umm. yeah. this place is nice.

i love san sebastian.

more to come after i get back.

i'm hungry

tengo hambre. not much, but enough to make me start off talking about it. for some reason i always manage to forget that on sundays this country closes down. you'd be lucky to find a store open selling water to people dying of thirst. in addition, i don't usually possess the foresight that would enable me to buy groceries for a couple days at a time instead of making it a daily adventure to see whether or not i can feed myself. today i couldn't. i woke up late and had a lunch of french fries that i managed to make myself and then today while walking around i had a popsicle and then tonight i've had water and teddy grahams. or chiquilin ositos. same thing.

last night was el noche blanco here in madrid. i guess it's the second time they've done it so far and it's been done by other cities in europe for years. the city basically stays open all night with lots of exhibitions by artists and performers that take place in the street. i guess the museums were open all night as well but i had better things to do on a night like that than to look at a bunch of old paintings i could waste a sunday on.

started out by going to the palacio real with my friends boris and ilya to check out the gardens and to see what they were setting up there for the night. here is a picture.


this is a picture of ilya and boris riding wild boars. they are such brave friends.


after that we went to retiro park where a very random performance art piece was taking place on the lake in the middle of the park. creepy people dressed in black costumes with weird masks rowed boats out to the middle of the lake and on the front of the boats were mermaid-esque topless spanish girls wearing turquoise sequined ballroom masks with long hair covering their torsos. they were supposed to be sirens i'm pretty sure. they rowed to the middle and turned and faced back the way they came, probably 20 boats, each with a creepy monster thing in black rowing and these mermaid chicks. about 20 more boats then launched from the shore, one in particular leading them. each of these boats had a creepy rowing monster too, but instead of topless spanish women, there was another eerily dressed guy playing a tuba with a single light glowing at the top of the instrument. they played eerie noises and rowed towards the mermaid boats with the guy leading the tubas clanging a bell. it was supposed to be like a ship i think sailing towards these sirens. they then just chased each other all over the lake, the whole time these creepy tuba noises and bell clangings just echoing through the lake, over the water, against the statues and the people and it was a very strange and weirdly inspiring visual.

from this i ran to my friend lyndsey's to have dinner and i swear this girl and her roommates never disappoint. the food i eat there is as good as any i've ever had time and time again. i did the dishes again and all the women swooned. i'm so popular. we went out to meet my friends in sol to head to some more exhibitions that we'd scheduled in different parts of the city through the night only to find that it had started raining while i was eating delicious food. the whole things kind of shut down because nothing could really go on outdoors so we sat on a bench, in the rain while some girl had my hoodie on because i am so nice and froze for a bit until we wandered to a bar where the girls had to flirt with the bouncers to get me in because i was wearing shorts and my nikes because i'd been walking around all day and had planned on continuing doing so throughout the night and not going to some lame bar with music and bouncers wearing suits but plans change and i got in and danced for a bit to pulse thumping bass blaring blips and bleeps european electronica at it's finest. all the other people were from italy or france so they loved it. yay.

this is a picture. my smile is fake. theirs are not. my mom hates it when i do this. i can hear her now actually.



walked around a little more after that and had planned on going to the showing of a movie that daft punk made that was to the south a little bit in the city but a pretty long walk so we were planning on taking the metro. all the other girls had gone home and i was left with a french girl and we went to the nearest metro station but for some unknown reason, on the night that the city had put months of planning into to keep everyone out all night going all over the city, they decided to shut down the metro at the normal time of 2. it makes no sense, didn't last night and not even today after a bit of sleep. so that was a bust and after walking the girl home i ended up walking the hour back to my house to finally talk to my parents briefly at 6 in the morning here when my mom asked me if i was drunk in code ('are you seeing double'?).

thanks mom, but i'd been out walking around for 16 hours and hadn't had a drink in a while.

passed out pretty tired and woke up at 1 only to discover that i had no food. studied and walked around a park for while.

life is good.

