me sleep in peace, which has actually been pretty nice. My sister also made me a smoothy since the idea of eatting anything else sort of makes me want to vomit. I hope I am better by tomorrow when I hop on a plane to Wisconsin where I can hug my girlfriend again and then we can start Ultimate Road Trip 2005 to California! Wooo!
to me, it sounds like a cure for anything.
...
My mom says I shouldn't donate money to the Tsumani victims because I hardly have enough money to get by myself. So I'll have to wait until I'm working again, I suppose. But if any of you feel inclined to get me a birthday present, it sure would be great if you donated to the relief efforts instead!

so this is the new year . . .

2005-01-03T17:55:00.000-08:00

So 2005 isn’t that different from 2004 so far, but I think we’re still in transition. These days being home usually is sort of a buffer between trips, semesters, countries, a time to reflect on where I’ve come from, where I’m going and to be reminded what it really feels like to be home. This is the first time in a while that the transition hasn’t felt rushed, and I’ve been able to settle into things a bit more, to dig into all those buried shoeboxes and rediscover my family. I had forgotten how wonderfully bizarre everyone here is! My family seems much more spontaneous and strange than most of my friends at college or in Europe, which was a bit of a revelation. Perhaps they are more comfortable with me than most people. Or maybe most people are just more boring and normal. I’ve also found collections of my parents old love letters, and it is comforting to read the private thoughts of two people my age who would go on to lead inspiring and heroic lives (at least to me), and to realize that their hopes, doubts and dreams were not that far from my own.

I spent New Years Eve with my extended family on my mom’s side for our annual family reunion, which is always around New Years, but rarely actually overlapping it. We rang in 2005 an hour early so the adults could go to bed, but thanks to many party favors and noisemakers, we rang it in in style. I proceeded to stay up many hours later than everyone else working on a very difficult 1000 piece cow puzzle, which was eventually finished with the help of many aunts and uncles sometime before January 2.
New Years Day I went hiking around Multnomah Falls with my dad and Aunt Rachel, and although we were a little damp by the end, it was a beautiful hike, with a variety of waterfalls, fresh snow on evergreens, majestic cliffs and a beautiful view of the Colombia Gorge. Oregon is perhaps the most consistently gorgeous place I’ve ever been.*

My grandma reminded me a couple of times over the weekend that she has two sets of ten grandkids -- one is grown up, and the second is rapidly growing up. I am the second eldest in that younger batch, and it was amazing to me this year how much taller and older my younger cousins looked. Back before my brother was born, my mom and aunt started loading us up in a minivan for annual summer trips around the Northwest, and tradition that continued (often with matching shirts) more or less until annually until we started going off to college. In the summer of 1992, this picture was taken on one of those trips.

Ben (11), me (9), Elizabeth (7), Jon (7), Allison (5), Meredith (2), Nathan (1)

This was the first time we were all reunited in the same place at the same time since those trips stopped, so we decided to duplicate the picture.

Ben (23), me (21), Elizabeth (19), Jon (19), Allison (18), Meredith (14), Nathan (13)

Crazy. We’ve all got longer hair, except for Jon and Ben, who could not be coaxed to take off their hats. Behind us is the still-beautiful Gorge.

*It could, also, just be a matter of perspective, as this John Muir quote points out: "All the wild world is beautiful, and it matters but little where we go, to highlands or lowlands, woods or plains...so universally true is this, the spot where we chance to be always seems the best."

Triumphant return! with guest writer!! and pictures!!!

2004-12-29T21:25:00.000-08:00

So. I am back in Oregon now, after much traveling and many, many long hours spent in airports. Christmas has come and gone, I’ve even managed to unpack my bags and put my clothes away. But now that I’ve returned from the land of Internet cafes, I feel it is soon time for a new website. And when it’s time for a new website, who has time to update an old website? Not me. It would be like eating yesterday’s cake while you think about baking a brand new cake for tomorrow! Totally inefficient. That’s why I will let my sister Elizabeth (who is rad, btw) finish this update and tell you all about our trip to the Dallas Oregon Goodwill Superstore today.

Ode to the Dallas Goodwill Superstore
Since we moved to Dallas in 1987, Aaron and I have watched Dallas enter the modern age with much fanfare. People camped out on the lawn of our first McDonalds. The opening of our Wal*Mart made the headline of our local newspaper. Traffic stopped along Main Street when Dutch Brothers offered free coffee on their first day. It’s understandable, then, that Dallas took such pride when Goodwill came to town. It wasn’t just an ordinary Goodwill, either. It was a SUPERSTORE--the elite of national thrift store chains. We may only have 12,000 people, but we have a Goodwill Superstore.

I don’t remember what happened when it opened in Dallas. Probably some people died. It was that cool.

Today we visited the Goodwill Superstore, and though we actually only bought a sweater (my purchase, for $4.99), I think we were both reminded of just how great it really is. As proof, we present you with four illustrated reasons:

1. Vests. Aaron said this one looked like a potholder.

2. Fun jackets and hats.

3. Awesome ponchos. This one can even double as a tent!

4. The formal dress section.

I’m not a huge fan of hamburgers, Aaron and I both try to avoid Wal*Mart, and neither of us drink coffee. But Goodwill is one step to modernity that I think we can both agree is awesome.

...

And that's my sister, ladies and gentlemen! She's right, too -- I hate Wal*Mart, coffee, and try to avoide beef, but I do not abhore progress! Thrift stores are an advanced, captitalist way of sharing and recycling. Both of which rule. Like my sister. Full of wisdom more advanced than her years, she is. She says she's willing to go freelance on more blog or journal entries if anyone requires her services. E-mail her @ ehumphre@willamette.edu . . . she's sad that I get more mail than her. She wouldn't be if she knew it was mostly just forwards and newsletters I haven't unsubscribed from, but . . . well, I suppose it's quantity and not quality that matters these days. But not when it comes to my sister! No sir! I would rather have one good sister than a ton of mediocre ones. You probably would, too. But Elizabeth already has a family, so you can't have her! But don't let that stop you from e-mailing her. Just don't start stalking her, you punks.

Final Spanish reflections

2004-12-15T06:47:00.000-08:00

Last full day in Granada. I´ve got my last final (ha ha, that´s redundant, isn´t it?) in fifteen minutes. Then all I´ve got to do is finish packing my bags, hop a few busses and planes, enjoy a few days in the United Kingdom, and then arrive in Portland four days from today. I spent the morning exploring the city and getting lost with my friends one more time . . . maybe it´s because Granada is the biggest and oldest city I´ve ever lived in, or maybe it´s because I was here for a limited time only, but being here has reminded me that there is so much to explore, not just in Granada, not just in Europe, but everywhere. Just walking to school today I had to take notice of the birds in the street, the construction workers just behind tin fences, the rosy-cheeked girl in the plaza shurgging her shoulders at the wind in her hair. The animated 21 second count-down sign at the cross walk. Familiar graffiti and broken down walks. Mixed languages, students in overcoats. Same signs in the streets, same cobble stones, same department stores, but somehow I feel it all vibrantly, like it´s new and old all at once. Is this premature nostlagia? Or is just a how I´ve feel almost every day in this city, amplified just a little by the tug of departure?
So many times, especially at Chapman, I lived somewhere with my eyes closed and my walking paths pre-determined. There´s so much just waiting to pour in from the borders, from the unexplored edges of our maps, that the realization can come in the same split second you look up from the ground:

"hey. I´ve never been here before."

They keep telling us the world is getting smaller, but I´ve yet to see proof.

been a while . . .

2004-12-12T05:23:00.000-08:00

I´m back from Portugal, hooray! Actually I´ve been back since Wednesday night, I think. I can´t really remember. Anyway, my ankle didn´t give me any trouble after I actually got on the busm, although everyone was a bit concerned about me for a while.

I only have a few days left in Granada, so I don´t think I´ll spend my time writing much on the Internet right now, especially since I have to study for finals. But I will say that the "chose my facial hair" contest will be over probably on Tuesday, so if you still want to cast an entry, scroll down a bit and post! Last chance.

This is all for now.
but it is not all.

Hoy y Mañana (todo en Español)

2004-12-03T16:42:00.000-08:00

Hoy: Cayé abajo de las escaleras. Y ahora, me duele en el pie.

Mañana: Voy a Portugal si el pie no duela demasiado!

Cause and Effect

2004-12-02T15:34:00.000-08:00

Seeing The Incredibles in Español almost made me cry, and that made me mad because there´s no way anyone should get emotional watching an animated superhero movie. But I did like it anyway.

Eatting American fast food for the first time in months made me feel completely gross, even though we had coupons and it was cheap. Ugh. I´m never eatting that stuff again.

All these free emotion popups make me a little >:( but mostly just :¡

Y . . . ya esta.

...

