Monday 5/30- Wed 6/1
Monday
Today was another typical day in Spain. Work went well. I broke up the day by going out for breakfast with Jose and Erica around 11 (they always go and usually invite me). I wasn’t hungry at all, but I figured it was a good chance to get to know some of my co-workers and speak some more Spanish with real Spanish people. I don’t really like coffee either, but I figured it was better than paying for food I didn’t want. I had learned from a friend that it’s rude for someone to get something when another person wasn’t having anything. I quite enjoyed getting to know Jose and Erica a little better though and getting out of the office for a while and with enough sugar the coffee wasn’t even that bad. After I got back I decided we needed some background tunes so for the rest of the day I introduced Jose to some of my favorite music. He had heard a lot of it, but some songs he would ask what the band was and write it down. By the end of the day I had finished up the translations of the website service descriptions and met with my boss to talk about how I could start making 6 different pamphlets for marketing their business locally in Spanish. This was both exciting because I had some artistic freedom and intimidating because it seemed like it would take a long time. The first day I mentioned to my boss that I had worked with inDesign and Photoshop so he felt good about giving me the project, when the truth is I have only taken 2 classes with them.
It was cloudy and had sprinkled a little in the afternoon (the first I had seen any drops of rain). Since it wasn’t sunny and the beach would only be OK, I went on a long run to explore the eastern edges of the city. I ran through this beautiful park that reminded me of Forest Park, but a lot smaller. It said it had a public library, but the building was smaller than a house and only open 2.5 hours of the day. When I got back I was beat, and scarfed a whole tostada for dinner while watching Cold Case or maybe CSI: Miami dubbed over with Spanish voices. I’ve given up on trying to follow the dialogue of all the shows that my mamá watches while I eat. When it’s not your native language you can really easily tune out the words and have to concentrate really hard to follow the fast Spanish conversations with slang and technical terms and whatnot. Sometimes when I try to hear the tv I find I’ve stopped chewing because I’m concentrating so hard on the words and it’s hard to understand them above my chewing anyway.
I spent some time after dinner trying to look up local Alicante summer events and flights for trips I’m taking to take around Europe over the weekends (this can be incredibly time consuming and frustrating I’ve found). Alicante does have a pretty vibrant summer life. Probably to keep all the tourists interested and entertain all the Spanish people who have summer homes in Alicante. First we have some Medieval Festival coming up beginning of June. Then there’s the famous Festival of Hogueras where they have huge bonfires all over the city, shoot off tons of fireworks daily, and just go nuts for a week. That’s on top of all the bullfights, concerts in the castle, and free movie nights they have.
Today was the first night I actually had trouble sleeping. The bed is a couple inches smaller than I am tall and the pillows all stretch the width of the bed so that’s really weird. I also have ended up with a decent amount of sand in my bed.
Tuesday
At work today I started on the LD pamphlets. That’s gonna be a fun challenge. I really enjoyed thinking how best to lay it out, what to include, how the design will tie together. I also spent a chunk of time coming up with about 40 suggestions for a company slogan since we don’t have one yet. I gave them to the boss and he really liked several, but I haven’t heard back yet. I went to breakfast again with Jose and got the Horchata and Lemon granizado drink Erica recommended last time and it was really tasty. Jose got to pick the music today. We listened to a lot of “top 40” songs, haha. Jose told me that he was only going to work half days from now on so that’s gonna be a bummer not to have him around in the afternoon.
When work was done I went to David and Pepi’s apartment. We spent some time walking around to different shops and just talking about anything we wanted to know about in English and Spanish. They took me to 3 different sports shops before we found a really cheap (comparatively) soccer ball for 10 Euros. I’m really excited that I can go brush up on my soccer skills now. We walked into one really interesting restaurant called Lizarran. There whole menu is a bunch of different meat, egg, vegetable, cheese and potato combinations on top of a baguette slice and held together with a toothpick. These mini sandwiches(?) are all set out on the counter and you can eat however many of them you want. Afterwards the waiter counts all the toothpicks of 3 different sizes are on your plate and that’s how much you pay. Apparently it’s an Alicante favorite.
Around 11:30 I met up with some friends and we walked to our spot on the rocks by the sea. I was happy to see that some of our other friends who we invited once had come again and they had brought some of their new friends. So it was just one big friendly rock-sitting party. When we had our fill of the rocks we went to the American hub of Havana for the weekly BP tourney night. It was a great time, but when the clock struck around 3am I decided to head home so I could function at work in the morning. One of these nights I am going to stay out til 6 or so and see what the end of the party is like when everyone ends up at the discotecas (dance clubs)
Wednesday
I woke up this morning and sat down at the kitchen table to my wonderfully familiar breakfast of a piece of fruit, 2 packages mini croissants (recently switched from the 2 sweet cakes I used to get), and a cup of milk heated in the microwave for 2 min. and loaded with 2 spoons of cocoa powder and 1.5 spoons of sugar. I’ve mentioned that my mamá is a good cook (M), but I’m going to go off on a tangent now about my experience with food in Spain because I love food and talking about it is almost half as good as eating it.
