Euro Appreciation

I finally got rid of my last 20 euro! An amazing girl from my congregation here is leaving in two weeks to perform in the Munich Opera for the next year, and so I sold my last bill to her at a going-away-party we held last night. Yay!

Annoyingly, I lost money on the deal. See, I happened to time my trip to Spain in exactly the wrong season. I had seen some articles recently about how the dollar has started to strengthen...but I didn't realize how much until I looked up the conversion rate, and came across this Euro vs. Dollar graph.


Just look at that!! While I was in Spain, the Euro hit its highest point in history vs. the dollar...and then the DAY I LEFT, started a sharp decline. If I could have just gone a few months earlier (as in, actually last fall, like I once intended), or a few months later (this fall), I could have saved untold dollars.

:: grumbles about foreign economies ::

Las Fotos

Hi everyone! I finally have culled through my photos, creating a representative sample to post on Facebook. All of the ones from Morocco are now posted and captioned. You can view them, even if you're not a Facebook member, by clicking here. The 2-3 albums from Spain will be posted in the next day or two.

Updated to add:

I've uploaded my Spain pictures! You can find them here (#1), here (#2), and here (#3)!

Updated Especially for You!

Hi! I've finally written all of my blog entries from my last days in Spain, and post-dated them to apply to the correct days. They start here. Enjoy!

What I Don't Miss About Spain

Late dinner. While I loved the schedule overall, it rapidly became impossible to make plans around a 9:30 dinner time. With the other Americans it was easy -- but my Spanish friends always wanted to meet up around 8 or 8:30. For the last two weeks I was in town, I skipped dinner practically every night.

People who knew NO English. While I loved practicing my Spanish, there were definitely times that just a little bit of English -- just a word or two -- would have proved rather useful.

My general frustrations with the language. By the end of the trip I increasingly pivoted between "wow, I've learned a ton! I'm so much better!" to "My goodness I don't know anything. I'm never going to learn how to SPEAK!"

Fish. It's a Meditteranean diet...they eat a lot of fish. Never having eaten it growing up (thank you daddy!) I'm unaccustomed to the taste. In fact, it's not really the taste that bothers me, nearly as much as the texture. In any case, I'm glad to be rid of it.

Fatty meats. I've grown up eating HIGHLY processed, and lean meats. Frequently in Spanish dishes, however, they would put sausages or beef which obviously contained a high fat content. It was disgusting.

Sandwiches. They thought that additional ingredients on sandwiches ruined the flavors of the other. So, a "ham" sandwich would be...bread and ham. Period. No cheese, butter, mustard, mayonnaise, etc. This quickly became dull. I'm hugely looking forward to eating at Panera someday soon!

Flamenco. I was living right in the center of some of the richest Flamenco music in the world, and I despised it. The costumes and dancing was pretty, but the music grated my ears. It sounded like people with decent voices purposefully grating them in order to be "stylish." The choppy runs, the screaming mid-song...it drove me crazy. I felt like they were a bunch of opera pretenders -- like this is what the common folk trying to copy opera came up with centuries ago, and where they couldn't do the music correctly, they just made up horrible sounding stuff to fill in the gaps. I was baffled to understand how ANYONE could make money, or be deemed a "professional" producing that shrieking.

The exchange rate. While not as bad as England a year ago...it still wasn't pretty. Speaking of which, anyone want 20 euro?

The lack of comprehension of the beautiful technology known as "air conditioning."

Overly starched, line-dried clothes.

Smokers. It's still incredibly "cool" to smoke in Spain -- especially for women in their 20s and 30s who have felt liberated in the post-Franco world. Thus, all public places, restaurants, elevators, even airports, etc, impose exactly 0 smoking restrictions.

Lack of rain. While the dryness made the heat much more bearable...I like rain. It's pretty, and refreshing. It rained exactly...3x my entire stay in Granada. Once for 30 minutes my first week, once for 30 minutes at the end of my first month, and once two weeks later in the middle of the night. Comically, though, the people of Granada react to even a drizzle of rain like the people of Georgia react to a snow flurry -- everyone runs indoors, and the entire city shuts down. It made me giggle.

Gypsies. They wandered the streets with their sob stories pleading for money, or with little sprigs of herbs, trying to bless you (in exchange for money.) While this never happened to me, it did to several of my friends -- the Gypsies would literally grab you and start a blessing whether you liked it or not. When you refused to pay, they would chase after you, cursing you instead.

Not serving my own portions of food. It's customary to put a full plate in front of each person who's eating, instead of putting a communal casserole in the center of the table, and letting then serve themselves. This resulted in me eating a lot more than I wanted to, in an attempt to be polite.

Soups. I've never liked liquidy hot foods -- especially not for lunch in the summer. But we ate them ALL the time.

Round-a-bouts. 4-way stopsigns or stoplights don't exist in Spain; it's all round-a-bouts. I despise them. Especially when circling them in Geronimo's badly driven car. grrrrr.

Showers. I hated everything about the showers, there. In fact, I found myself dreading the idea of taking one, and sometimes would put it off by a day ("I don't smell that bad...") First, for some reason, bathtubs there are different dimensions. So, all of the bathtubs are about 4 inches taller than the American standard. For the first couple of weeks, I kept accidentally stubbing my toe as I stepped into the showers, because appartently the height of the bathtub is one of those things your brain automatically teaches itself and you don't realize it.

So, getting over the stubbing-the-toe factor...water is scarce in Spain, and particuarly older women are VERY frugal about using it. So the rule is that you start the shower, holding the head-on-a-hose above you, and spend 30 seconds making yourself soaking wet. Then, turning off the water, you lather up in all of the soap and shampoo. You can then turn the water on again for 2 minutes to rinse yourself off. The end!

But of course, the water itself is a problem -- it's COLD! It's heated by a gas tank kept in the house. Many times the gas wasn't on when my roommate or I wanted to take a shower, so the water was icy. Othertimes, if it was on, it was to run the washing machine or the dishwasher, so it was lukewarm at best. Sometimes we'd have enjoyably warm (never actually hot) water for the first 30 seconds....and then it would promptly die as it began minute 2. All in all, the entire experience was miserable.

What I Miss About Spain

(in no particular order)

Wolfang

My Mormon friends in general

Speaking in Spanish constantly -- being forced to practice, and improve.

Tapas in general...especially the still-surviving tradition of free tapas with a drink in Granada!

Superior ice cream shops, on every corner -- Tiggiani's outranking them all

My Senoras

The Alhambra, the Albycin, and the ever-lingering Muslim culture of the city

Having both the tallest mountains and the most beautiful beaches within a 45 minute drive

My program directors -- they were so much fun, and genuinely interested and engaged in the lives of the students. If there was ever a problem, they would do everything to solve it. (They far outclassed my program from London last summer in that regard).

Walking everywhere

Beautiful fountains in every plaza

Paella

Spanish pop music

Excursions to other cities

Cafe' Futbol, and the waiter staff there (particuarly Mauricio) which my American friends and I got to know by name.

The insanely late schedule -- people wake up between 9 and 10, eat lunch at 2:30, take a siesta, work/go to school for the evening, come back to eat dinner around 10...and then the evening is just getting started. No one goes to bed before 1 a.m., not even the little children.

Siestas

My history classes

Not having to do any of my own chores

Cifras y Letras -- the number/word game show

All the really pretty and stylish dresses in the shop windows....Wolfang accused me of being a dress addict. I would veer off the chosen path just to window shop. I never bought anything though, because I didn't have any money. *sigh*.