Things about Spain part 1
"Treacle tart, I'm so glad I didn't give up on you." <- What I said to my "treacle tart" on the airplane. I wasn't going to eat it but then I did and it was the yummiest thing I put in my face the whole month.
Before anything else I must say that though I am home in one piece, my shit is still in London. I mean, I'm cool with that. I didn't have to carry it into the house. I assume that my bags will be returned to me. But I will say that if I lost over 250 euros worth of Spanish books I'm going to have to figure out if I should cry, vomit, and THEN break things, or break things, vomit, and then cry. If any of you have horror stories about losing luggage permanently, now is NOT the fucking time to tell them to me. K? K. I have so many books in those bags. Linguistics books, reference books, Vasco books. (Vasco = Euskera or Euskara but I can never remember which is right in English so I call it by the Spanish word.)
Anyway, yesterday was the day from hell. Would you like to hear about it? Good!
I went to bed at 2:30 the night before. I really didn't want to. At all. I wanted to go to bed at 11. But I fail at life. So I woke up at 3:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. My alarm went off at 4:30. At 5:30 we got on a bus to Madrid. Three hours later we were in Madrid. I was so delirious that I almost started crying. I thought we were in Mexico. I don't know what I would have done without my airport hubby Brad pushing my shit around on a cart and making sure I didn't fall over.
While we're on that note- Brad Nissenbaum of Northampton, Massachusetts, is one of my best friends ever. Noted.
So I checked my luggage in and the woman asked where my flight was going. I said London and showed her my little card that showed London to Boston, blah blah, she nodded. She put my bags through and handed me one boarding pass. I asked why there weren't two. She freaked out, realizing she'd just sent my bags to London and not Boston. That was pretty awesome. So she ran off, got these new stickers, did all this stuff, and told me that they'd go re-label my bags. (Right.) When she came back she started talking to me in English for some reason, and then said, "Ahh, lo siento, hablas español," at which point I told her that it was muy temprano in the fucking mañana and that English would be fine. I got my second boarding pass and went to help Brad w/ his stuff while he checked in with Luuuufthansa to go to Germany. Then we sat with Caitlin and Carolina, the dumbest human being in the world. Brad left at noon and I continued sitting with Caitlin and Brick for a while. At 2 I decided I should go through security so I did. Here's the wicked comforting part. There are signs ALL OVER THE WALLS that say lighters and matches aren't allowed on flights. New signs, Internet reminders, everything. So when I went through the check, so held up my lighter (not so much a smoker but I thought it was cute and got it out of a vending machine in Salamanca) and asked what I should do with it. The guy took it from me and put it in a little basket. Then I walked through the metal detector and he handed it back to me.
... Yeah, handed it back to me. I gave him a weird look, stuck it in my pocket, and walked on. So my lighter made it all the way home. I wish I'd stuffed it full of crack or something to at least make the accidental smuggling process more amusing.
I spent my time in the airport eating ridiculously expensive candy bars and looking for a certain CD. More details about that later. I had been afraid I was going to make it through the whole trip without making an airport friend, but then I met Señor Jose Guevara from Peru, who was on his way to Colombia. He was nice. I only talked to him for a minute though, and then he wished me buena suerte and got on his plane.
On the flight I was starving to death so I ate a sandwich, which cost me FOUR EURO FIFTY. You're not supposed to have to PAY for food on airplanes. I was pissed. But I was also starving. The flight was rather uneventful, aside from the fact that it left AN HOUR LATE FOR NO APPARENT REASON. I did a children's animal word search and it took me about half an hour to find giraffe because I didn't realize that it started with a J in Spanish.
Then we got to London.
