This Saturday, I woke up at 11am, and I'm pretty sure I was the first person up in our apartment. I'm also pretty sure this is the earliest I've ever woken up on a Saturday here, and I think the last of my roommates to get up today finally got out of bed at 2:45pm. Another friend who I talked to later didn't get up until five. Ahh... it's not always easy to get enough hours of sleep during the week, especially for Americans who aren't in the habit of taking siestas. It's all fine and good to start making plans to go out on weeknights around 11pm, but it's tough when one needs to get up at 7:30 in the morning for work or class. Weekends are catch-up time, which means they also seem to go fast!

But the custom of the siesta seems to be alive and well here, even in central Madrid, at many of the smaller shops. Almost anything that's not El Corte Inglés or another big store will close from about 2pm to 5pm every day. Stores have heavy metal roll-up doors over their entrances, and if you take a walk in the afternoon, most of these doors are slid most of the way shut, with maybe a foot-and-a-half gap left open at the bottom so the shopkeeper can sweep. They always seem to sweep during the siesta. If you look under the door of a shop you were hoping to go to but just missed, you'll almost always see a pair of feet and a broom.

I was at a party on Thursday night -- one of the guys from my class at the language school, named Daniel, and his girlfriend, whose name I can't recall, had finished their Spanish classes and were about to go back to Brazil, where they live. They had a farewell party and a bunch of people came. Since most of them were from the language school, it was a crazy mix of nationalities and native languages... and a really good time. The best part was when the man who manages the apartment building, a jolly Spanish chap who's probably in his 50s, came up to the apartment during the party to bring a bigger garbage can. Somebody thrust a beer into his hand, which he opened joyously and toasted the room with, and then he spied the food table and said (in Spanish, of course), "Tapas! [snacks] You have learned well! It can't be a party in Spain without tapas!" He then proceeded to dive into the food, feasting on some chips and brie cheese, talking the whole time about how good of a Spanish party this was. He had a really rich, classic voice and was positively beaming. Then everybody started taking their pictures with him, which he loved, and then he finally left.

My internship is proceeding apace quite nicely. One of the websites I'm supposed to make (the smaller, easier one) is nearing completion, and I'm preparing to take on a Drupal-based content management system redo of the main site, which will be fun and one of the biggest web projects I've ever taken on. Javier, one of the staff members at my internship who's been working with me the most (and who also is some kind of a national or international karate champion, I think -- seriously), helped me have a phone conversation with the web techies to sort a few things out. Interesting note: many business telephones in Spain, including the ones at my company, are cellular. They have a large base and a corded handset and look exactly like a normal business telephone. They're just not connected to the wall at all. No power cord, no phone line, no nothing. The people in my office pick their phones up (base and all) and move them around when they want to carry a conversation into a different room or just stretch their legs. I asked about this, and Javier explained it to me: when the Spanish phone system was privatized, the entire landline infrastructure was given to one company called Telefónica. Therefore, because building new infrastructure is super expensive, most areas only have Telefónica landline service available. However, Telefónica is expensive, so many other companies decided to offer business multi-line telephone service via their cell networks. Javier showed me that their business phones have a rechargeable battery and a SIM card in the base, just like a normal cell phone, because their business phone contract is with Vodafone, not Telefónica. Javier said he could bring his office phone to his car and drive all around if he wanted, and it would still work the same. Interesting stuff for me, since I've never seen it in the U.S.

Now for a question everyone's been asking me: ¿cómo son las chicas españolas? (How are the Spanish girls?) My impression so far: not that different. I guess it depends on what you're looking for. People in general DO seem to put more energy into their appearance -- it's like the U.S. only without the worst-dressed third or so. And there are LOTS of attractive chicas here, for sure. But there are also lots of attractive people in Minneapolis and tons of other places. And there's about the same proportion of people here who may look great but who actually aren't people I want to spend much time with. There are awesome people too, like anywhere. I had wondered if las chicas españolas would be amazingly different in some way; uniformly awesome like I'd been told by Spaniards, but so far, I'd say that people are people, and leave it at that.

But couples do make out more in public. That's been an interesting thing to notice. It's really not unusual to pass a street corner where there's a couple intently making out while people walk past them on all sides. The crowd barely takes notice. A few days ago, I came across a couple intensely engaged by El Corte Inglés; a few hours later, I saw them again, lips still locked, this time on the street by my apartment in front of Burger King. Maybe they took a break to eat. On a walk home from the language school one day, there were two couples making out at a single intersection. They were kittycorner from each other, so as I walked between them down the street, I kind of wondered if some invisible force field would cause me to grab a girl and join in. Unfortunately, nothing happened.

And as long as I'm on a somewhat-related subject, the norm for nudity in generally-available printed material is different: you can show breasts. On a walk down the street on a typical evening, a bunch of people are always handing out flyers for different bars and clubs, and often these will feature women who are fully nude from the waist up. One of the magazines that's currently being displayed in regular newsstands has a totally naked waist-to-head shot of a woman for its cover, and the magazine is shelved in the front of newsstands like everything else, with the picture staring out at passers-by.

Lastly, I was taking the metro home from work one day and something happened that struck me as straight out of a Frank Capra movie. The train pulled into an almost-empty station, the doors opened, and two guys in their 20s ran on, one wheeling a full-size microphone stand, both with guitars -- one electric, one acoustic. The mic stand had an amp and battery pack strapped onto the base. Both were wearing slick felt hats and sharp vests and the guy with the mic stand had zebra-striped sleeves. As they rushed onto the train with their gear, the guy with the mic was speaking like a hyper emcee to the train at large (in Spanish, of course). It was something like, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome, welcome, we're so glad you're here! My partner here and I are about to play for you, and we'll pull off some terrible performances of everybody's favorite ballads and songs. [laughter] I know, right? Right! Are we ready? One! Two! Three!" and they started to play. They had plugged the electric guitar into the amp, the guy with the mic was singing and playing, the subway car was rocking along at speed, and I'm pretty sure they even had canned music that they were playing through their amp as backing. It was, in a word, magnificent. Everybody else in the car was watching and rocking along. They played for two stations, ended their song, then split up and ran down the car in opposite directions with their hats out to collect money from the crowd (and almost everybody gave them something, too) before disappearing off the train.

That's it for now,

Andy