And, furthermore, I can once again feel my rear end. Also, my fingers. That room was really cold. And I was basically sitting in it taking tests for three hours. Actually more like three hours and 20 minutes, because it was 14:50 when I finally finished. And I hadn't had lunch yet, because this is Spain and Spain is like that.

On the plus side, I spent three hours and twenty minutes basically writing two really long essay/short(long) answer tests. In Spanish. I don't think I could have done that a year ago. Although I admittedly had some trouble with describing the olive harvest scene (I need to figure out how to say basket and ladder. I hypothetically know how to say both of these, but reality begs to differ. Also, I should figure out how to say grid. Although "square holes" works. That wasn't for the olive harvest, that was for the "spherical hispanic amphora" question).

And I had some hot chocolate. Not just Nesquik, although it was largely nesquik. I put in some of the fragments of the real dark stuff, and some cinnamon, so it was excellent. Although it occurs to me that I need to sing tonight, so that was perhaps a bad idea. But it was still yummy.

Speaking of singing, I also need to play guitar tonight, and haven't practiced since Thursday. I should do something about that, like yesterday. But now will work too, I guess.

And there are always dragons.

So, there you are, kids. If you ever need to tell your Spanish-speaking friends, "This is the most difficult shower I've (n)ever taken," think back to this moment.

Tonight has been an evening for feeling silly.
Despite having used the oven twice before (and forgetting a knob last time), I forgot to set it to bake, and to set the timer, and to set the temperature. So I waited 15 minutes wondering why the oven wasn't getting hot . . .

And then I tried to take a shower. Aside from needing to wash my hair, I have a sore throat and a runny nose, and thought that hot water would feel nice.
First problem: I couldn't light the hot water heater. Well, actually, I managed the water heater just fine; I even noticed that the one knob on the gas line was turned and turned that. I just couldn't light the butane lighter to get the flame lit. The last one was running out of juice, so Pepi clearly got around to getting a new one, and I couldn't get it to light. I can light camping stoves. I can light Coleman lanterns in the dark. I can manage those nasty paper matches. I can light fires with one match - with no matches if there are still a few coals left. I can light fires in the woods when it's been raining for three days and everything is soaked. But I'm a wooden matches kind of gal. I don't like butane lighters. This is why. And the fact that the metal piece gets hot and will give you a nastier burn than the actual fire, and you're liable to forget that it's hot until it burns you.
So I knocked on Ana's door when she was practicing and she lit the water heater for me.
And all was well, right?
Of course not. The water was coming out of the faucet rather than the shower head, which it's never done before, and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to switch it (turns out the little pull-up piece is in the same place as the ones at home, only it's disguised as a holder for the portable shower head). Ana to the rescue again.
And all was well?
Well, I started my shower. And when I went to rinse the soap out of my hair, I discovered that the water had gone cold. Looking through the little window, it looked like the heater had gone out. So I called Ana (who was luckily puttering around the kitchen) and stood there wet and shivering while she tried to re-light the heater - and discovered that the tank of butane was empty. So I stood there wet and shivering while she changed it and re-lit the heater.
Era la ducha más dificil que nunca he tomado.

This whole weekend has been vaguely bleh. In addition to being sick, I read the death-crumpets book (La virgen de los sicarios, The Virgin of the Hitment), which was both depressing and disturbing. And I can't even say that I didn't like the book, because it wasn't the book's fault. What I didn't like was knowing that the situation that the book describes still exists in Colombia; the drug trafficking and the casual disregard for human life and relationships, the world where someone will kill you for your nice sneakers that will probably get them killed sometime next week, and, what is perhaps the worst bit, a world where many people don't believe things can be different.
And while I knew about many of the problems in Colombia, there's a difference between knowing and reading a novel where you're immersed in that world.
I would say, "oh good, I've finished it," but I still need to watch the movie before class on Wednesday, and then we'll be discussing it for three classes.
And writing for the past two-three days has been like pulling teeth (okay, not quite that painful, actually. But slow and draggy and hard), although that finally got better today and perhaps now that Things Are Happening it will continue being better.