the best sandwich i've ever made

today i made a very good sandwich. i woke up at 11 and was very hungry because i hadn't eaten dinner last night because the light in my kitchen was broken and i didn't want to cook in the dark. i can barely cook when i can see what i'm doing. i bought some bread from the place on the corner and then grilled some chicken i found from a little bit ago that i'm pretty sure was still good but i cooked it anyways so my guess is that it can't have been that bad for me, cut up a tomato, got some lettuce and cheese, and then put that sucker together.

yummmmmm.

i should've taken a picture but i was too busy eating.

i have a midterm in my international trade class on wednesday and have spent most of today trying to figure out just what the hell import and export biased growth for a country really means.

saturday night is el noche blanco which is when all the public buildings like libraries and congress and museums stay open all night with the lights on and so do stores and bars and there are concerts in the street randomly. rumor has it that daft punk is playing at 6am somewhere. i'm going to pee my pants if this is true.

everything to come.

this thing kills pictures

i posted some pictures but the site chopped them all. not sure why. i'll figure it out next time. sorry.

where to start.. i know, how about used love socks floating in the ocean

so yeah, there was a condom floating in the ocean at port olympic in barcelona. i was going to take a picture of it but i was too busy trying to hide my eyes from all the topless 60 year old women walking around. yuck. on a lighter not my hand still smells like garlic from last night's dinner of chicken. i was going to make pasta and chicken but the german girl used all the pots and just covered them with foil and put them in the fridge. so i just ate some chicken and garlic. yummm.

barcelona was a lot of fun, really nice city. big. really big. i liked it a lot. we took a midnight bus there on thursday night and got in friday morning groggy and feeling like crap after not having slept much and then wandered around the city with the group for a while. the girls checked into their hostel and took a nap and i went to the terrace on the top of the roof and read and wrote and smiled in the sunshine for a bit. then it got cold and i got to put on my flannel and hoodie and it was nice to be cold after the weather being hot for so long. i ended up staying at my friend stephanie's because it was cheap and free and was really amazing actually because she left for ibiza that weekend and just gave me her key. she lives in a science lab, a modern building with brushed concrete ceilings and floors and white walls and white shelves and ikea chairs and plates and pots and silverware and halogen lights in the walls with door numbers on the bottom right of the doors.

went out a little that night and ended up in some alley far from everything with two girls and a bartender that was ecstatic to have americans who spoke spanish in his bar and kept talking about tennessee for some reason and gave us all free beers and i went home early to my white cell and woke up feeling terrific. i got to take a shower in a bathroom that was approximately 1 foot by 2 feet and ended up almost standing on the toilet during the whole experience.

went to the beach and saw my wonderful friend my plastic floating in the water and then climbed the moutain of the jews with a jew and saw a castle and a olympic stadium and a concert place and a couple of museums and a really quite fanstastic view of the city. i stood in front of a palace and took a picture for my mom. it looked like this.



went down and bought a pizza to cook in the kitchen and it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to use the damn oven and when i finally did the pizza burned on the top and didn't cook on the bottom but i was hungry and out of money and ate it anyways and spent the next couple of hours with a stomach ache worried i was going to throw up because of eating uncooked bread. i didn't. or at least i haven't yet. went out again that night to a bar that kelsie and peter and brett and everyone else had talked about called la ovella negra and it turned out to be super ghetto and smelled like dirty cigs and old beer and was like a big cafeteria hall but had a good atmosphere and a pool table and lots of places to sit and lots of life and was all in all a pretty good vibe. ended up sitting on a plaza with a fountain with a guy from ireland a girl from germany and a girl from france talking about nothing in particular til 5 in the morning. this is a picture from that night with my friend monika. look how happy i am to be in barcelona. i'm smiling. positively radiant.


sunday i went and saw all the gaudi stuff which is really quite spectacular. it's like dr. seuss was just coming off a three day sleep deprived acid trip and then immediately jumped into a week long mushroom bender and then rounded it all off with a little bout of alcoholism all the while drawing and sketching. the apartment buildings are crazy, segrada familia is going to take forever to finish and is very neat, and park guell is nuts. all very pretty. all very scary in a subliminal sort of way.