We got off the plane and were forced into a line where we were sniffed by a dog. It was wicked awesome that I had a doll stuffed with bird feathers in my bag and was wearing my green pants that I got food all over in Granada and never washed. I was so afraid that was the end of my trip right there. The dog was cool though. Eventually we went in and started going toward terminal 4. Liz and I both stopped to pee which was the worst decision of the month. While we were originally supposed to have an hour and 45 minutes, we did not. This was bad. We had to take a little bus thing to terminal 4 (I FUCKING HATE HEATHROW AIRPORT BY THE WAY) and that took like 15 minutes. Not only did we get there during boarding, we got there during last call. LAST CALL. The two of us were running through the airport to get to gate 25, and I could barely move anymore- I was wearing flip-flops and had a gigantic bag on my shoulder. I was nearly crying the whole time, and this was BEFORE the guy yelled at me. He said, "Don't run, you'll die. Just walk. The plane won't leave right away." I yelled, "I CAN'T WALK TO BOSTON!!!" and kept going.
I got there and almost everyone else was red-faced and nearly in tears as well. Some were in tears. Not just from Madrid either. I don't know what had gone down but people were really upset. The best part? Though it was last call, no one had boarded the plane yet. We got pushed down into the place where you get on the plane, but we were just huddled in this little room, freaking out together. Not cool.
The flight, I will admit, was good. I sat next to the only open seat on the flight, which means that I put the armrest up, curled up in a ball, and actually SLEPT ON A PLANE for the first time EVER. This was made possible by the mini bottle of red wine they had given me. I watched cartoons and part of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which was terrible.
When I got to Boston, I went through security which took all of 15 seconds (Where? Spain. Why? Studying. How Long? A month. Thank you, good night.) and then dealt with the fact that none of my shit made it to Boston with me. I was too tired to care. So then I went and wandered around looking for the fucking van that was waiting for me. PS I still hate being picked up by fucking airport vans instead of people I actually know. It's wicked fun to spend an hour and a half with one random stranger you have to tip instead of your boyfriend. Anyway, I finally found him and we left. He didn't seem to be in the best of moods and I hated all of humanity by this point, so I asked him about his kids so he would talk the entire ride home, which he did. I got home, yelled at my mom for the 600th time for calling me so fucking much because I can't stand it and it's making me a really angry person and it makes me feel like writing really long sentences about how I want to smash my cell phone and scream in her face and run away, and then I gave Aaron a hug.
I gave Aaron the creepy two-headed voodoo doll thing I'd bought him. Everyone on my floor in the residencia was afraid of this thing. Liz didn't want to sleep in the same room with it. When I gave it to Aaron, he nuzzled it and gave it a hug. This is the boy I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. Please let me reiterate that again.
So, I'll write about specific excursions and things later. For now, some fun things.
The best signs in Spain are definitely PERROS NO with a crossed out picture of a poodle, and the one that involved the word "Blobject." What is a blobject? The world may never know.
The best things ever said:
*"Where's your tikis mikis?" "It's in my pocket."
*A little girl on the bus after Julio started telling us our itinerary for the day, in Spanish: "HEY!!! I don't speak SPANISH!!!"
*Estoy full of beer.
*Nao... sei. (Me ordering a soda in Portugal by pointing and saying "I don't know.")
*"Thanksgiving... hay... calabazas?" "No, calabazas no... pavos." "Mmm. Calabazas." "NO CALABAZAS!"
*"I could make that with stones!" "I could not make that with stones but I could make that with metal!"
*Es broma.
*Por que no???
*Las manos asi!!!
*Bien hecho, hombre. Bien hecho.
*No va a volar. (<- I would like to point out that if "Not gonna fly" ever actually does stick in the Spanish language, I was responsible.)
*It wasn't so much doing the vertical tango as doing the horizontal tango... vertically.
*"The abbreviation for crackmuppet should be crumpet." "What's a crackmuppet?"
*Popi, how do you say "bucket" in Spanish?" "What's a bucket in English?"
*Oh fuck them, what are they gonna do? Take away our birthdays?
*Linguistics is stuff you do with your tongue.
*"How apparent is it that I have a Fraggle in my pocket?" "Pretty apparent."
*If you're tired and you know it raise your hand! If you're tired and you know if clap your foot! Or whatever.
*Me: The romans used to eat dinner reclining on a concrete sofa thing... and they ate dormice.
Brad: Can I have a cracker?
Me: You can only have a cracker if you sit up; I don't want you to die.
Brad: Is that how the romans died?
