It´s not supposed to rain in Alicante...

Gonna try to keep this one brief, ´cause I wanna get my night started...

Thanks to those of you posting comments. It´s good to hear what you guys think about the stuff I´m experiencing here. It´s also cool to see how Marliese is holding up in Peru in comparison to how I´m doing here.

Anyhow, this rain crap has to end immediately. Everybody that´s from here says its´s getting pretty ridiculous how much they´ve been getting since (more or less) when my program started...what luck. Also, it´s been snowing in all these parts of Spain where it´s never snowed before in recorded history, including parts of the province of Alicante. Luckily it hasn´t dipped down low enough to snow here in the city, although they´ve said a few times on the news weather that there is a chance of snow this weekend. I thought I got away from the stuff when I left Boston, but apparantly I´m not safe from it´s slippery wrath anywhere. To boot, southern Spaniards have no clue how to drive in the stuff since they´ve hardly ever seen it, so the nightly news has been filling up with reports of horrible accidents with lots of dead women and children. Good grief.

On a side note:
My friend Eric just informed me by way of text message that they make ham flavored Doritos here. Kinda ridiculous- not at all surprising.

Onwards,
I´m getting even more immersed here, as I hung out with Arantxa and her friends at one of their apartments. We made a big lunch together and hung out for the afternoon. It was much fun, and I had a chance to learn a lot of young people slang. Also, they invited me to a giant weekend-long rock festival in Extremadora (countryside of Spain that is at least 15-20 years behind the rest of the country) at the end of March. It´ll be nice to get my camp on while in Spain, especially since it should be real nice out during then. The only thing is that it overlaps with the organized Madrid trip my program is putting on, but I´m thinking rock festival in the sticks chumps organized tour in a city I could easily navigate around myself later on. That weekend also happens to be my birthday, so it´ll be cool to spend it with mis amigos españoles.

Language skills are still moving forward, although there are days where I am really tired and don´t want to have to put in the extra effort just to communicate basic stuff. I suppose I just need to be thinking in Spanish more often, maybe pushing my American friends to speak español with me. This is turning into a point of jealousy for Marliese´s Peruvian adventure. She doesn´t have the option of speaking English to anybody in person so she´ll probably end up picking it up a lot faster than me. Rougher initially I suppose, but she´s gonna be fluent in no time I bet. Still, the homestay and intercambio facets of the program are paying off in a big way for me, so I appreciate those opportunities immensly.

A small thought:
I love how with the Euro, 1 and 2 cent coins have been given a much less prominent role in the currency system. Everything sold here is sold in .05 cent increments so the lowest coin you usually have on you is 5 cent euro. Of course this has downfalls, as things that are sold by measured volume end up coming out to odd amounts, which results in the spare 1 or 2 cent euro coin here and there. Those suck cause you really have no use for them, and end up with a pile of them in your pocket or at home. Plus, the 1 cent euro coin is smaller than an American dime, which makes it easily confusable with other more useful things like... watch batteries....... yea.

And something else I like about Spanish culture:
Yelling! People yell at each other so much here. It was a little off-putting at first because I thought everybody was angry at everybody all the time, but it turns out they yell completely for the hell of it. People can be standing 2 feet away from one another and will be yelling as if they were a quarter of a mile *ahem* kilometer- down the street. It really does liven up conversations and keep all present parties interested whether or not they want to be. It always makes me want to laugh, so I´ve been trying to do it more myself. I look forward to approaching fluency in the language so I can yell more often and with more confidence.

Ok, that´s all I can think of for now, and I want to grab some grub.

love, peace and chicken grease