A day in Cadiz and a funny pic of Rafa

Taking one for the team and enjoying a delicious croissant for you!

Okay, I have to be self-deprecating here: I am lame…my 50+ year-old host mother is staying out later than me!  So, in an effort to go against my very being and NOT be lame (aka, stay up past the early hour of 3 AM on the weekends) I have adopted the siesta.  In America this word never work—unless you are Anne B***nahan (will not reveal full identity), my mom’s friend who is INFAMOUS for her ability to nap, few people possess the time to lie down and pass out in the afternoon.  In Spain, everything is shut down during these hours.  It is almost as if your only choice is to siesta.  Tough, I know.

Another thing that would never work in America (my family at least) is the desserts.  We only have fruit for dessert.  Knowing Fa-tass*, he would be incapable of sobering up from his daily refined sugar high.  Also, we always have a knife in our hand during dessert.  For whatever reason, no one eats the skin on fruit here, so dessert is a bit of process…skinning and cutting the fruit, then eating it.  Anyone who has ever had dinner in my family knows that having knives in our hands would be a miserable idea.  “Mary, I really think the ERA proposed in the ‘70s was unnecessary.”  Mary lunges across table, knife in hand.

Another difference: the perception of food.  Today for dinner my sister made me—what she called**—“vegetable stew.”  In reality, the vegetable stew was actually about equal parts olive oil and salt (probably close to a half-gallon of each), with an occasional vegetable; I kid you not.  It was delicious, but seriously fattening.  EVERYTHING my family cooks here is doused in olive oil.  Or fried in it.  In our kitchen we have a 5 liter (roughly 1.3 gallon) container of olive oil; we constantly are buying more as 5 liters go verrrry quickly.  (I had seconds of the olive oil soup.)

Anyways, this past week was fun, but a bit intense.  My class is now in its final week and on Friday we had our first exam.  It was funny getting my grade back today—again reminding me that this is not just a vacation with occasional classroom learning.  My grades actually transfer back to EEUU—must study accordingly.

Friday night I went out for ice cream with Denise, from Carnegie Mellon (originally from LA).  Delicious.  I was riding a Sevici home when I passed a bar and ran into a group of other kids from my program.  Hung out with them for a while and we then headed to Calle Betis.  This is a street, close to the river, composed of discotecas and bars.  One professor told us it is where Spaniards go “ir de pescas,” or go fishing…basically, looking for American girls.  My group ended up in a bar with many rainbow flags adorning the ceiling.  The cross-dressers also enlivened the atmosphere.  Brad, from Villanova, is a muscular African-American who was out with us.  He was approached by a group of Spaniards who were hoping he was a rapper, when he said no, they asked if he at least sings hip-hop.  Again, no, but they still went on the buy him lots of drinks.  I left pretty early and walked home with a group of kids.

On Saturday my program went to Cadiz, a beach town on the coast.  20 euros and an hour-ish later, we were at the ocean.  We jumped off the bus and headed toward the ocean.  The water was gorgeous, very very warm.  Based on maps, Cadiz appears on the Atlantic, but my host family said** that Cadiz has beaches on the both the Atlantic (cold water) and Mediterranean (warm water), so I assume we were on the Mediterranean.  I was a big spender and spent 5 euros to rent a chair for the day.  Money well spent!  I mainly read some magazines and swam.  Ahhhhh relaxation!

Cadiz

Apparently, my parents desperately needed some beauty in their lives, because they went to a gas station (yes, we are very classy) to pick up wi-fi (they were at our internet-less lake house), to Skype me.  Despite my mother getting ridiculously close to the screen and reminding me of orthodontist appointments where you awkwardly are staring up a person’s nostrils, it was lovely to talk with them.  Like always, Matthew is the voice of reason in their house. 

Countdowns: 4 days until end of first session, 18 days until my family visits me.  Looking forward to some more exploring of the streets of Sevilla this week!

Love to all!  And sorry, if I had more time, I would have written less...

*Fa-tass is a term of (semi) endearment that we call my father.  My siblings and I cleverly came up with this apodo in order to call my dad “fat ass,” without ever actually calling him one.

**Actually, this is my interpretation of what she called it, so who knows what she REALLY called it.  (Basically, my life is like the game telephone, by the time the Spanish enters my ears, is processed by my semi-functioning brain, and is then “comprehended,” the message has changed from “that man is well-dress” to “there’s a woman wearing a toupee!”…or something else absurdly different.)

Check out this ad with Rafa.  I think he looks so funny in it!