The lack of an update last week can be neatly explained by two factors: a broken charger and Polish girls. First, the charger: my roommate, Charlie, brought his Mac to Spain with him right as the charger began to go on the fritz. It finally broke just over a week ago, so he couldn't use his computer while he waited for a new charger to be shipped from the States. He needs to bring a laptop every day for his job, so I loaned him mine. This worked great, except his work goes until 6pm so I couldn't use my laptop in the afternoons, which is usually when these updates have been written. That explains about 40% of the reason why there wasn't an update last week.

The other 60% would have to be the Polish girls. Why, you ask, couldn't I write the updates in the evening, after Charlie and I got home? It's because for most nights over the past week, Charlie, Briana (another roommate), Alec (who lives a floor below), a few other folks, and I have been having a grand time partying with Kaisa and Maria, two students from Poland who were studying at the language school for two weeks. We met them at a party on Friday (somebody at the school was leaving to return to Switzerland) and they invited us to go visit Toledo (former capital of Spain; about 45 minutes outside of Madrid) with them the next day, which I'd really been wanting to do anyway. So we went to Toledo, took a billion pictures (the Polish girls were crazy about pictures -- scratch that, crazy in general), and stayed all day, and then went out the next night in Madrid, and it snowballed from there. I think I got to bed after 2:30am at least four nights that week, and increased the number of times I'd ever been out dancing by 200%. It was awesome, but thank goodness for siestas! It's hard otherwise to wake up every morning at 7:30 for work! Kasia and Maria left on Sunday (muy triste) and this next week looks like it will be much calmer.

One little snippet: I know I've written about this before, but orange juice is HUGE in Spain. One of the random cultural things that I never would have guessed at... in Toledo, I ordered a glass of orange juice in a bar (perfectly normal thing to do; it was fresh squeezed) and it came with a packet of sugar. It really didn't need sugar, but I tried it (and proved to myself that orange juice is, in fact, better without sugar). But Spaniards seem to love putting sugar in their drinks -- coffee, tea, you name it, there's a sugar packet served with it.

Some of my roommates and I were hanging out with some Italian students in a bar one night, and there was one old gentleman who played the piano and another (still older) gentleman who sang, very loudly and very well. Afterward, he was resting near our table and asked, "How many different nationalities do we have here?" He then proceeded to ask us each of our names in turn, and then provide a stunningly detailed historical analysis of all our names from memory. "Carlos? Carlos was the name of a king..." and he'd go for about two or three minutes. He had analysis for everybody. He said that my name means "manly," which is the same thing I've read in those books where you can look your name up. He had more to say too, but I don't remember it at the moment. After the names, he asked if we knew how to dance, and Francesca from Italy did, so he danced (very fast and very energetically, like a younger guy) with her for a few minutes and everybody was laughing and clapping. Afterward, Charlie turned to me and said, "This is going on the blog!" so Charlie, this one's for you.

Intercambios. In Spain, language exchanges are called intercambios, and they're very popular among language students. The idea is to meet up on a semi-regular basis with a native speaker of the language you're trying to learn who is also trying to learn your native language, and have conversation with roughly equal time devoted to each language. It's a good idea. It's also very easy for native English speakers to find intercambios in Spain, since English is an in-demand language. Taking the advice of a friend at the language school, I decided a few weeks ago that I would look for an intercambio. I wrote a card with my e-mail address and a short paragraph and put it up in the English Philosophy department of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. It was a Wednesday. That Thursday, I was buying cheese and bread in the store across the street from my apartment, and the lady at the checkout asked me, "Where are you from?" I said, "United States," and she said, "Oh, that's so cool! I'm learning English and we should totally have an intercambio sometime!" So we arranged to meet up. On Saturday, I got an e-mail from a student at Complutense in response to the card I'd put up, saying he'd be interested in doing an intercambio. So we arranged to meet up. And a couple weeks later, the same friend who had originally suggested intercambios to me was eating in a restaurant and her server just happened to mention that she was looking for an English-speaking intercambio (my friend is Austrian and speaks German), so she wrote my number down and gave it to the server. So we arranged to meet up. Are you keeping count? That's three intercambios. As of now, the only one that has consistently worked out time-wise is with Javier, the guy from Complutense. It's very very fun! Conversation is always a good thing to learn a language...

Switching gears here to something that may offend a few of you but I've been thinking about a lot: Every day here, I'm more and more glad that George W. Bush isn't the current President of the United States. In a way, everybody represents their country to some degree when they travel abroad, and a country's image is hugely influenced by its leader, perhaps particularly so in the case of the U.S. The more I talk with people and the more I listen, the more relieved I am that I can be "the person from Obama's country" instead of the person from Bush's. I'm simply liked more. In the United States, you hear somewhat about how much Bush was disliked/hated in other parts of the world, but it's a whole new level to be outside the country and in the midst of non-U.S. citizens while they talk politics. I have felt genuinely safer and more respected here as an American because Obama's in office now.

There's a store called FNAC here in Madrid. It's large -- kind of like Best Buy meets Borders Books. It's electronic gadgets and media, but 'media' has been interpreted more broadly than Best Buy does, and their book section is really quite good. New books, not used. The store is spread across multiple floors of the same building and I think the bookstore floor is the highest. They have many books in Spanish and an international section with English and other languages. Janny, a friend from the language school, goes to FNAC all the time to sit in the book section. There's a small reading room that's kind of arranged like... well... it honestly reminds me most of the little tiny 'theaters' that can be found at some interpretive centers in the U.S. -- you know, the ones that show a 20-minute film every half hour. Two or three rows high of seating comprised of large steps, like bleachers, arranged in a U formation. People come to FNAC to just sit and read books there for a long time, like a sort of library. I went there for the first time with some friends to meet up with Janny on Sunday. It was so cool to see -- this little reading room just positively teeming with people, squished on the benches and sitting/sprawled on the floor, reading because it's a great thing to do for an afternoon. It felt very quiet and thoughtful.

And that's where I'm ending this update. Til next time,

Andy