that night we rounded out our stay with some good old fashioned chinese food and the whole speaking spanish in a chinese restaurant will never get old to me and then went and met everyone at this incredible fountain light show thing at placa espanya where in front of the palace that's a museum there are waterfalls flowing down and leading to a huge fountain that reminds me of seattle center except no giant half orb just water and it pulses and changes color and music plays and all the way down the road leading to it are fountains. it looks like this. kind of.


yeah, so kind of. a lot prettier in person you can imagine.

ran from this place to the bus station, hopped on an 11 pm bus from barcelona, got into madrid at 6 after sleeping for maybe 2 hours, went home and passed out for an hour, went to class and work all day and then finally died last night for a couple hours. this is what i looked like on the metro going to the bus, happy to be leaving a city full of stink and love.



all these pictures are for matt who whines a lot.

and yeah, i wore the same thing all weekend. big deal.

rent a cops that pack guns, missing the ocean, falling in love with a french girl, and the homeless guy who sleeps in front of my house

i think i finally got a little rest from the weekend. haven't been doing much and have just been going to class and working and having chill nights with friends.

we went out to my friends boris' apartment the other night which is probably about an hour north of my neighborhood walking and it's kind of in the ghetto. but it has a rooftop terrace where we sat and talked and drank and hung out for while looking over some of the skyline of madrid and the sky was dark but the clouds were still pink and light and moving fast. it was a nice night, caught the last metro home and ended up talking to a crazy lady in spanglish about ocean beach where she had incidentally spent two years of her life as a troll right outside of south coast. small world.

i was walking to work today and noticed i was hungry, probably because i hadn't eaten anything in a while and popped into a supermarket to grab some bread and noticed that there was a security guard just kind of wandering aimlessly through the store with a horrifyingly bored look on his face. i suppose i would be bored too if i were protecting apples and cans of pringles. but that wasn't the most interesting thing, he was packing a gun. like a real cop.. it was the strangest thing to think that a rent a cop working inside of a grocery store had a gun. kind of scared me when i realized i was wearing a backpack and he was eying me suspiciously. i grabbed my bread, paid, and got the hell out of there. maybe next time i'll leave the backpack at home and try not to look like i just woke up.

i've never really lived in a city that's far away from the ocean. i don't like it. it's i imagine it's like living in nebraska. nicer. but kind of like that. maybe. there's just no water around here. it doesn't rain and there's no ocean for 7 hours in every direction. there aren't even large lakes. it's weird because i'm not a huge fan of the beach, i actually really dislike the beach but i do enjoy the ocean, just having it around. i remember in seattle going to alki beach and having bonfires and the water being freezing and sky gray and cloudy and the air cold, the smell of the ocean drifting up and down the street and just sitting on the sand next to the cold water listening to the little waves on the shore. i miss it.

last night i went to my friend lyndsey's house who is here from new york doing school at a place that teaches you how to teach english and hooks you up with a job after. pretty cool thing.. she lives in sol which is more or less the center of nightlife in madrid and she also lives with 8 other girls, 4 italian and 4 french. they were making pasta and she had invited me over and i got to sit in the kitchen watching all these girls make pasta and yell at each in italian and spanish and french and trying to figure it all out, the craziest scene imaginable, languages flying and people packed into a tiny kitchen, drinking wine and laughing at the stupidest things in other languages that i only half understood. it all culminated with a plate of steaming pasta in front of me that tasted like pasta that i can only imagine yeshua could have topped. i don't know what was in it and i don't care. i volunteered to wash dishes and i think it went over well. i am such a gentleman.

afterwards my american friend lyndsey said there was a birthday party she was going to and i didn't have class until 11 this morning so i said i would go and so did a french girl named louise. i have in the past had a very poor view of french people and i would like to take every bad word i said about them in generalization back. well not all of them, but most. lyndsey ended up getting wasted and dancing and i sat on a couch lining the wall of the back of this bar with this girl and made faces and stamped around awkwardly laughing and speaking spanish and her speaking french and only half understanding each other the entire night. she learned how to say smack a ho and super duper. it was magic. i think i'm in love.

this morning i left for school and passed the homeless man who sleeps on the bench on the street in front of my house. not an unusual scene, except this time i noticed he had peed his pants. i felt bad and put two euros in his pocket. he didn't move. after seeing the 3 boxes of don simon sangria under the bench, i can only imagine why. he may have just had a better night than i.