2004-11-30T11:12:00.000-08:00

In leiu of the usual "why Spain is awesome and traveling rules," I would like to present something a bit different today. Something called
I may have eatten brains

For lunch today I arrived a bit late. It was raining out. In the dining room, everyone was finishing eatting as I arrived, and no one had bothered to turn on the ligths, leaving the gloomy gray sky as our only illumination. The meal started with spinach soup, one of the few Spanish dishes I cannot really stand. But I ate it all. I am not one to snub food that´s been graciously prepared for me. And there were fried potatoes and some sort of meat coming up for the main course, which pointed to brighter horizons.
If only it were so.
As my señora prepared a plate of food for me she asked if I thought she´d given me enough meat. "Of course," I told her sincerely. "There are a lot of bones in it," she explained, "maybe I should give you some more." I did not protest.
There were indeed a lot of bones in the meat, and removing them was made a bit difficult by the thick sauce which contained all sorts of vegetables and who knows what else. There was a subtly strange, slightly familiar taste to the food, which did not completely agree with me, but I cheerfully ate it anyway. Were I eight years old again, surely I would have cried or complained. But I´m 21 years old and I am no longer "picky."
Then I found a piece of meat that was stubbornly attatched to the bone. I had already been having a hard time distinguishing between meat and fat or skin or sauce or whatever exactly it was that I had been eatting, so I decided to fully uncover this odd piece of flesh and see what exactly it was connected to and whether it was worth eatting.
What I found was yellow, with slight ridges and a very defined, almost plantlike shape. It was squishy and I could not easily cut it with my fork.
But I´d seen tissue like this before. I the air had been thick with the smell of phermaldehyde, and I had a scalpel in my hand. Mrs. Ambert´s class, probably fifth grade, when we disected sheep brains. Perhaps there had been no smell underneath the preservative chemicals, but I was sure now that if the brain itself had smelled like anything, it was that strange taste I´d detected the lunch currently set before me.
I swept more of the sauce and vegetable bits away and saw that the bone was a vertebra. Which fit my theory exactly: on my plate, amid tomatoe sauce and aside fried potatoes was a very significant piece of SPINAL COLUMN.
Just to be sure, I asked my señora about it when she returned. She struggled a bit to explain the concept of "lamb" to me, since I did not know the Spanish word, then when I pressed her further, freely and cheerfully admited what I already knew to be true. I had been poking sheep brains with my fork. And then I had eatten off of the fork.
And who knows what other bits of spinal tissue I ate before I discovered this spoungey yellow bit.
I remember learning back in high school that bits of brain and spinal tissue that made it into hot dogs are what spread Mad Cow Disease to humans. Can anyone verify or deny this?
And can anyone wipe this incident from my . . . brain?

More Italy trip journal

2004-11-29T10:48:00.000-08:00

We hit the streets of Florence with no plans and just as little time. I remember the city as cars, smog, rubbish bins, phone booths and tourist shop mannequins all blurring together beneath swirling clouds in a wide-open blue sky which, although obscured by the ancient buildings, I absorbed completely. To have finally left the train station and the underground mall which connected it to downtown and to finally be walking down the streets of Florence, Italy gave me a great sense of freedom and relief, even if the city itself wasn’t doing much for me.
We jogged past a gigantic famous building of some sort The Duomo, or something close to that, although I cannot describe with any sense of confidence since I hardly remember it. Someone snapped pictures. All I know is there were towers, it was probably too large to all fit a the camera viewfinder, which seems to suggest that I may have also snapped pictures as well, and I think it was painted in an interesting way. Upon learning that we were only in Florence for three hours, other travelers often asked, “did you at least see the Duomo (or whatever they called it)?” and I confidently assured them that we did. Although it was sort of like saying I’ve also seen Morocco. Which I may have seen from across the Mediterranean Sea while up in the Sierra Nevadas, because they say it’s possible, but I couldn’t tell you want it looked like, if I even saw it at all.
Our shutter-quick snapshot feet finally came to a full stop when our street unraveled into the open void of a giant plaza. Magnetically we were drawn to the cathedral at the end closest to us, where other tourists were gathered on the steps and at the door. A chat with the security guard revealed that we needed to pay eight euros to get in, and it would take about an hour to see the whole thing. All of us were centimo-pinching kids on a budget, so the four eight seemed a bit expensive, until we realized how much we’d spent on train tickets to just to get to Florence and decided that the price to actually see something in Florence was comparatively quite low. Even so, we left one spendthrift on the stairs as we made out way to the ticket booth.
Most of the cathedrals in Europe are dark, gaudy and guilt-gilded. It’s hard to escape the feeling of decadence, but in this one it was clear that our admission price went to keeping the sanctuary well-let, clean and relatively appealing. Sort of like a modern-day payment for penance, but without the pretense of salvation. There were shrines set up around the front with offer boxes and actual candles to light, unlike most of the electric night-light alter boxes in Granada.
More prominent, but without flickering candle light, were the secular shrines of this cathedral: the eternal resting place of the Italian Renaissance’s best and brightest. Michelangelo, Galileo, Dante, Machiavelli and other luminaries were buried in graves more or less built right into the cathedral wall, adorned with sculptures and Latin inscriptions. Galileo’s tomb was the oddest sight, as I seem to remember that he was imprisoned and basically killed by the Catholic Church, but I suppose it’s nice to know that they didn’t hate him forever. I wonder if his soul got absolved, too?
I didn’t know that Dante’s tomb was in the cathedral until I was standing in front of it, and I had a small literary freak-out. I’ve not read Dante himself, but I’ve read a lot of rad stuff one way or another inspired by The Inferno (Milton, Blake, C.S. Lewis), and let’s face it – the name Dante has a lot of pop to it. The words “Dante’s tomb” just sound cool.
After we’d sufficiently explored the corners and courtyards, admired the ceiling and the statues, we returned to the plaza to collect our missing member, and hit the streets of Florence once again, arriving at the train station three minutes after our train left.

NEXT TIME: DANTE’S TOMB!!!!!!!!!!!!

Post-thankful reflections. + a contest!

2004-11-26T08:05:00.000-08:00

I realize that for most people Thanksgiving is one of those reassurance holidays. You know, the kind where friends and familiars return to the same family dining room and eat the traditional meal that hasn´t really changed since the introduction of green-bean casserole in the mid-fifties. A heart-warming practice to be sure.
But Thanksgiving doesn´t really mean that to me any more. Since I left for college, each Thanksgiving has brought me to an increasingly forigen, yet always friendly, dining table, and I find myself looking forward to whatever bizarre holiday hijinx are in store for me next year.

Freshman year I ate at home in Dallas, which was not too odd except for the inclusion of Mr. Travis, my quiz team coach from high school, at our dinner table (appropriate since I spent three years of school eatting my lunches in his classroom) and my Great-great Aunt Rosana preforming a slightly racist skit from her childhood as we were all eatting mint M&Ms after dinner.

Sophomore year my Aunt Kathy and Uncle Gary invited me out to Palm Desert to spend Thanksgiving with them at their "spa," which fortunately was not a hoity-toity place where everyone wears cucumbers on their eyes and has a personal trainer, but a little desert community based around a few hot springs pools and populated by bunch of retired people living in mobile homes and driving around on four-wheelers. We ate dinner at a card table with the neighbors from the next mobile-home over, and in the morning got up early to hit golfballs across a makeshift course of dirt, rocks and coffee cans. We got one golf club each. I think I also almost killed myself on theif four-wheeler. But I couldn´t have picked a cooler way to spend my first Thanksgiving away from home. And they fed me all the pie I could have asked for.

Junior year I was deep in screenwriting assignments and couldn´t get away for a few days to spend with my aunt and uncle out in the desert again, but my old roommate Ed invited me to his grandma´s house in Compton, East L.A. This would not only be my first Thanksgiving with black people, it would be my first Thanksgiving without any other white people. Well, except that Ed´s last name is White, which is clearly instant comedy. But none of that really mattered -- I have never been accepted into another family more quickly. For dinner we had all the traditional trimmings, as well as maccoroni and cheese, which I thought was an excellent addition to the dinner-spread. I also learned how to make the best peanutbetter and jelly sandwiches ever, and Ed and I got to teach his grandma how to properly put on a backpack, something we were both amazed that she had never done before. Ed played guitar, I played with his cousins, we gave most of our leftovers to a homeless guy at the gas station, and I ate the rest of it for lunch the next day.

Senior year (that´d be this one), I spent in Granada at a fancy Spanish resturant where the staff tried their valient best to serve us a real American dinner. My study-abroad program set the whole deal up and they told everyone to "look nice," which isn´t exactly a formal dress code, and was interpreted in many different ways, from tee-shirts to ties, from prom dresses and shalls to mini dresses and go-go boots. It was my first Thanksgiving served with Fanta and bi-lingual blessings. For many of the kids there it also seemed to be their first Thanksgiving served with as much wine as they wanted, and there was a lot of giggling and a ridiculous ammount of picture taking. I didn´t even know everyone who I ended up being pulled over to pose with. But the dinner was pretty good. The best part was actually the quiche, not surprising since the Spaniards can do amazing things with eggs. We were also served chunks of tuna, broccoli soup, and each person at the table got a different, (often unidentifiable) chunk of the turkey. One of my friends sitting next to me was too distressed about being away from home and familiar food to eat much of anything except bread and mashed potatoes, but I told her that a forigen Thanksgiving just something I was used to by now.

I called my family when I got home around midnight, and was happy (thankful?) to find that Thanksgiving hasn´t settled into a run over there, either. The dog was running around with stitches on her nose from being attacked by a squirrel and our dinner guests included not just Grandma Betty, Aunt Rosana and Mr. Travis, but three Japanese exchange students from my sister´s school.

And I´m thankful that there are always some things you can count on, like turkey and mashed yams and friendship. But that´s not what this holiday was always about. The first Thanksgiving was celebrated by strangers in a strange land who were able to get by thanks to the kindness of people they hardly knew. These past few years have brought home that point to me -- Thanksgiving isn´t completely about the familiar, it´s about the strange . . . and the stranger. I think every table should have at least one.