(Supplement)
I just described the breakfast I always eat, and that is very typical of a light Spanish breakfast. Again, lunch is the biggest meal, but the dinners mamá gives me are pretty similar in size and structure. She always has the food prepared and ready to be heated up by the time I get home, so I just tell her when I wanna eat and she brings it out (yea, I know I’m spoiled). Many times the meal will kickoff with a salad with olive oil on it. Not my favorite dressing, but I’ve gotten used to it. Then I soak up the olive oil with a slice of bread I cut from the baguette that accompanies every meal. At first I noticed there was a new baguette every day. Since I would only finish like a fourth of it, I assume she just threw the rest away because she wanted to give me fresh bread and it’s so cheap. I told her that wasn’t necessary and she said something like don’t worry about it, but now the baguettes stick around for a couple days. I’ve still never gotten to the end of one. The main dishes are always something like ensalada rusa (Russian salad, very similar to potato salad), Cuban rice, spaghetti, chicken and potatoes, tostada (a huge potato and egg concoction), weird pizza, paella (my favorite, a rice and sausage dish), steak with fries (my least favorite b/c they don’t have BBQ sauce), weird lasagna, black bean and churizo, pasta salad, some tuna concoctions with a whole crawdad thing, etc. Desert is always a different fruit: watermelon, apple, mini-peaches, melon, strawberries, orange, banana, and twice chocolate pudding and once yogurt. I always fill my glass with the huge bottle of water she always sets out which she refills from a 5-gallon jug of bottled water. Mamá says the water here tastes awful. Whenever mamá sees I’ve finished she immediately gets up to clear my plates. I told her I could do it, but she said no so I just help get whatever she can’t grab. I’ve also learned to stack my plates on top of one another as I eat so she won’t get up and clear one plate at a time and wait for breaks in the tv shows to set down my fork.
I think one of mamá’s favorite parts of the day is when she goes to the market each day, because I can tell she takes a lot of pride in her food. I didn’t mention this, but over the weekend her son who lives with her but works out of town came back from his job building platforms underwater for salt extracting/processing factories (I clarified this from earlier). We didn’t really see each other because he was always gone seeing his kids and I was gone too, but anyway he said she used to be a better cook (I hope she didn’t hear that). Honestly, I didn’t get a great vibe from the son because I think he is unhappy with his current situation, but it was good to meet him.
There are dozens of small cafés on all the streets. Many are combined with a heladería (ice cream shop) which I’ve enjoyed occasionally :P. You’ll see tons of places with ‘ía’ on the end because that means it’s a shop of something: bocatería = sandwich shop, librería = bookstore, peluquería = hair salon, cervezería = beer place, etc. There are also lots of Kebap restaurants that sell kebab like things in wrap form. I hear they are delicious and will try one soon. Another thing they have a tone of (un-related to food) is gold-buying stores. Armando told me that during the recession these popped up because people had to sell off their jewelry/heirlooms for cash. Another strange thing you will find sold on the streets a lot are bundles of sticks. Apparently you eat them. They are some type of root, which I guess has a natural flavor and is then sweetened somehow. I can’t wait to gnaw on some sticks. It’ll be a tasty snack fit for a beaver. That’s another thing- they don’t snack during the day. It’s been kinda hard to adapt to not being able to go to the closet mid-afternoon and dump out some cereal or something and really hard not to be able to nom on some ice cream at midnight. There are definitely American favorites like Subway, McDonald’s, and KFC (which is actually the most popular somehow). Now that I think I’ve sufficiently exhausted the topic of food and hopefully made you mouths water I’ll go back to my Wednesday!
(end Supplement)
I continued to shape the pamphlets at work. I collected a bunch of pictures and graphics from the data files to use. Today was kinda confusing because they switched out my computer at lunch and I had to transfer all the files I was working on. Instead of one of the huge Mac desktops I was demoted to a Acer monitor attached to a Mac computer shaped like a Tupperware box (a bit bigger than an external hard drive). It was one of those days where felt like my mind was going in 10 different directions and it didn’t seem like I got much done.
Also, over the last day I’ve felt really slow with my Spanish. I don’t know why, but it feels like I’ve been asking people to repeat stuff a lot and just ending up nodding my head. I told Jose this and he said it was to the contrary, so maybe my brain is just tired. One of the highlights was when Jose pulled out the huge bags of gummy candies he keeps in his drawer and “forced” me to take one. At some point during everyday I think everyone stops in to see him and get some candy (he says sweets are his vice, and I told him it’s alright cuz everyone has one). While we chomped on candy we watched the trailers for the new Batman movie. Some of the guys in the office are huge Batman fans. The office has a really friendly feel where everyone stops in to say hello and goodbye to each other.
Today was the first day it really rained a decent amount. It's only rained once, and I already am tired of it because it means we have to stay inside where there is nothing to do. Without the beach option I tried to go to play basketball or soccer with some friends after work, but basketball courts were empty and soccer fields were full so we went home early. I’m planning to take it easy tonight, maybe relax with an online movie (IN ENGLISH!) and get a good amount of sleep.
Ciao (haha, jk) Adios,
Cóle
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