*Nehhh, I'm really tired. I'm going to go home and go to bed. I have to get up earl- OH MY GOD IT'S AFTER MIDNIGHT IT'S MY BIRTHDAY FLAMING SHOTS FOR ALL! :runs away:
And so much more.
More later. Goodnight.
Before anything else I must say that though I am home in one piece, my shit is still in London. I mean, I'm cool with that. I didn't have to carry it into the house. I assume that my bags will be returned to me. But I will say that if I lost over 250 euros worth of Spanish books I'm going to have to figure out if I should cry, vomit, and THEN break things, or break things, vomit, and then cry. If any of you have horror stories about losing luggage permanently, now is NOT the fucking time to tell them to me. K? K. I have so many books in those bags. Linguistics books, reference books, Vasco books. (Vasco = Euskera or Euskara but I can never remember which is right in English so I call it by the Spanish word.)
Anyway, yesterday was the day from hell. Would you like to hear about it? Good!
I went to bed at 2:30 the night before. I really didn't want to. At all. I wanted to go to bed at 11. But I fail at life. So I woke up at 3:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. My alarm went off at 4:30. At 5:30 we got on a bus to Madrid. Three hours later we were in Madrid. I was so delirious that I almost started crying. I thought we were in Mexico. I don't know what I would have done without my airport hubby Brad pushing my shit around on a cart and making sure I didn't fall over.
While we're on that note- Brad Nissenbaum of Northampton, Massachusetts, is one of my best friends ever. Noted.
So I checked my luggage in and the woman asked where my flight was going. I said London and showed her my little card that showed London to Boston, blah blah, she nodded. She put my bags through and handed me one boarding pass. I asked why there weren't two. She freaked out, realizing she'd just sent my bags to London and not Boston. That was pretty awesome. So she ran off, got these new stickers, did all this stuff, and told me that they'd go re-label my bags. (Right.) When she came back she started talking to me in English for some reason, and then said, "Ahh, lo siento, hablas español," at which point I told her that it was muy temprano in the fucking mañana and that English would be fine. I got my second boarding pass and went to help Brad w/ his stuff while he checked in with Luuuufthansa to go to Germany. Then we sat with Caitlin and Carolina, the dumbest human being in the world. Brad left at noon and I continued sitting with Caitlin and Brick for a while. At 2 I decided I should go through security so I did. Here's the wicked comforting part. There are signs ALL OVER THE WALLS that say lighters and matches aren't allowed on flights. New signs, Internet reminders, everything. So when I went through the check, so held up my lighter (not so much a smoker but I thought it was cute and got it out of a vending machine in Salamanca) and asked what I should do with it. The guy took it from me and put it in a little basket. Then I walked through the metal detector and he handed it back to me.
... Yeah, handed it back to me. I gave him a weird look, stuck it in my pocket, and walked on. So my lighter made it all the way home. I wish I'd stuffed it full of crack or something to at least make the accidental smuggling process more amusing.
I spent my time in the airport eating ridiculously expensive candy bars and looking for a certain CD. More details about that later. I had been afraid I was going to make it through the whole trip without making an airport friend, but then I met Señor Jose Guevara from Peru, who was on his way to Colombia. He was nice. I only talked to him for a minute though, and then he wished me buena suerte and got on his plane.
On the flight I was starving to death so I ate a sandwich, which cost me FOUR EURO FIFTY. You're not supposed to have to PAY for food on airplanes. I was pissed. But I was also starving. The flight was rather uneventful, aside from the fact that it left AN HOUR LATE FOR NO APPARENT REASON. I did a children's animal word search and it took me about half an hour to find giraffe because I didn't realize that it started with a J in Spanish.
Then we got to London.
We got off the plane and were forced into a line where we were sniffed by a dog. It was wicked awesome that I had a doll stuffed with bird feathers in my bag and was wearing my green pants that I got food all over in Granada and never washed. I was so afraid that was the end of my trip right there. The dog was cool though. Eventually we went in and started going toward terminal 4. Liz and I both stopped to pee which was the worst decision of the month. While we were originally supposed to have an hour and 45 minutes, we did not. This was bad. We had to take a little bus thing to terminal 4 (I FUCKING HATE HEATHROW AIRPORT BY THE WAY) and that took like 15 minutes. Not only did we get there during boarding, we got there during last call. LAST CALL. The two of us were running through the airport to get to gate 25, and I could barely move anymore- I was wearing flip-flops and had a gigantic bag on my shoulder. I was nearly crying the whole time, and this was BEFORE the guy yelled at me. He said, "Don't run, you'll die. Just walk. The plane won't leave right away." I yelled, "I CAN'T WALK TO BOSTON!!!" and kept going.