ALSO!!
I´m starting to get tired of my beard, which just made its Internet debut yesterday. So I´m starting a new contest. Just tell my what I should do with my beard (keep it? shave it? shave one side of it? braid it?) and why. The best answer not only gets to see their fashion advice come true, but I´ll send out some more Spanish comics to the winner. Game starts now!

Holiday Pictures!

2004-11-25T08:29:00.002-08:00

Feliz día de gracias, everyone!

I´m thankful that I can grow a beard!

And for my home country!

And for the country that I´m living in now!

I´m even thankful for the ocean between them!

There´s just too much excellent stuff in the world to not be thankful. Totally thankful.

between classes.

2004-11-23T04:41:00.000-08:00

More Italy coming soon. But for now a quick update:
-this is the first month since July in which I haven´t traveled to another country, but next month will see me traveling between five.
-today was the first time I ever had to look up a word in Spanish to remember its English spelling (the word was language).
-I ate at an Indian resturant last weekend with two Spanish guys, a German and my Indian-American friend Ronak. The food was so spicy I had to keep running to the bathroom for water as there was only one waiter for the whole resturant, and he didn´t seem interested in refilling my glass. I got to explain to the Spaniards that we do not eat pizza or ribs on Thanksgiving.
-For Thanksgiving (that´s soon, huh?) I will be eatting at a fancy resturant with all the American kids in my program. There will be turkey. There will be cranberry sauce! As far as I know, there will be no ribs or pizza.

More from Italy! We go to Flourence! Hijinx ensue!!

2004-11-20T08:09:00.000-08:00

We got up early to leave Venice and promptly realized that although our spacious camping bungalow had two showers, neither of them worked particularly well. Took the bus from the campground to the city center and took our time strolling to the train station, where we sat on the sunny steps and ate breakfast purchased from the train station cafeteria. I ended up with yogurt and a very sugary donut that I wanted to wish away almost immediately after eating it.
As we waited for the train to come, I snuck glances at the American newspapers some fellow travelers were reading, looking for news of the election. It took me a few slightly conspicuous passes to get the gist of the main headline: trouble in Iraq is bad news of Bush reelection campaign. I was hoping for something a little juicer, but with Internet access costing close to seven euros an hour in Italy, I would take my homefront news any way I could get it.
We got relatively comfy seats on the train, heading to Florence, and pressed our noses to the windows as we crossed Italy, green and sun-spotted in mid-morning.
Once we arrived in the Renaissance capital we had a bit of business to take care of: we needed to call the hostel we had booked for that night in Cinque Terre and find out how late we would be able, and then based off of that figure, we had to buy train tickets, hopefully late enough in the day that we would have time to enjoy Florence. This seemed simple enough, until I was found that the number I had for the hostel was . . . well, something was very wrong with it. I could dial it well enough. That was no problem. But after I dialed the number I only got a dial tone. I tried adding the Italian country code prefix. I tried subtracting it. I let others try as well. But we could get no human being on the other end of the phone line. Heck, we couldn’t even get a robot! And if we could have, it probably would have been an Italian robot, and that wouldn’t have done any good either.
So we’re stuck in the train station in Venice. I wait in line at the Custom Service station for a good twenty minutes as family with crying kids try and negotiate their tickets, then finally get to talk to an agent whose English is about as good as my Spanish. Of course feel very stupid asking her if she can just tell me how to make a call from a payphone. But she can’t get our number to work, either.
It is at this point that I came to face the painfully obvious truth: there was no technical difficulty, no language problem, no question of the right amount of change in the pay phone. Only that I had forgotten to write down the last digit in the phone number.
We had been in Florence for over an hour by the time we finally left the train station – in search of an Internet portal. Forking over a euro for ten minutes of time in a crowded cubbyhole crammed full of websurfers, I was able to access my e-mail and get the full number -- turns out I had only left off the zero at the end. And when my friends asked to see the number as I had correctly written it on my hand in purple pen, I sheepishly realized I forgotten the zero a second time.
Back at the train station I was finally able to talk with someone at the hostel. After I stammered, “uh, hello. Do you speak English?” the man explained that we had to be there by eight o’clock. Which gave us about three more hours in Florence before we had to catch a train. By the time we got something to eat at the train station’s beyond-awful food court (where they sold the greasiest, blandest pizza I have ever put in my mouth, and featured a McDonalds offering some sort of Japanese promotion that included “Samurai Shakes” and “Zen Nuggets”), it was clear we were not going to have time to see The David. Or much else for that matter.
But we were bound to see everything we could.
NEXT TIME: all we could see were a few paintings, a cathedral and a morgue.

old italia

2004-11-18T10:57:00.000-08:00

I have a sore throat. I´m not sure if it´s becaue I am getting over a cold, because I am just getting a NEW cold, or because I am surrounded by people smoking cigarettes. Either way, I am eatting a Twix bar, the first American candy I´ve bought here, and hoping it will make me better.
Somehow.
I dropped the Italy travelouge a few weeks ago, but I´m just going to pick right up and pretend like nothing happened. Call it the weblog version of the five second rule. If there are germs floating around, I can deal with them. They´ve probably all already found their way to my throat anyway, but I have my Twix bar! chomp. chew. etc.
Anyway, Venice! We quit the monuments and waterfront in hopes of finding ending our night with the cheapest Genuine Italian Resturant we could find. In Venice cheapest does not equal cheap, however, and we gave up the bargain hunt at a ristorante patio where strings of colored Christmas lights shown softly in the Venician, haloing us worn-out and miss-matched Americans with the sort of romantic light that attracts presumptious and insisten rose vendors. I explained that the three girls we were traveling with were like sisters to me and Ronak, but I don´t think the rose vendor spoke Spanish. Or English.
Our waiter was an old Italian man and I think the rest of his old Italian family cooked our food. I don´t remember what I ordered at the resturant, except that it wasn´t really that good. I´ve never been huge on Italian food though.
After dinner at the mostly-deserted resturant, we returned to the main canal and hopped on a water bus to take us back to the (land)bus station. I wish that more cities had canals just so there could be more waterbusses. As I stood on the open deck and leaned into the wind of our velocity, Venice spilled out before us in black and light, hotel billboards and monuments illuminated with a curator´s reverence.
We passed by a cruise ship with green and blue portholes, a swimming pool lit like a disco and at least five resturants that I could count. To this small-town boy who took a 2nd grade field trip to see them put in the McDonalds that would legitimize my pueblo as a real Town, it looked like science fiction -- a whole floating city of steel and glass, bigger than my school in the states, bigger than Mount Rushmore.
Bigger, it seemed, than anyone ever claimed the Titanic was.
When we were on dry land again we sat down by the canal and waved at the gondolas passing by while we waited for our bus to take us back to the hostel. It seems now that I look back, that almost everyone in a gondala was an old person, floating along beneath past the cathedrals and beneath the bridges, smiling at us with a bit of a confused suspicion. But maybe that´s just me remembering the city. Past its prime, coasting on history. Watching us more than we were watching it as we ran around with our cameras and guide books. Venice was a kind city, I´d say. Tired, but tolerant.

False start, excuses, etc.

2004-11-18T05:43:00.000-08:00

I was just going to update, but now I have to go eat lunch.
This has happened more times than you realize.

More Venice

2004-11-07T02:23:00.000-08:00

So we finished our pizza, were laughed at by some Italian kids and took a few pictures by some historical looking Roman columns, and headed back to the bus station where we zeroed in on a group of grungy looking American kids with backpacks, who were unsurprisingly headed to the same campground as us grungy looking American kids. A bus picked us up, and the driver informed us that he´d take us to the campground for free, but if we wanted to get back we´d have to pay, which made me glad we already had reservations. The ride was about half an hour long and at one point stretched over a bay where the only land in sight was the long, thin stretch of road we were traveling on. It reminded me of the train scene in Spirited Away.
The campground itself was in a small town outside of Venice and looked like your basic tourist campground. Wooden rails, gravel roads, unheated pool, all that. We got lucky and ended up in a five person "bungalow," esentially a mobile home with a kitchen/dining room, two bedrooms and two bathrooms, for less than 20€ each. There were mosquitos everywhere outside and the showers only ran two temperatures: scalding and freezing, but we were pretty happy and impressed with our humble abode.
We paid the three euros or so to return to Venice on the next bus and scoped out the city.
Our goal was to find the big, famous main plaza, which I have now forgotten the name of. We followed the signs on the corners of buildings pointing toward the plaza, which ended up being a pretty good way to get a tour of the whole city as the route we followed was anything but direct.
We stopped to get gelato from an old Italian man who had reggae blasting from his shop and Bob Marely posters on the wall. I went out on a limb and got kiwi, a privelage I would not have had in the United States. It tasted fresh and tart, although having the seeds in there was pretty cool. Not sure I´d do it again.
Also stopped at plently of tourist shops (including the Venice Disney Store!) and a few beautiful views -- watching the lights of houses and boats reflect on the dark canals after the sun went down, that sort of thing.
When we finally arrived at the huge plaza, there was some sort of luminous blob floating about 20 feet in the air, and a small crowd of people gathered around it. As we got closer I realized it was lighting for a film set -- they´d blocked of quite a lot of the plaza and old palace and in the distance we could see dozens of actors in 16th Century aristocrasy garb preparing for a ball scene of some sort. Somehow the grips had rigged up a nine-foot-long inflatable balloon with lights inside of it to create a nice diffused source, perhaps to get a daylight effect. Elsewhere a huge spotlight had been rigged up to a high clocktower and shown down on the famous palace (I think it was a palace) that was part of the scene. From a couple of extras in the crowd we learned that the film was a Disney production called Casanova, which imdb tells me will just be on TV, not in theatres.
At the other end of the (really quite large) plaza we found a 50-year-old German man sitting on some cathedral steps doing a water color sketch of the palace for his own notebook. Although none of us spoke any of the same languages, we were able to communicate a little. He seemed like a very nice guy. Nearby, locals hired for the film production dashed around doing who knows what else and at opposing resturants across the plaza, two famous dueling orchestras kept the music going strong . . .

