Bodegas, too Much Pants, and The Beach

Nothing terribly new to post on, but I´ll try to pinch one out anyway, since I´ll be busy studying for a midterm the rest of the week.

The weekend was mostly a laid-back affair, starting with a typical Friday night. Saturday we went to the bodega-laden pueblo/city of Jumilla (believe me, city is a big stretch). A Spanish bodega is not a small convenience store as is the case on our side of the Atlantic. A bodega here is where they age and process grapes, and eventually bottle them as wine. The vineyard is usually in another location altogether (the first bodega we went to had many of its grapes flown in from Iraq, interestingly enough). Anyway, I´ve been on vineyard tours before in the States which included all the fermentation and bottling process with it, so it wasn´t a terribly interesting time as nothing new was really learned. The first bodega we went to bottled real cheap wine, so I didn´t bother buying any, but the second one had some decent stuff so I picked up a bottle. I took some pics, but I may not even post them since they aren´t terribly cool. Maybe a few...

After returning from Jumilla early in the evening I had a fairly typical Saturday night as well, without much interesting stuff going on.

Sunday was cool because I discovered the group of kids that play ultimate frisbee on the beach several times a week. My ankles feel like hell today, and every muscle in my leg is sore from spazzing around in the sand for 2 hours straight, but at least I have a new (fun) form of excercise. Plus, I can sharpen up my ultimate skills up while abroad.

I have a midterm this week for my language class, which is making me kind of nervous. It takes two days to complete, which is a bit on the daunting side (what the hell is the final going to be like?!). Concentrating on school is getting more difficult with the nice weather calling me every day. I can already see Alicante beginning to metamorphize into the tourist-laden werewolf-beast it inevitably turns into every summer. It´s not an atmosphere that is terribly conducive to being productive in school.

Oh, and this is kind of bothersome to me. Spaniards don´t wear shorts. They just don´t. They wear bathing suits to the beach, but other than that it´s pants, pants, pants. Not only that, but they give us dirty looks for wearing them. I´m guessing they assume all of us shorts-bearing folks are just tourists here to get drunk off their cheap beer and puke on their sidewalks, but there´s also a bunch of us here to take in real Spanish culture and not stick out so rudely. Just because we don´t have the gene Spaniards do that makes them not sweat while they walk around in black pants and winter coats in 75 degree weather doesn´t mean we should have to suffer just to look like we aren´t tourists. I can´t imagine this incessant pants-wearing going on when it starts climbing up into the 90s and above, but I´m waiting to see for myself. Gah.

I´ve been feeling a little frustrated lately with language. My language learning feels a lot like a roller-coaster sometimes, because I´ll have a week where I feel great and I can communicate and understand really well, and other weeks where I feel completely stupid, like everything in my brain has shut down. I think part of this might be because in classes we keep forging ahead with new stuff (now mostly stuff I won´t even use in conversation), while I want to spend more time on the useful things I do use everyday. Also, it just feels like stuff leaks out sometimes. I only have so much room for new vocab in there, so less-common or highly situational words that I learn escape me often unless I make it a point to pound them into my head. I really wish I had an intercambio that lived in Alicante (rather than a 45 minute busride away from Alicante) so I could hang out more often and get more practice in with people my age. I guess it´s just something I have to keep working at.

On a more positive note, I´m psyched to go to Madrid this weekend, then on to Valencia to catch the last night of Las Fallas. It´ll be nice after my week of mid-term stress, and I´ll finally get to see some real hardcore Spanish partying. Awesome.

Must run now, I have a bus to catch, and a subsequent lunch to eat. Gonna try to get the mop cut later today, hopefully into a quasi-mullet (I still have a long way to go before I´ll have a real party in the back). Next I´ll just need to cut the sleeves off my t-shirts, then go shopping for flood pants. Then I´ll be Spanish. Yeah, that´s the ticket.

Hasta luego