At about this time the shag carpet wookie walked by and I had to wonder if I could get his number...

Hey all!  This will be my last post in Spain!  How sad.  I'm not overly excited to be coming back stateside, but all good things must come to an end I guess.  I had final exams and a bunch of papers due last week and spent most of my time dealing with that, except for a game night with Sergio and his friend/my friend's intercambio Jennifer (my friend is also so named).  We played Carcassonne and Zombies, which is like the lovechild of Carcassonne and a video game.  With Zombies, of course.  :)  I quite like both games.  I'm mostly packed now; my suitcase is still overweight and there's nothing else I can get rid of, so I guess I'll be paying up.  :(  I'm hoping that the scale's a little off.  Tonight is my last night with Ángeles, which is incredibly depressing.  I'm going to miss her.  We had octopus for lunch today, which is another thing I'm going to miss.  But anyways, on Sat., Sergio and I went to a comic convention in Madrid.  It provided an opportunity for people-watching almost on par with that of an airport.  Exhibit A,  The Shag Carpet Wookie (I stalked this guy for about 5 min. trying to get a forward-facing picture):

Exhibit B, Robin Hood and Maid Marian, Disney version (remember? with the animals?):

Exhibit C, Slacker V and the Emo Squad:

 Exhibit D, Mario and Luigi (ever wonder what they do in between levels?  now you know!):

Exhibit E, Robin Hood's Evil Twin and friends:

Exhibit F, ex-friend of Jennifer's that we stalked:

No, we didn't dress up.  We did get in line an hour early, though, to sign up for a "meet the author" slot.  The girl ahead of us had a Santa outfit on and a homemade bazooka that I thought looked like a big clarinet.  Might as well get the message across to the bad kids, eh?!  Besides, with resources running out, I bet coal started looking too expensive.  We did get a spot, but it's still a bit stressful because you can get a sketch during the first hour or so of signing.  There was a little kid who must've been around 8 or 9 in front of us in line, and I was stressed the whole time that he wouldn't get a sketch.  He did, though :)  Other than that, we mostly just wandered around and looked through comics and such.  I had a good time.  On another note, all the Christmas lights are up around Toledo, and it's beautiful!  Some pictures:

Another view of the city:

Wow, I'm going to miss it here.  I'll let you know if anything exciting happens tomorrow, but if not, tune in in January for my (mis)adventures in Italy!  Actually, maybe I'll keep this going over break... we'll see.  But for now, hasta luego and thanks for reading! :)

So... guess what you can do with dental floss and a little ingenuity?

Hey all!  This week's been rather low-key, but I figured I'd stay on top of things as finals are coming up next week.  Ok, really I have a paper due Fri, and I have to procrastinate somehow, right?  So one correction to my last post- I said that Miró's style was a rather abstract surrealism when what I meant to say was anti-objective surrealism and couldn't think of the term.  I realize this matters to no one else, but it was bugging me.  Speaking of Miró, we had a trip to the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid to view paintings by him, Picasso, and Dalí.  I very much enjoyed it.  Earler that day we went to the Casa de América for my narrative class and saw an exhibition of photos by Horacio Coppola.  It was fantastic!  The photos were in black and white and beautifully composed; many of them dealt with mirrors and reflections, a subject that fascinates me.  It was my favorite part of the day, I think.  On Sat. morning, we had a group intercambio and went for tapas, and I ended up trying spleen jerky (for lack of a better term).  It was disgusting.  Imagine cardboard covered in taco seasoning... and knowing that it was spleen.  Horrible.  Afterwards, Veronica and I headed to Valladolid to see Jamie Cullum in concert.  I'd never heard of him, but he's this little British guy who sounds like a mixture of Michael Buble, Damien Rice, and Coldplay.  All the hipsters in Valladolid (not many, in case you were wondering) came out for it.  Anyway, we arrived and checked into our hotel with an hour to spare (it started at 8), so we decided to walk to the concert.  At around 7:40, we were in the industrial wasteland of Valladolid with no idea of if we were heading the right way.  To make a long story short, due to some misinformation, we caught two wrong busses and two right ones and ended up arriving at the wrong place.  Apparently there are two buildings named almost identically, so instead of Jamie Cullum, we found a bunch of kids playing handball.  We then caught a cab to the right place and ended up arriving at 8:40.  We ran frantically up to the ticket guy and asked if it was too late to enter; he looked at us like we were nuts (nothing out of the ordinary here in Spain) and took his sweet time letting us in.  When we finally entered, we were greatly confused to find the lights on, a fog machine rolling, a miniscule band of hipsters gathered by the stage, and no Jamie Cullum in sight.  After looking again at our tickets, we found that, in fact, it started at 10.  Go us.  The concert was great, though; I enjoyed it.  Here's a clip; I seemed to have crappy luck with getting video at opportune times:

After, I decided to take a shower at the hotel.  Yes, this is pertinent information.  While I was in said shower, I managed to slip and fall (no, I'm not 90 years old) and grabbed the curtain for support.  Well, not only did I and the curtain both fall, but I managed to rip the metal curtain rod out of the wall and bring down the entire shower with me.  Yeah.  Terrified that the hotel had a credit card on file, Veronica and I decided to fix it in the morning.  How, you ask?  Well, we put everything back together and attached it with... dental floss!  A LOT of dental floss.  This is what our Notre Dame education does for us.  Exhibit A:

That is ONLY dental floss holding the whole thing to the hook in the ceiling.  Impressive?  I certainly think so (and I certainly hope it held out at least until new people checked in).  Anyway, we were supposed to meet up with one of Veronica's intercambios, Ana, and do a little tour of Palencia on Sun., but Veronica turned her phone off.  Turns out it requires a pin (which she forgot) to let her turn it back on.  So, as we couldn't arrange to meet with Ana, we caught the bus back instead.  I was ok with it.  Honestly, all of the small cities look the same after awhile and I had a lot of work to do.  Not that I ended up doing it anyways- I came home, ate some rabbit (continuing my LOTR adventures, I suppose), and went to Harry Potter instead.  After a few minutes, I forgot that it was dubbed in Spanish and enjoyed it quite a bit.  Ron's dubbed voice was rather deep and manly, though, which made me laugh.  What else... my computer keeps making bubble noises and it's starting to worry me... Oh! We had a Thanksgiving dinner at the Fund on Thurs. that was surprisingly nice.  And either they brought in a sheep to feed the werewolf upstairs (à la Jurassic Park) or he's teaching his kid animal noises- I heard baaing the other day.  That's all folks!  Well, for now at least.  Happy hump day (Wed., Mom) to all, and to all a good night!