Venice

2004-11-03T16:03:00.000-08:00

Venice is more or less what you expect -- a little labrythine patch of snow-globe caliber Enchantment neatly crisscrossed by bridges, canals and laundry lines. There are persistent flower vendors, ornate fountians and vines overflowing the banks of the canals. There are all sorts of small boats tied up to docks next to the sidewalk. The streets twist together in a way that seems to deliberately encourage losing yourself in the city -- nothing goes directly anywhere.
The city is sinking, of course, and the canals are rumored to be so polluted that if you fall in they have to take you straight to the hospital. Add to this the facts that hardly anyone can afford to live in Venice any more and the local economy is entierly dependent on tourism and it becomes clear that Venice is a dying city kept on life support -- now a novelty resort.
But while it might not be more than a bauble now, just a shell of what it once was, it´s certinally a charming bauble.
The biggest thing I can fault it for is having payphones with never give change, but that seems to be pretty consistent all over Italy.
After contacting our hostel and making sure a bus WOULD be coming to pick us up later in the afternoon we hit up the pizza scene for lunch. The pizza in Spain has been uniformly bland -- possibly 80% of the worst pizza I´ve ever eatten has come from there, so I was excited for Italian pizza. It wasn´t bad. They put a lot more oil on their pizza, offer more toppings than just ham and cheese and the overall effect was pleasing.
However, the last pizza I had before coming to Spain was my first taste of deep dish pizza -- straight from Chicago -- and I´m not sure if any pizza in the world, even those from the "homeland" can compare.

Oops, cafe is closing again! I guess the bus story will have to wait until next time.

At Last! Italy Trip journal . . . part one.

2004-11-02T08:56:00.000-08:00

Finally I´m posting my adventures in Italy. I´ll try to keep this flowing quickly and reguarly so the whole thing is completed within a week or two. The trip was spun directly out of an AIFS trip to Madrid, so we´ll start from there. Now, without further ado:

ITALY part one.
Starting point: Madrid.
Destination: Barcelona.
We caught the night train for a eight hour trip that would take us from the heart of Spain to the coast. The idea was that we could sleep on the journey and arrive in Barcelona fresh and rested for more travel.
We ended up in a compartment like they have in the Harry Potter movies – a little room with four seats on each side facing each other. There were five of us traveling together, plus three girls from South America, who we chatted with for a while, appreciating their accents, which are actually clearer and less slurred than the Andalusian accents we have had to adjust to. Eventually, however, we were ready to sleep.
And we could not. The seats we were in allowed us very little leg room, did not recline and had no headrests. We tossed and turned for a long time, leaning on each other, resting legs here and there, trying to get comfortable in any way possible. The hours were long and restless. Eventually, someone kicked the bottom of my seat and it slid forward a little bit. This was a startling discovery. I found a lever, which I could pull and make my seat move in a way none of us had thought possible. In a sleepy staccato I managed to get the word out: “Seats . . . recline!”
Soon we were all a little more comfortable, but I also found two pairs of legs resting on either side of my seat. There was hardly enough room for me to sit much less rest comfortably. But other people were sleeping at last. I got up to walk around the train and call my girlfriend. When I returned, my seat had been completely taken over. I nudged people out of the way and collapsed stiffly. I may have gotten an hour of sleep before we arrived in Barcelona.
We stumbled into the station needing to find a bus to the airport, somehow we did. I don’t remember much except being exhausted and the fact that most of the signs weren’t in Spanish but in Catalan, the Northern Spanish dialect. It felt like we’d already stepped into another country. And then we stepped onto bus.

Destination: Gerona
We got extraordinarily cheap plane tickets to Italy thanks to a discount European airline called Ryan Air which operates out of airports close to, but not actually IN major cities. The trade off is that you have to spend more time and money on ground transportation – I have no idea how long it took us to get to the Gerona airport, but I know I was slightly more well rested when we arrived there. We may have had to take two busses, actually. All is a fuzzy fog in which I blink to stay awake. I do remember my eyelashes pretty well from this period of travel, but they didn’t look any different than they usually do.
I suppose we got through the security check at the airport without any real trouble. I just had my backpack and had not brought any swords with me. The only real danger was that the limited amount of clothes I was brining might start to smell after I wore them for a few days, but that was far from my mind at the time.
I do remember eating some sort of breakfast in the airport cafeteria. I think I just bought some immunity-enhancing yogurt, which did its job, and maybe ate a few cookies that someone else had.
Then we waited at the back of what could very liberally be called a “line” to board our plane. Apparently order and anti-mob devices are a luxury Ryan Air bypasses in order to pass the savings onto us.
Here are other things they skimp on:
Beverage services.
Honey roasted peanuts.
Reclining seats.
Seatback pockets.
Emergency cards (all information is printed on the seat in front of you).
Manners.

It didn’t matter. I slept instantly.

Destination: Venice
Oh, also skimped on were landing terminals. We just climbed down the stairs and walked into a converted warehouse which now served as our airport and first taste of Venice and Italy.
Of course we didn’t land in Venice exactly. We landed in some little town a few hours outside of Venice. So we had to catch another bus to actually get to the canal city.
But first there we had to claim our bags, use the restroom and make it through customs.
I had not checked a bag, so I didn’t worry about that.
I did worry that inside the men’s restroom was only a porcelain hole in the ground with a chain above to pull to flush. No seat. No toilet paper. Just a hole with food grips on the side. This seemed like a particularly ominous sign to me.
Others found more ominous the fact that customs basically was nothing more than a doorway leading through a hall leading to Italy. Nothing to stop us, no one to stamp our passports, no one to even check our passports, not even a warning sign or cardboard cut out of a security guard we could pretend to talk to and be hassled by. We just walked through confused and possibly carrying dangerous items, not that anyone would know.

I finally had gotten enough sleep on various modes of transportation that I remember some of the ride into Venice. If Spain at first seemed very brown to me, Italy seemed very green. We rumbled through past vineyards, orchards and houses overgrown with shrubbery through a countryside that looked no different than it must have when they first started putting pictures of the Italian countryside on the labels of wine bottles.

Venice, of course, is a completely constructed city that although ancient, feels as far removed from the countryside as you can get. In the middle of the bus station we tried to get our bearings . . . busses were everywhere momentarily, but once we ventured into the city proper all motor vehicles would be vanish’ed, replaced by boats and walkways hardly used for anything except tourism any more, and perhaps a few bicycles. But before we hit up the canals in earnest, we’d have to find out hostel, which would involve . . . surprise . . . a few more bus rides.

NEXT TIME: I promise only a short paragraph about busses.

You´re all crazy!!

2004-10-25T07:16:00.000-07:00

To set the record straight, I am
#1. a Christian and
#2. for the most part, poltically liberal.
Somewhere along the line, it was decided that these two things are by their very definition incompatible. Liberals think Christians are close-minded and hypocritical. Christians think liberals are morally deficient and hypocritical. And I get the insanity from both sides, especially as the election gets closer.

I have heard my Christian friends say, "well, if John Kerry wins, it will only mean we´re one step closer to the appocalypse, which will scorch the earth, but end with us living with Jesus forever in Heaven."

I have heard my friends in Che Guevarra tee-shirts say, "well, if Bush wins it will usher in the proletarean revolution that much faster, toppling the corporate-facist political machine and leaving us in a world full of peace, freedom and equality!"

At least it´s good to know that everyone is working towards the same goal -- peaceful oblivion after the already pre-written victory of their own side. Do any of you people actually stop to think you might not be completely and absolutely correct? Ever think it might help everyone if you ventured out from your own private idealogical clubhouse to work together with the kids across the yard? No? I guess I´ll stick to being a contradiction, then.

P.S. -- the next thing I post will be about the Italy trip. Unless it´s about the soccer game I´m playing tonight.

Things I´ve seen on television: both are absurd, one is funny.

2004-10-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

Sometimes we watch the news at lunchtime.
Spanish news is not all that different from American news -- it seems to either be numbingly tragic and disaterous or numbingly fluffy and inconsequential.
The other day they did a piece on the sexuallity of the Spanish, citing statistics (how often everyone does it, where they do it, how long they do it for, etc) over video footage of couples making out passionately in public parks. My grandmotherly señora and her grown daugther didn´t seem to blink, so I tried to take it all in stride as I ate my garbonzo beans, but when the straight-laced reporter started discussing the frequency of orgasms, I was unable to stifle my giggle.
Yes, I am twenty-one years old, why do you ask?
Today on the news we watched as mourners were torn hysterically away from a funeral in Granada by the police because the president of Latvia was visiting the cemetary and for some reason the police were told to get everyone out. From the footage, I thought that someone had been robbed, or worse. Turns out they were being pushed to the ground for attending a funeral service.
I can´t even make it sound more ridiculous than it is. I tried, I just can´t.
There are a few signs grafitied around the city that have a couple of menacing policemen with nightsticks surrounded by the words "they´re not here to help you."
I always thought it was sprayed onto the wall by some sort of anarchist or something.
But now I have to wonder whether it wasn´t just someone trying to peacefully lay their mother or father to rest.