miss you all. if you've been calling my cell phone i'm sorry. i've gotten the missed calls but every time you've called i've been in class. and i'm a bad person.

love.

gnarly suburban fiestas, fourteen year olds throwing up in alleys, drunk girls, and spending the night in a train station

i´ve decided from here out to abandon most grammar constructs. i´ll save them for the school papers.

this weekend was insane. i don´t think i got to sleep before 6 or 7 in the morning three days straight. it wasn´t even like stupid club crazy, it was just eating dinner at 11 and staying out and walking around most of the time until you realize the sun is climbing over the horizon and oh yeah you really are that tired so maybe you should catch the metro home. it also doesn´t help that the metro stops running at two in the morning and doesn´t start up again until six, leaving a pretty big gap if you´re stuck in the middle of madrid kind of far away from your home on the edge.

thursday night we went salsa dancing which was a lot of fun minus the fact that i can´t dance and that the bouncer made fun of my shoes. it´s not my fault i don´t own dress shoes and didn´t want to pack them even if i did all the way to madrid with me. you have to dress nice here to go out and since nice for me is a pair of jeans a t-shirt i catch a lot of crap and it usually results in the girls we´re out with pleading with the bouncer to let me in. it´s great. i love it. i´d break down and buy some dress shoes but out of principle i won´t. never. anyways salsa dancing was fun and there was a nice girl who tried to show me how to do it but i have about as much rhythm as a caterpillar so i eventually just sat on the side of the dance floor watching some haggard looking dudes pull some good looking chicks. amazing. this one guy was at least 30 pounds over weight with no hair and man boobs but the guy could dance and girls loved him. he was like poli but fatter. and no hair. and he could dance. so nothing like poli.

got home late. friday i didn´t have school so i worked a bit, made some money to go out with, and then friday night we thought we were just going to have a chill night at a friends house so nobody dressed up or anything and we were just sitting around drinking and then someone threw a show at the window and down below on the street there was a group of 10 other people from school going somewhere in sol which is the area for general hedonism so we got our stuff together and went out and had one of the better nights i´ve had here. just general bars and nothing crazy and just singing mulan in the streets. songs from aladdin too. my friend boris at the beginning of the night had given me a book he´d hollowed the pages out of so i could hide valuables in it because someone had broken into my apartment and taken a bunch of money earlier in the week so all night i walked around carrying a fake book with no words inside of it on the divergent views of the american capital punishment system. i am so scholarly.

was supposed to go on a day trip with friends to toledo on saturday but i slept through it and went to the park next to my house to read and ended up sitting on the grass next to a large fountain reading the dharma bums and thinking climbing mountains and writing for a couple hours. the sun was out, the grass was warm, the shade was cool, the water was loud, and i was happy. grabbed dinner with my friend lyndsey who neglected to tell me that i´d be the only boy on their all girl outing (this has happened more than once, maybe they think i´m gay?), and ended up eating at a chinese place with two american girls, two french girls, and two italian girls while nobody spoke the same language. one of the italian girls could only understand italian and french and one of the french girls could only understand italian and one of the american girls couldn´t speak spanish so it was just a whole drunken mess of languages falling all over each other. there was much pantomiming. i think that´s how you spell that.

ran to the train station at 11 to catch the last train out to the gnarly fiesta in the suburbs of madrid. each suburb during the summer has it´s own party every weekend and this one was calling something like pozuelo and it was pretty fun. problem was it was a 15 minute train ride and the first train didn´t start up until 6:30 the next morning. which wouldn´t have been a problem, but nobody deemed it important enough to tell us that everything shut down at 3 in the morning and we were left to wander the streets watching high school kids throw up in alleys and sit in pools of their own filthy filth. ah to be young in spain.

i was also wearing shorts and shirt and it got cold so we all ended up huddling together in the train station at about 5 in the morning half asleep half alive telling stories and for some reason i woke up with words written in bright red lipstick all over my arm. three showers later and it´s still all sparkly.

i´d also like to welcome my dad to the readership, i just hope he doesn´t cut me off because of these anecdotes.