And homework (aside from death-crumpets) was major-time Not Happening; but the paper is short and isn't due until Tuesday evening.

I did get work done on my books on Friday, though. And people are coming over for paella tomorrow, which should be fun.

While it may not get properly cold here, it was still WAY too cold this morning to take a cold water shower. Or even really to wash my hair in cold water and not shower. But it was time to wash my hair, and it needed it . . .
It's days like this that I really envy people with very short hair.

Maybe I should have just stayed in bed with the ewok-type creature who came over from Ron and Deb's house. Even if Gandalf wanted us to go on some huge quest type thing, and the cardboard box the ewok traveled in kept bursting into flame, and there was some sort of overarching Adam and Eve metaphor. At least it was warm.

I officially take back anything bad I ever said about Pharos and the Pay-for-Print system.

Okay, that's a lie. I still think that it isn't intuitive (it's easy, but it isn't intuitive; you have to teach almost everyone how to use it the first time), and that when it goes screwy, you've got some interesting problems, and the fact that there aren't printer-card/OneCard-money machines in the printing labs is annoying, but it's so much better than it could be.


. . . You've perhaps guessed that I've had my first experience printing here.

And, in it's favor, it could be a lot worse. It isn't hard, and it isn't expensive (2 centimos per page, which is less than 3 cents, and if you get a card it's slightly cheaper still), and my camera-memory-stick-cum-zip-drive works just fine. HOWEVER. The entire system appears to be run by one woman, who isn't always there, and probably has another job too, and I haven't a clue what the hours of the lab are (never mind her hours; not even her fellow coworker seemed to know when she would be back) - and something that one of the other girls said makes me suspect that they are odd somehow. On the plus side, you can pay with change or with a card (the cards are little paper things like your tenth-cup is free deal from a cafe, or like the cafeteria at my high school), but it just seems so WEIRD to me that I can't just go and print at any point during the computer lab's hours. I was only waiting there for 30 or 40 minutes, but when I told Sonia (former Smith AMS student; is from Córdoba; I ran into her in the lab) that I had an hour and fourty-five minutes before my class, she gave me a sort of well-you'd-better-hope-that's-enough look. And did I mention that there was a line? A short line, but still.

I will say that what I saw of the lab appeared to be less ancient than the classroom support equipment. Which is to say, the computers were somewhat shiny; I brought my laptop (in case the flash drive didn't work) and so didn't actually use them.

Well, I suppose things like this are the reason that I'm in Spain.

You're not being very helpful. Given that I'm here in Spain, it would make sense for me to take a literature course that would fulfill one of my 200-level requirements in addition to just taking classes in Spanish to fill up number-of-classes requirements.

I e-mailed my advisor six days ago to ask if Class A or Class B would be suitable, and she hasn't gotten back to me. I was aware when asking her to be my advisor that she could be a little slower in answering e-mails than I might like (but not this slow!), but I was kind of in a rush about that decision because my pre-major advisor, also in the Spanish department, was on sabbatical - which no one had told me - and no one else bothered to inform me that it was necessary to declare one's major before applying to go abroad.

Since I would really like an answer on this topic before classes start next week, I decided to e-mail the department head. Only, you seem to have seen fit to not post that information on your website. I had to go to the course catalog via the registrar (to a section of the website that I didn't actually know existed, and was just hoping it was) in order to figure out who I should be e-mailing.

It seems to me that a LANGUAGE department might put a little more effort into making things accessible to students abroad.

Please write back,
me.

Oh right, that's why no one is on right now (or at least, why for part of everyone - the rest of you have no excuse); it's currently the first meeting of SSFFS.


Also, the dinner I just ate with my aunt and uncle? Cost 112 euros for the three of us. And it was amazing, but that's a scary number even if I don't think about the exchange rate.


ETA: Or maybe either gmail or AIM or both hate Spain.

I actually ( heard back from the Spanish Consulate today )

Maybe I'll e-mail s-m b now. She'll be a nice antidote for Slowness in Answering E-mails.