Old School

2004-10-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

So there´s a poster in the secretary´s office downstairs in the Centro de Lenguas Modernas where I come every day for classes that says:
University of Granada
450th Anniversary

and it´s from over 20 years ago.

Not about Spain

2004-10-16T09:30:00.000-07:00

So I´m quoted in the new Chapman Magazine, mostly because I worked in the Chapman University PR office this summer and was on hand for a quote. I´m not really sure how I feel about it. The issue is about the 50th Anniversary of the school moving from L.A. to Orange County and they asked me what my thoughts on the issue were. Here´s my quote:

Aaron Humphrey ´05
Senior Film Major
"When I think about Chapman moving from L.A. to Orange 50 years ago, I think of the students -- I wonder how I´d feel if I suddenly heard we were moving to another city? A lot of the area here seems like it´s probably the same as it was back then; with Old Towne being the way it is. Chapman has definitely changed more than the town around it. The university has grown a lot in the last 10 years. When people ask me how big my school is, I always have to stop and think -- is it bigger than it was yesterday? But if anything, Chapman still feels like a small school, even though it´s grown so much."

I´m pretty sure that is NOT exactly what I said, as it sounds a little to spun -- I think I was a little more critical of the school when I was initially interviewed. I´m surprised that it came out sounding so positive. But on the other hand, the quote does capture my affinity for using dashes, something I thought only showed up in my writing.
I guess it just bothers me that the quote is so oblique ... "With Old Towne being the way it is" -- What? Who is going to actually know that I was talking about the neighborhood committee that enforces the way storefronts look and what kinds of houses can be built? Who´s going to know it´s the that "the way Old Towne is" has also stopped our school from expanding as much as it would like to?
I think that Chapman really has been growing too much, too fast and too superficially. We need more student selectivity, better programs and a farther-reaching curriculum more than we need more buildings. But more buildings are what get all the attention. We´ve got some pretty amazing profs, though.
All in all, I´m torn. With the way Chapman is going, I don´t think it will feel like a small school in five, or even two years. But I know that part of the quote is completely accurate.
Because I threw it in at the end to give them something I knew they´d print.

About pigeons. Please at least read the last section.

2004-10-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

On my second day in Europe, a frantic, low-flying pigeon in London almost ran beak-first into my face. Since then I´ve run into large quantities of pigeons on an almost daily basis, although perhaps "run at" is a more appropriate term, as I get a lot of satisfaction in chasing them down and watching them hop hop hop cautiously away from me, or take off all at once in a great smattering of feathers if I come a bit too close for comfort.
I really do love doing this, and I think it´s got relatively little to do with the fact that one almost took my head off in England. I also don´t think it comes from any instinct to assert my own dominance over a lesser species, although I feel a bit ashamed at this suggestion. Rather I think it´s tied to the same instinct that leads me to make sculptures out of salt shakers in resturants, bounce pencils off my desk during classes and stare longingly at playgrounds, even though I know I´m too old for them -- I am nothing if not easily entertained.
And flapping, frantic pidgeons are nothing if not entertaining.
Of course this has, along with staking salt shakers and bouncing pencils, gotten me in trouble more than once.
Exhibit A: in a Madrid park I spotted a huge flock pigeons all hanging out in a corner by a fountian. They have no where to go but up when I run and jump at them, and they all go flying into the sky like paint onto a Pollack canvas. What I don´t notice is a nearby old lady who surely catches a wing or two upside the head or two as fifty pigeons hurdle right past her. My two friends point this out to me after the fact and I feel terrible. Girl friend says to guy friend, "I´ve got an idea -- let´s play pretend like we´re all a family: we´re married and Aaron is our grown-up autistic child!" Ha. Ha. Ha.
Exhibit B: in case you guys didn´t know, there are a TON of pigeons in the square at Vatican City! Like sand on the seashore. I wasn´t the only one chasing them around this time -- some of my friends also got into the action too, and there were a few kids not much bigger than pigeons themselves toddling around after the nervous birds. I didn´t chase any away that day, only walked directly toward them and watched them part before me like the Red Sea. And I didn´t even need a divine staff! I tailed a few individuals, seeing how close I could get to them before they´d finally take off into the air, which usually wasn´t very long after they realized they were being stalked. One, however, just kept hopping away from me faster and faster, either unable or unwilling to open his wings. In an open plaza (s)he could run, but definetly not hide, and truth be told, (s)he couldn´t really run that well either. We went around in wide, looping circles, me slowly gaining speed, the bird slowly growing more and more harried as it hopped. It got to the point where either I would catch it with my bare hands or it would finally give up and fly away. The moment of truth! Who would win, man or bird?! Then, WHAM! I was concentrating on the pigeon and not on the little girl who was chasing her own bird right into my path. The bird got away, the child was unhurt, the mother did not press charges or even look upset. But I felt stupid. And I didn´t even know what language to use to appologize. I went with Italian since we were, you know, in Italy.

But today, I had the most amazing pigeon experience ever!!! (This may seem quaint to those of you who live in big cities, but I have never had to share a city with a large avian population before, so I´m going to have "pigeon experiences" and a few of them are going to be amazing. So there.)

Back in Granada I was walking home from a shopping trip with my friends Erin and Heather. (I bought new deoderant, as I realized mid-way through our close-contact trip in Italy that mine had been giving me a terrible rash.) As we passed through the plaza, I trailed a few pigeons as we walked, and then noticed a large congregation by the fountian, so I ran to scatter them. Erin ran after me to help out, but being admittedly not as well-versed in pigeon chasing as myself, she slipped on a patch of water and crashed to the ground. The seat of her pants were soaked, she was emberassed, shaken up and the three of us decided to sit on a nearby bench for a few minutes so I could give a short lecture on the techniques of safe pigeon chasing.
We hadn´t been sitting long before an old man in a wool jacket began breaking up a large loaf of french bread and tossing it in large chunks where the pigeons had formerly been. Eventually a few got up the courage to return and start pecking at the bread. These were very well-fed birds -- along with being downright frighteninly, I swear at least one of them had a double chin. But the man kept throwing out bread. And more and more pigeons began arriving.
I speculated that the man was baiting the pigeons with the bread and then using the pigeons as bait for silly American kids like us who would chase after them and slip on the water he had probably spilled there earlier. Devious!
But he really didn´t need to be using up that much bread. We just sat there watching him and talking and after about 10 minutes, after he was tossing the last of his second large loaf, and it became clear to me that he wasn´t just tossing out stale leftovers. He walked over to us with a bit of the crust, smiling. The girls thought he was offering the bread to us and sort of waved him away, but I could tell he had something to say to us.
He explained, in slow, simple Spanish, why he was really there. It was pay back, he said. Making things even again. During the Spanish Civil War the people had very little to eat. There was no food, and he was hungry. So to get by, he had to eat a lot of pigeons. Now, there is food. So he´s feeding the pigeons that had once fed him.
"It´s a good story," I told him. And I should have added, important.
I don´t know as much about the Civil War as I should, but I am aware that most of the adults I know here in Spain lived under Franco´s dictatorship. And those who were old enough had also been through the terrible fighting and violence. The pigeon man I had been lame spinning conspirisy stories about was a testiment to what the people had been through, and these bread crumbs were his own personal vow not to forget how hard and awful it had been. But maybe more than that, they were a way of expressing thanks for the bounty and freedoms he has now.
So I guess I learned a lot today.

Return

2004-10-12T07:30:00.000-07:00

Whew.
I am back from my long European Tourist Adventure.
Many, many awesome times were had. But I also returned to Granada at 7:30 this morning after a 15 hour bus ride from Madrid and slept for about four hours. Classes start in earnest tomorrow so I have to begin thinking in Spanish again. And studying as well.

I´ll write more about the trip soon.

leaving on a jet train

2004-10-05T10:19:00.000-07:00

John Denver´s song is playing in this Internet cafe that always short-shifts me on time. In two hours I´ll be catching a cab with four fellow travelers to the train station where we´ll catch the overnight to Barcelona. From there we fly to Venice, where we´ll spend the night and probably ride a few water busses.
···
Today we toured Toledo, the religious capital of Spain (I´m assuming this is where the phrase "Holy Toledo!" comes from), and so far the only place they don´t let you take pictures in the cathedrals. It´s also the sword-capital of the world, so we got to tour the sword-making shop and see some awesome swords, including Excaliber, the Highlander sword and (I think) and authentic Klingon sword as well as samurai, musketeer and U.S. Marines swords.
The only place that was selling Spanish swords was a convinence store on the other side of town. You could also buy Placer Azul ice cream there.
Toledo is a very beautiful city, though, and was the home of El Greco, who is one of my favorite 500+ year old artists, although many people seem to think he´s too gloomy and ignores anatomy or something. I say he was just an expressionist before Expressionism really started.
But I don´t know my art history, so maybe I´m wrong.
Gotta run again.
More later.

Madid, but not Mad.

