Return to Andalucía y mucha mierda

Hey friends and family (which, as I recently discovered, also includes my fantastic monitores. Good thing you're all so wonderful and I only have nice things to say about you.)

So I've been slacking off on my blog writing and photo-posting again. But per usual, I think it's for a decently good reason. It involves more traveling!

This past weekend was a 4-day weekend in Madrid, even though I had five days off, and is known here as a puente (bridge). I have no idea why it's called a bridge. But there you have it. So May 1st is May Day/International Workers' Day, May 2 is a holiday in madrid where they celebrate fighting against Napoleon's troops for their independence (they don't really highlight the fact that they lost.), May 3 and 4 were the regular weekend (you know, saturday and sunday), and May 5 was some holiday in Getafe, where my university is, so we didn't have class. It was basically the greatest thing ever.

So with all this free time I went traveling with 3 friends to Sevilla, Tarifa, and Cádiz, all of which are in Andalucía, the southern part of Spain. And by the southern part I mean the warm and sunny part. Yeah buddy. OK so bear with me while I tell you all about my adventures:

April 30: The adventure begins. After having dinner with supermonitoras Bibi & Yoly, as well as Bibi's boyfriend Fredo, Rachel, Pablo, and I made a mad dash to the bus station way the fuck across town to meet Annie to catch an overnight bus to Sevilla. We made it with just a minute or two to spare, and when we went to get on the bus the bus driver at first refused to let me on. Why, you may ask? Because I am a tremendous dumbass and had gotten plantain all over my bus ticket, rendering it both useless and smelly. (As a side note, it may have been banana. I think they use platano here to mean both plantain and banana. Though I could be wrong. It's been known to happen on occasion.) Anyway, after Pablo (monitor/way better spanish speaker than myself/also happens to be my boyfriend) talked to the bus driver, I was allowed on the bus and we were off to Sevilla!

May 1: Bus ride from hell. 6 hours with a 45 minute rest at a rest stop that smelled like shit at some ungodly hour like 2 or 3 AM. We arrived at our hostel in Sevilla around 7, and since our rooms weren't available until 12:30, we slept on couches in the lobby until about 9 or 10, when we were joined by 2 other people from our group, Isaac and Melanie, as well as Melanie's boyfriend. We went out and explored Sevilla for a couple of hours before coming back to the hostel to take a 5 hour "nap." It was a beautiful nap. Maybe as beautiful as Sevilla, which is just amazing. Man do I love sleep. Then Rachel, Annie, Pablo, and I went out for tapas at various restaurants, including one with a very angry bartender lady (bartendress?). There was also a lot of great gazpacho. We went to bed at 10:30 because we were still exhausted.

May 2: More sevilla! It was super pretty. We went on a boat ride down the river. We were supposed to pay attention to the scenery, but instead we all payed attention to these 3 cute little boys who were playing in front of me. I made friends with this little spanish boy named Sergio. If it wasn't completely illegal and a huge hassle, I'd totally take a little kid home to the states with me as a pet. Then we had a picnic in this really pretty park with jenny, a friend of a friend from vassar who's studying in Sevilla for the semester. Then we went back to the hostel to rest for a little and watch some episodes of The Office, the best television show ever, at which point I realized I had turned fairly dark/red in the hot Andalucian sun. Then we went out again for tapas. Tapas are the best.

May 3: Check out of our sweet hostel. I forgot to mention that my first experience in a hostel was actually a really positive one, it was really clean and nice and they had a bar downstairs, a rooftop pool and kitchen, and was generally fantastic. Anyways. So we checked out and caught a bus to Tarifa, one of the southernmost points in Spain. So southern, in fact, that you can see Africa (Morocco) across the water. But don't worry Mom, Dad, and Grandma- I didn't go to Morocco, as much as I really wanted to. We tried to have a picnic on the beach but Tarifa is really, really windy, giving a whole new meaning to the word "sandwich"..... ha. I'm so clever. I went for a quick 4 second swim because the water was really cold, then we went back to our pensión (i have no idea how to translate this... it was a small shitty room with a private bathroom and two sets of bunk beds). We watched more of the office, ate lunch, and napped. We did a lot of eating, napping, and the office watching during the puente. It was great. We went into the old part of Tarifa at night to get dinner and drinks afterwards. The old part is a lot prettier than the part where we were staying, which was pretty much just ugly.

May 4: Check out and walk around Tarifa for a couple hours with our suitcases because we had nowhere to leave them. Nice. Bus ride to Cádiz. Cádiz was beautiful, and had a beach you could be on for more than 5 minutes without being beaten by the sand. We went for a walk after the beach and got lost and ended up taking a solid hour-an- a-half walk. My feet hurt afterwards, but we saw a decent amount of Cádiz. We had great fresh fish for dinner, and also tried caracoles (snails). They are nothing like escargot- they look like snails you would find in your garden (or presumably in the sea, where they actually came from), with the antennae and everything. They didn't really tast like much, but now I can say that i've eaten sea snails. Awesome.

May 5: The adventure back to madrid. First we tried to buy bus tickets for an 8 hour bus ride, but there weren't any available until that night, and we had class the next day. So we went to the train station. There were no seats available on the AVE to Madrid from Cádiz. Go figure. So we had to take a train back to Sevilla to catch the AVE there. 95 euros later I was on my way back to Madrid. Yay.

So yeah. My weekend was an adventure and I loved it. It also killed all my motivation to do anything except lay on a beach and get tan and swim in the ocean. Oh well.

Before I end this horrendously long post, here are some cool things I've learned recently about the Spanish language:

1. Know how you say retirement in spanish? jubilación
2. When you wish someone luck before they act in a play, we say "Break a leg." Spaniards say "¡Mucha mierda!"- "Lots of shit!"
3. We've been learning about love and sex in my colloquial class recently. On tuesday we learned that another word for erection (besides erección) is empalme. That same day when I was looking a map of the metro, I realized Empalme was a stop on line 5. Apparently it also means union. I prefer to think there's a metro stop called Boner.

ok I think thats all. i'm in the process of uploading more pictures, since I just realized I havent done that since semana santa. there's already about 30 up there, probably only about 200 to go...