Just a quickie...

Started my 3-week, 3 hour a day intensive Spanish course on Monday. So far, so good. We are pretty much starting as close to square one as I can comprehend, but it´s already proving to be a lot more useful than I expected. Now that I´m living in a more "Spanish" context, going over the very basics (masculine/feminine, singular/plural type basics) has already proven very useful in ironing out the little grammatical mistakes in my conversational Spanish, making communicating at home better. We are covering a ton of ground each day, however, so I´m sure things will be getting much more difficult very soon.

Met with my intercambio, Arantxa (A-ran-cha... It´s a Basque name) yesterday, and was introduced to some of her friends. My intercambio is a student at the universidad that is studying English. We are given assignments which we need their help to complete, providing us an opportunity to learn more about Spanish life, and also possibly make some new friends. Anyhow, Arantxa and her friends seemed really cool, and they mentioned going out sometime, which would be cool. It´d be nice to start making some Spanish friends for all sorts of reasons.

Saturday, there was a program-sponsored tour of the province. We visited three rather-touristy places outside of the city, which turned out to be really cool. Saw this really deep cave that the Republican forces used to hole up during the Spanish Civil War. A bunch of the stalactites (or is it ´mites?) weren´t at the top because of the Nazi air-strikes. Anyway, it was pretty beautiful in there. They said they hold different sorts of concerts (jazz, classical, gregorian chanting) throughout the year, and the acoustics of the cave give it a natural cathedral-like quality. Me and a group of others agreed it´d be a good idea to rent a car and get out there when that´s going on. After that, we went to this waterfall, woodsy place. Really beautiful green nature stuff in a region of Spain that I assumed was completely arid. Didn´t spend much time there, but got some nice pictures anyway. After that, we went to this castle/house thing, but by then everybody was pretty exhausted. It seemed cool, but I was ready to get back at that point, so probably didn´t appreciate it as much as I could. The castle was on the top of a hill however, and there was an incredible view of the surrounding area. I appreciated that at least. Afterwards, we got on the bus and headed back to the city...

Went out that night, mainly to watch the Patriots and to catch a glimpse of the Alicante nightlife. Never been too huge into watching sports, but it´s nice to do something American in a foreign place. Anyway, there was a bar that was showing the game (at least the first half, since it started at 2AM Spain time), so about 35-40 of us sat out watching it. We convinced them to let us stay past their closing time of 3AM until halftime rolled around at 3:45 or so (very generous as the bar had already been written up a few times by the cops for staying open later than allowed). Afterwards, my friend Eric and I still had some beer energy so we decided to check out the Puerto, aka Club Central. Clubs here stay open til 7 or 8 in the morning (some stay open even later, I´m told, although I have difficulty seeing how that works). Anyway, it was pretty ridiculous, as after all the bars close at 3-4 in the morning, there is this gigantic mass exodus of young people off the streets and onto the port towards what can really only be described as a shopping mall of clubs. We´re talking a massive pillar of people all going to the same place. You´d think there was a parade every Saturday night or something. On the port is literally an outdoor mall-structure with something like 20 to 25 clubs (and a few different fast food joints for drunk munchies) that are all blasting shitty euro-techno. Strangely, Spaniards can´t dance half as good as I assumed all of them could (more stereotyping on my part), although at least they move a little bit more than people do in American clubs. Regardless, it´s a pretty fun(ny) sight to behold. most places didn´t have a cover, but I didn´t stick around for too long as I had been up ass-early in the morning for the day trip. I plan on getting out there again to really dive in and check it out, just for the pure novelty of being able to stay up til 7 in the morning with a huge amount of people.

It must have gotten up to the mid-60s today in the sun, which made for gorgeous walking weather. Explored most of the rest of my barrio that I haven´t seen yet, then ended up here. I´m hoping the weather holds til the weekend as I signed up for a free hiking trip on Saturday. It´s gonna be another long day, but I´m excited to get out of the city again and see more nature out here. I think we´re going up a mountain or something. I´ll be sure to take cool pictures and try to get them online. Anyway, gotta run. This post ended up being a bit longer than planned.