2004-10-04T14:49:00.000-07:00

Today was a free day in Madrid. Here are the things that I did:

-Got a good night sleep. possibly my last for a while.
-Went to the Reina Sophia Contemporary Art museum. Saw early surrealist Spanish art, a bunch of Picasso, including Guernica. They say you can´t really appreciate that painting unless you see it in person, and I actually had to sit down after viewing it for a while just to recoup my emotions and thoughts. I like art a lot, but that doesn´t often happen to me.
-Planned on going to an Indian resturant, but realized that we had been at the art museum too long and since it was almost 4, the resturant would be closed for siesta by the time we got there. So we ended up eatting at a Planet Sandwich, some sort of branch of Planet Hollywood that only serves bland paste concoctions on crustless white bread. It was awful, but at least it was cheap.
-Went back to Reina Sophia and checked out their more modern stuff. Interesting that sometimes modern art looks more like it belongs in a science museum or a playground than a gallery. When I have my own art gallery I will let everyone play on it if they want to and yell at no one for doing what it looks like the art was made for. Why make art that looks like it was made to be walked through if the guards get made at you when you DO walk through it? sigh. some of the art was really sad, too.

ahh, this place is closing again. goodbye again for now.

Race

2004-10-03T13:17:00.000-07:00

So Internet cafes are more expesive in Madrid and we´ve been coming and going so much it hasn´t been easy to get on a computer long enough to type something worthwhile out. I´m not promising that tonight will be any different.
But last night I was trying to type at a place above an arcade and the whole room would shake every two minutes or so from kids playing mallet-smashing strength games downstairs. That plus buzzing lights and flashing noise all added up to me not really being able to think.
But I´ve seen cool stuff when not in front of a screen: castles, aquaducts, Don Quixote, a whole ton of used books, more ham (jamon in spanish, I almost typed that) than I ever thought existed, and um, I don´t remember because my time is almost up.
more when I can get to it!
love,
aaron

during one night, I reflect on another night.

2004-09-29T16:28:00.000-07:00

Ay.
Internet cafes can be ridiculous. I only wanted to come here and type up a tale of daring adventures and intrigue, but this is the third computer I´ve been on ... and it appears to be working, but who knows when I actually try to post this.

Oh, and now the cafe is closing completely. Hooray!
Anyway, my story was going to be about piling 15 people into a 7 passanger van and driving through the Adalucian countryside to a small pueblo where we had an awesome Spanish/English BBQ thanks to a Granada kid we met at church a few weeks ago. He´s actually studying and working in Denmark, but he says it´s so expensive to live there and Granada is so cool that he´d rather live in Granada and not work than live in Denmark and have five jobs. But for now, he´s commited to his Danish work and is only home on holiday, so he did the next best thing to moving permanently to Granada: threw an awesome party for friends, family and complete strangers!
He only expected about six of us American students to show up, but word got around somehow, and thirteen of us were waiting to be picked up at the gas station when he pulled up in a van already carrying a few Spanish friends.
But we made due. We also almost died, because the Spanish can´t drive. But we made due.
I lost count of how many people were eatting at the candle-lit picnic table that night, but I felt more fluent in Spanish than I had in a long time, telling stories and making jokes almost as naturally as I would in English. And somehow, because it was in Spanish, everything seemed funnier and more invigorating. We ate a lot of meat, as well as Fanta-esque juice and potato chips. oh, and bread!
I put a piece of bread on my head and said, "it´s a panbrerro!"
"Nooo," said a well intentioned Spanish kid, "SOMbrerro!"
But it was my turn to correct him. I knew what I was talking about, a bread hat! "PANbrerro!" I said again, probably looking stupider than I felt.
He couldn´t stop laughing.

I am no proficient at puns in two languages.

And I actually told most of that story! Well, except for the end, where we all ended the night by standing in a circle in the middle of the lawn and singing Spanish VBS songs. Everyone was college-aged, but somehow everyone knew the words and corresponding hand and body motions. Well, everyone except for us American kids. We just faked it -- smiled and laughed and spun around in circles shaking our hands when the other kids did. And when the Spanish kids began singing "Padre Abraham tuve muchos hijos," we joined in. Some things aren´t hard to translate.

The cafe really is closing now. Buenas Noches, todos.

Back from Seville + contest winner!

2004-09-27T03:58:00.000-07:00

So I have returned to Granada, and as always am glad to be back. I was at first rather impressed with Seville with its smoother walk-ways, ritzier stores, bigger river and hipper night-life, not to mention a wider variety of tourist attractions. But it didn´t take 24 hours before I was longing for Granada´s cobblestones, orange walls and friendly graffiti.
I´ll write more about the city and our trip when I´ve got a bit more time, but first I´m excited to announce that we have a winner in the guess the brand name contest! Please be aware that I don´t endorse this company in any way, I just thought that their slogan was a bit absurd and sounded slightly freaky and psychadelic.
The slogan was:
Ven a la Placer Azul
Which translated to English means:
Go to the Blue Pleasure
Which said in a deep, raspy voice sounds:
Hideously creepy.
The winnder is:
Tylor!
And the brand name is:
Nestle.
Here´s Tylor´s winning entry:
"I think it is a Nestle ice cream product called "KIMY swirls blue"...it's cold, turns your mouth blue and is on a stick...familiar brand Nestle. What comics do I win?"

I´m not familar with the KIMY swirls blue and don´t know at all what it might do to your mouth, but all the advertising for Nestle frozen confections out here has a blue background, and the Nestle logo is blue, so that´s where I assumed the logo came from. Tylor may know more about this Blue Pleasure than even I did!
So anyway, this contest is over, and I´ll be sending Tylor some rad Spanish comics as soon as I get his address.
I´ll try to think of another contest to host soon. Thank you to everyone who participated!

Now that I´m in Seville, I suppose I should get a haircut!

2004-09-25T04:10:00.000-07:00

We just checked into our hostel, the city seems more modern than Granada, lovely larger and less graffiti´d.
The hostel was on a little tiny side street and looking for it on a just-bought map made my eyes go dizzy. But I was never even good at Where´s Waldo. We got some help from a few loitering locals, but since there were a few turns to take, I had to hold the map out in front of me, looking very touristy as we traveled.
We found a pleasant plaza where the girls all wanted to stop and look at shalls and buttons and jewelry and I re-oriented myself -- realizing we had gone the wrong way. Fortunatly, my traveling companions were too shopped-out to noticed that once we crossed the street, I led us right back down the way we came.
I feel very, very sneaky.
The downside of this is that they might now give me more directional credit than I´m actually worth.
This map is never leaving my side.

Travel news + a cry for help + an awesome trivia contest!

2004-09-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

The bad news: I´m totally exhausted and confused from looking up hostel and ground transportation information for our trip to Italy next month
The good news: Holy crap, I´m going to Italy next month! And Sevilla next weekend! The beach seems to have been only the beginning.

If anyone out there knows anything about traveling in and around Europe, specifically Italia, please let me know. We´ll be there six days and are planning to see Venice, Cinque Tere, Florence and Rome before flying out for a day in Barcelona and then catching an overnight bus back to Granada.

Oh! bonus trivia question contest: there are signs all over Granada advertising a brand everyone in America is familiar with. The advertising slogan is "Ven a la Placer Azul." Kudos to anyone who can traslate that, but I´ll mail a couple of Spanish comic books to anyone who can guess what company the slogan is for and give me a good explanation why that´s their slogan. No cheating! You have a week.

A few notes about Granada and phones

2004-09-20T04:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes Granada feels like a labrynth. The streets are narrow, mostly cobblestoned and can vere off at a 45 degree angle without much notice. The buildings on every street are built deliberately high to block out the sun and wind and everything stretches out like wild ivy from a series of plazas and fountains, each street bisected and intersected dozens of smaller alleys and side streets.
In addition to this, there are no street signs. Sometimes you can find the name of an alley on a plaque posted on the side of a building at an intersection, but it´s hard from a set-rule. On major streets there might be Disneylandesque colored signs pointing to major plazas or landmarks, but most of the time they´re just there to direct tourists back to their hotel.
Again, not terribly helpful.
In some ways this system is cool; it makes just finding the door to a resturant or musem feel like stumbling onto a secret passage or clandestine hideout. It also seems appropriate that a roaming minetaur wouldn´t feel out of place here in Picasso´s homeland (the labryth-dwelling man-beast was a favorite symbol of the famous painter).
But for someone like myself who frequently got lost in the town I lived in for 14 years, it can also be sublimely frustrating. There is apparently one store in the city that sells international phone cards that can be used easily with my cell phone for three days in a row before our trip to the beach I spent over an hour seeking out this hidden shoppe. I never once found it. This is more remarkable when you realize that I had been there TWICE before and HAD DIRECTIONS.
I even had a friend walk me there (after it was closed, unfortunatly) and show me how to get home and I had no idea where we were. "See, it´s right by the Salsa place we were last night," he told me. And I saw the Salsa place, recognized the area, recognized that I had been there before, had walked there only last night, and was mesmerized. "I thought this was on the other side of the city!" It was not. Or maybe it was. I really had no idea what side of the city we were on anyway.
So basically, I´ve had to just use the phone in my house for calling home. This is not a terrible thing, just difficult, since the one phone in the house is in the TV room and someone is almost always watching TV in there and I don´t want to interrupt them.
So today I got up in the morning and made a late-night phone call to my girlfriend in the American Midwest. We talked for a little over an hour and my Señora later informed me that she had to go down to the street to use a payphone for a call she needed to make.
I felt bad and insisted she let me know when she needed to use the phone if I was on it. "It´s your phone, not mine," I told her in Spanish. "No," she smiled at me and said (also in Spanish), "you live in this house and the phone belongs to whoever lives in this house."
So Granada may be easy to be lost in, hard not to feel at home here.

Mar Amable

2004-09-19T15:05:00.000-07:00

I flew over the Mediteranean once before.
But this weekend I actually swam in it.
After a three-hour trip in a bus with seats that might have been comfortable if my legs were half their current size, I arrived with the rest of my study abroad group somewhere on the Spanish coast. I´m told it´s called Roquetas de Mar, but I was so glad to get off of the two-story bus that I didn´t really care. We checked into our hotel, were told when the buffet would be open, and then hit the beach.
Wow, how posh does that all sound?
Wow, I also can´t believe that I just called something posh. I guess I really am in Europe.
I am used to beaches in Oregon where everything is damp and surrounded by cliffs and evergreens -- all fog and sweatshirts and driftwood. I have gotten used to beaches in California, more or less the sandy parking-lot at the end of the world, lined by firepits and tee-shirt stores. But as I stood up to my shoulders, being slightly rocked by waves, and digging my toes into sand and pebbles, the only words of description that came to my mind were: "I´ve never known the Mediteranean to be un-friendly."
It sounded like something Erin would say.
It´s less naturally impressive than the Northwest coast (no big waves, no sweeping vistas, just sand and sea and sky), and less commercial than SoCal (no surfers, no boardwalks, no billboards, only a patch of beach umbrellas and some topless middle-aged women), but entierly agreeable. The water is calm without being boring, the water midway between warm and cool -- transitioning from standing on the shore to being in the water is nearly seamless, and though the pebbley beach negates sandcastles, it also doesn´t stick get stuck in shoes, between toes or under swimsuits.
For a while we played four-on-four Ultimate Beach Frisbee (both ocean and beach were legal playingground) and I wished it could be an every day activity. I had two spectacular dives (neither entierly succesful), at least one goal-scoring throw, and my team emerged victorious. One goal was my tee-shirt and beach blanket. The other was a patch of sand by a lady with a book and blue and white umbrella. I think she was glad when our game ended.
Sadly, most of the charm of La Mar ended at the seashore. Aside from our strange and spectacular buffet dinner and breakfast, there wasn´t a whole lot to the town we found ourselves in. I have never seen kitch quite like I saw at this particular Spanish beach´s souvenier shops. Somehow the calm of the Medeteranean must have stolen all discerning taste from this town. Never once did I see anything I found to be funny, amusing or even terribly interesting. And never before have I seen so many statuettes of odd cartoon characters (including anamorphic bananas) engaged in every manner of sexual positions. I´m trying at the moment to purge these images from my mind and cannot imagine why anyone would purchase or display them.
But at night we went out watched. The water felt warm against my ankles as sand swished back and forth along the coast, the sea a deep gray-green, calmly rolling and pulsing underneat the starry sky.
It´s a scene you won´t find on a postcard.

More about names of cities (+ 2 bonus topics!)

2004-09-16T10:57:00.000-07:00

I am still having a hard time making all the verb tenses agree in my sentences, but that hasn´t stopped me from making Spanish puns since the first day we arrived in Granada.
The most obvious, of course, is in the name of the city itself:
Gran Nada, "the big nothing."
Now, the joke doesn´t work entirely, because Granada is a vibrant, and quite baroque city. But it´s also more than a pomegranite (see previous entry) so what is in a name after all? Well, in this particular joke I´ve found a connection to my home town to go along with the fruit-based connection to my previous residence in Californa. As far as I know, Dallas, Oregon has never grown on a tree (although the high school mascot used to be the Prune Pickers about 100 years ago), but it truly was a big bunch of nothing.
Wow, that sounds mean. I love Dallas, really. There just isn´t much there

Bonus topic: Facial hair
I have been growing a beard. It´s coming along quite nicely. However, I may cut it tonight before we go salsa dancing. I haven´t decided yet.

Bonus topic 2: Tee-shirts
A few days ago I was talking to a few people I had just met at a café. Like most of the people here, they were both smoking, even though they´re Americans. The loudest of the two was from Texas and was wearing what looked like it could be a Sesame Street tee-shirt, except that it said 666 Hell Street (or something similar) instead.
I was wearing a orange and yellow tee-shirt that Erin had made me for Valentine´s Day that says "Agapé" on it. He was all, "dude, what´s your shirt say?" and I said, "oh. um, Agapé. It´s a Greek word for unconditional love."
"Oh," he said, "ok."

Cities of Fruit

2004-09-13T14:48:00.000-07:00

Some of the most rousing dinner-table (technically lunch-table, but that just doesn´t sound right) conversations we´ve had in my house have revolved around fruit.
I´m not really sure how this happens. But one way or another, we were sitting there, me, Luke, and the Señora, descibing our favorite fruits to each other. The Señora explained that soon it would be melacotón season, and we would get to have those delicious, round fruits which as it turns out are known in English as peaches.
Luke tried asking about passion fruit, which he´d grown familiar with from his summer internship in Peru, but we could not find a Spanish word, so he was stuck describing something fleshy with lots of little tiny seeds that are OK to eat.
The Señora was dubious about this, feeling that no fruits have seed that you eat. Luke and I tried to show her the tiny seeds in a banana that Luke was eatting.
Since the topic had shifted to weird things fruits can do, I tried descibing the weirdest fruit I´ve ever seen -- the pomegranite. Explaining one in English is hard enough. They have a hard outershell, that sort of also goes all the way through them. And then a bunch of seeds, all of which are enveloped in their own little fleshy red seed pods, which you eat and spit out the seeds. You break it open and it seriously looks like a berry-flavored alien laid eggs in there.
Needless to say, I failed to communicate the essence of this fruit in my second language (which is still in heavy development). But my Señora did look very intrigued.
I ran to my backpack and dug out my trust dictionary to look up the English word for this most-bizarre of fruits and found the Spanish translation for Pomegranite:
Granada.
Really!
Just like in California, where the city I go to school is called Orange, I now live in a town named for a fruit. The next time I was out in the street I started to notice the obvious signs: all the posts along the sidewalk, all the manhole covers, they are all decorated metal representations of pomegranties. Granadas all over Granada.
My life is one big fruit salad.

Comer Comida

2004-09-09T03:31:00.000-07:00

One of the most convinient things about living with a host family here in Spain is that for the first time in over two years, someone else is responsible for feeding me and doing my laundry. My host mom is a widow with seven grown up children and a small handful of grandkids. She doesn´t really speak any English, but that´s more than alright.
There are piles of old letters, folders and spiral-bound notebooks crammed haphazardly into a cupboard next to my bed. The first night I was here I spent a few hours browsing through them, absorbing scrawled declarations of amor, grammar lessons broken down point by careful point, clipped pages from New Wave fashion magazines, tourist brocures and at least one ski pass. Written in at least three different languages and dating back since before I was born, they suggest that La Señora has been hosting students in my room for quite a while.
She mostly leaves me and Luke alone, popping her head in our room a few times a day to ask "¿quieres comer?"
Meals happen oddly here. Breakfast takes place whenever we happen to get up and consists of the same three elements every day: a cup or orange juice, a mug of unusually thick milk and two pieces of toast. There is also a large plastic container of Cola Cao, chocolate powder to add to our milk. It dulls the odd, creamy flavor of the milk, but even after two or three minutes of vigilant stirring, always fails to completely dissolve, leaving clumps of chocolate powder skimming the surface. It´s nothing to complain about, though. The toast always comes with raspberry jam to spread on it, except for two consecutive days when we had muffins instead of toast at all.
Lunch is served between two and three in the afternoon, and this is the "big" meal, the one visiting family and friends will usually join us at. There are typically three dishes of some sort, ranging from panella (rice with chopped meat and vegetables), to stew, to straight-up meat of all varieties, to spinach soup or just a bowl of chopped tomatoes.
And always, always, always water and a loaf of french bread.
When I was in Puerto Rico they called this same style of bread "pan de agua," or "water bread." I wondered at the time where the name came from -- if it was made with more water than most kinds of bread, or typically eatten with water.
Now I understand that it´s because it´s eatten LIKE water. Every bite or two of lunch of dinner is followed by a bite of bread. I´ll cut myself four of five slices in a meal, and Luke and I by ourselves usually go through half a large loaf in twenty minutes or less.
Dinner is less formal than lunch, and usually Luke and I eat alone -- the Señora considers a cup of juice to be enough for her dinner. The meal is smaller, and sometimes a little more off-beat. Last night we had breaded chicken patties and french fries. And a lot of bread.

I am outdated.

2004-09-07T11:23:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I really tried to put some links on the side or customize this page a little bit, but while I was off on my own FTP´ing and editing posts in Word Pad, things seems to have changed quite a bit. Everything´s all fancy and I have no clue how to make it work any more, especially with the limited time I have in this Internet café.
But I DID get rid of the typo in the header, so now it really does link to my old page where you can go to visit my friends on the Internet. They´re all quite nice.

So what can I say about Spain at the moment? I´ve started classes, and have my first homework of the school year to do tonight. This month is three weeks of "intensive language training," which means four hours of Spanish classes four days a week. It don´t think I´ve had one class that often since middle school, so I´ll have to get used to not having at least a day buffer between when my homework is assigned and when it´s due.
There are two teachers, one who I like, the other who I don´t exactly mind, but time seems to pass slower when she´s teaching. Note to future teachers: please be excited about your material, and don´t sit down in a desk for the whole class! especially when it´s something as difficult for students to engage in as Spanish and especially when you have a mushy local accent that makes it even harder to discern syllables!

Trying to revamp this fancy new page has sucked up all my alloted time, mis amigos. I shall return with many more stories later.
Paz!

short, but . . .

2004-09-05T09:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we went to La Alhambra!
I climbed a tree in the gardens there.
it was totally sweet.

Raining in Granada . . .

2004-09-03T02:33:00.000-07:00

Strange thing about this side of the world: it´s early September and it doesn´t get dark until after nine PM and isn´t light until eight in the morning. I thought originally that the Spaniards were a bit college-student crazy to stay up until midnight todas las noches, but it turns out that the sun is late to bed as well. The whole Spanish world revolves around a night-oriented day.

Today was my first academicly-oriented day in Europe as it started off with a Spanish placement test. After a quick breakfast of toast, creamy milk with chocolate and O.J. Luke and I made our way through the soggy streets to the Plaza de Isabel la Catolica where we were supposed to meet the other students before continuing to la esculea.
But we were late and no one was there. So we headed up to the school alone. I´m glad Luke was with me, as he´s as good with directions as I am bad with them. Yesterday it took me two hours to get home after wandering around back alleys and hidden plazas and going in circles every which-way. I need to take Luke with me everywhere, like a walking, talking compass. Navigation is not a bad quality to have in a roommate. Saves me money on a GPS device.
We crammed into little tiny desks in a room on the second floor of the school -- at least three different study abroad groups were taking placement tests, so the small building was alive with chatter, mostly in English. Getting through the crowds was almost more difficult that the test, of which there were three parts.
The first was a bunch of short essays that was a relative cinch. It´s not hard to write about "what is a typical day like?" in any language you´ve got a passing ability in.
Then came an hour of multiple choice grammar questions. It´s not as fun figuring out what´s wrong with other people´s sentences than making up your own. Well . . . at least not when you don´t know the language well enough to be a smart-alec about it.
Then we took a break as the professoras corrected our tests and then called us in one-by-one for a short grammar section. This wasn´t hard as by that point they knew what we could handle. I got asked a lot of questions about school and such, and I only wished I could remember the verb for "to learn." It´s aprender, but that little revelation came about ten minutes too late.
It looks like I´ll be placed in one of the two intermediate levels, which is exactly where I thought I would be. Nice to know that the teachers have the same impression of my abilities as I do.
This Internet café is crowded y tengo much hambre. So for now, salúd!

¡Hola, chicos y chicas!

2004-09-01T12:29:00.000-07:00

Estoy ahora en Granada!

So I got up at four AM this morning and lugged my huge, lumpy and awkward Army Surplus duffel bag full of fifty pounds of clothes and other essentials to the hotel lobby and got on a bus to the London Heathrow airport where we flew to Malaga Spain.
Flying over Western Europe is curiously like flying over a giant Atlas. Unlike America there is little topography or geology to speak of, it´s all flat with every coast line clearly drawn and every farm bordered neatly by rows of trees. Except for the golden glow of the sun on the Bay of Biscay, everything looked the same as I imagine it would in a full-scale map.
In Malaga we waited in the most crowded, poorly designed bagage claim I´ve ever seen and finally loaded into a few big white vans and drove to Granada.
Spain is browner than I thought it would be. It´s not particuarly glamorous -- it has more in common with pictures I´ve seen of South American than the kilometers closer UK -- a few palm trees, lots of broken down buildings and tan countrysides freckled with orchards of trees spaced with pixel-precision.
(The radio station in this Internet cafe is now playing "Take on Me." I don´t know why I feel compeled to mention that.)
But Granada the city is a little different. It´s all stone streets and storefronts y paques y catédrals. Once we arrived we were paired up with our host families. I´m staying in a fourth floor appartment with a widow and her adult daughter, rooming with a kid from North Carolina named Luke. The food so far is great. My Spanish is not. The city is cool. I´ll have more soon.

Let's skip way ahead.

2004-08-31T12:35:00.000-07:00

Ok, so the short end to this long story was that I got my passport, even though I had to pass through a few more trials and tribulations after that.

Since then, a bunch of things happened! Like so many, you won't even believe it! I'll break it all down by states and countries first, OK?

CALIFORNIA
Oh man, I hardly even remember now. I finished up both of my jobs, had a going away party at the beach, packed up all my things (well, most of my things), ate a few pies, saw a few peaches rot (very sad) and toasted some marshmellows!
And other things! But I can't remember now!

Then I flew home to OREGON
While there I saw my awesome family and hung out with my awesome friends. Activities included: being completely shunned by the dog (not quite as sad as seeing peaches rot, but a little sad), going for a daring river adventure with my bro and dad (and aformentioned dog) and cutting my foot open on a rock, watching my dad sew my foot back up in his office (he is a doctor, so don't worry), going to the John Kerry rally in Portland with my pals Peter and Neil and Neil's baby Taylor (real live baby not baby as in girlfriend baby) -- it was the biggest rally so far of this election season, over twice the size of the second biggest (also a Kerry rally), which was pretty awesome, eatting pie (by my mom), playing Scrabble with my grandma, trying to go to Enchanged Forest with my sister, but getting lost and going to a flea market Mount Angel Abbey instead (cheaper and equally castley), packing and buying new clothes for the first time in over a year.

THEN I flew to see beautiful Erin in WISCONSIN
And continued my streak of doing awesome things by doing awesome things with Erin. These included: going camping at a Yogi Bear campground, visiting a cheese factory, water aerobics with senior citizens, getting my hair cut (by Erin!), being happy with my hair cut, going on a big lake in a motorboat with a lot of her family, going in a smaller lake in a canoe with just her and her brother, eatting real Chicago-style pizza for the first time (in a car in the rain), thunderstorms, cookies, Garden State, a lot of love, etc. etc!

Now I am in LONDON (this is a country, not a state)
and I have been on an airplane sitting next to a large African businessman who spoke no English but was cool anyway, been on a tour in a double-decker bus, seen a huge statue of Prince Albert, admired the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London, seen a play in the reconstructed Globe Theatre standing up, wished I could sit down while watching aforementioned play, wished I could sit down AFTER aforementioned play, crossed a lot of bridges, seen a GIGANTIC metal spider, heard a street musician covering James Taylor, heard a lot of people call things "brilliant," eatten at a real English pub, learned that real English pubs are a bit pricey, learned that there is NO circus in Picadelly Circus (also quite sad), taken the Underground a lot, carried POUNDS of British currency (ha ha, get it?), stopped at an Internet cafe, and am now out of time.
Muc love and more later,
-Aaron

More for everyone

2004-08-18T18:28:00.000-07:00

I fixed comments so that they're open to everyone now, not just those registered on blogger. Rejoice!

continuing SF adventure! but no pictures this time

2004-08-17T17:44:00.000-07:00

So there I was in the Nob Hill district, home to many tall, ornate town houses in every candy color imaginable, bobbing up-and-down streetshills straight out of a Dr. Seuss story, and I had been told, the post office and consulate I needed to visit to complete my mission. I was confident I could find the Spanish consulate, but it was the post office that posed a problem, since I could not seem to reconcile the directions I had looked up that morning on the hostel’s office computer with the tourist map I had also snagged from there. I had apparently copied them down wrong as it looked like I’d just be going in circles – as far as I could tell there was no other reason ight turns in a row.
I although I didn’t have the address of the post office, I did know which street it was on, so I cut ties with my pre-planned route and turned left. If the post office didn’t show up within a few blocks, I could just turn around. In the meantime, I asked some people walking around the neighborhood where I could find my destination.
They were not helpful.
“I’m not sure, we don’t actually live here, but I think I saw one somewhere around here.”
“You know, I don’t know this area really at all.”
“Hmm, there used to be one around here somewhere, but I think they moved it.”
None of this inspired much confidence in me. After about three hills and twice as many blocks, I decided to turn around and once I retraced my steps back to where I turned left instead of right I began asking for directions again.
The first place I stopped was a coffee shop where the cool kids in green aprons directed me a few blocks up a different street than I had been traveling on, but assured me “it’s right there!”
It wasn’t. What was there was a UPS store. An honest mistake, sure, but the UPS store does not sell anything resembling the special envelope I needed. The man behind the counter had crooked teeth and was chatting quite intelligently about politics with the elderly lady buying balloon stationary when I walked in, begging for directions to the USPS (note the first S).
Then, once this info had been relayed to me, I walked another four blocks back to the coffee shop, turned and walked one more block. And there was the Post Office. And I learned never to trust someone in a Starbucks apron for directions.

2004-08-16T18:09:00.000-07:00

MY DUEL WITH THE DRAGON!
(continued)

My battle with the dragon did not go well. We were tussling something awful when out of nowhere he thwacked me with his massive reptilian tale and I was out of there like a fly ball on a summer’s day.

But when I landed headfirst somewhere on Nob Hill, there was no one to catch me.

Also, somewhere in the fray I had lost the special envelope I had bought from the post office and absolutely needed in order to apply for my visa!

That darn dragon had stolen it!

Or maybe I had just left it on my desk back home.
(note: in real life my desk is messier than this and the walls aren’t green.)