I got there and almost everyone else was red-faced and nearly in tears as well. Some were in tears. Not just from Madrid either. I don't know what had gone down but people were really upset. The best part? Though it was last call, no one had boarded the plane yet. We got pushed down into the place where you get on the plane, but we were just huddled in this little room, freaking out together. Not cool.
The flight, I will admit, was good. I sat next to the only open seat on the flight, which means that I put the armrest up, curled up in a ball, and actually SLEPT ON A PLANE for the first time EVER. This was made possible by the mini bottle of red wine they had given me. I watched cartoons and part of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, which was terrible.
When I got to Boston, I went through security which took all of 15 seconds (Where? Spain. Why? Studying. How Long? A month. Thank you, good night.) and then dealt with the fact that none of my shit made it to Boston with me. I was too tired to care. So then I went and wandered around looking for the fucking van that was waiting for me. PS I still hate being picked up by fucking airport vans instead of people I actually know. It's wicked fun to spend an hour and a half with one random stranger you have to tip instead of your boyfriend. Anyway, I finally found him and we left. He didn't seem to be in the best of moods and I hated all of humanity by this point, so I asked him about his kids so he would talk the entire ride home, which he did. I got home, yelled at my mom for the 600th time for calling me so fucking much because I can't stand it and it's making me a really angry person and it makes me feel like writing really long sentences about how I want to smash my cell phone and scream in her face and run away, and then I gave Aaron a hug.
I gave Aaron the creepy two-headed voodoo doll thing I'd bought him. Everyone on my floor in the residencia was afraid of this thing. Liz didn't want to sleep in the same room with it. When I gave it to Aaron, he nuzzled it and gave it a hug. This is the boy I'm going to spend the rest of my life with. Please let me reiterate that again.
So, I'll write about specific excursions and things later. For now, some fun things.
The best signs in Spain are definitely PERROS NO with a crossed out picture of a poodle, and the one that involved the word "Blobject." What is a blobject? The world may never know.
The best things ever said:
*"Where's your tikis mikis?" "It's in my pocket."
*A little girl on the bus after Julio started telling us our itinerary for the day, in Spanish: "HEY!!! I don't speak SPANISH!!!"
*Estoy full of beer.
*Nao... sei. (Me ordering a soda in Portugal by pointing and saying "I don't know.")
*"Thanksgiving... hay... calabazas?" "No, calabazas no... pavos." "Mmm. Calabazas." "NO CALABAZAS!"
*"I could make that with stones!" "I could not make that with stones but I could make that with metal!"
*Es broma.
*Por que no???
*Las manos asi!!!
*Bien hecho, hombre. Bien hecho.
*No va a volar. (<- I would like to point out that if "Not gonna fly" ever actually does stick in the Spanish language, I was responsible.)
*It wasn't so much doing the vertical tango as doing the horizontal tango... vertically.
*"The abbreviation for crackmuppet should be crumpet." "What's a crackmuppet?"
*Popi, how do you say "bucket" in Spanish?" "What's a bucket in English?"
*Oh fuck them, what are they gonna do? Take away our birthdays?
*Linguistics is stuff you do with your tongue.
*"How apparent is it that I have a Fraggle in my pocket?" "Pretty apparent."
*If you're tired and you know it raise your hand! If you're tired and you know if clap your foot! Or whatever.
*Me: The romans used to eat dinner reclining on a concrete sofa thing... and they ate dormice.
Brad: Can I have a cracker?
Me: You can only have a cracker if you sit up; I don't want you to die.
Brad: Is that how the romans died?
*Nehhh, I'm really tired. I'm going to go home and go to bed. I have to get up earl- OH MY GOD IT'S AFTER MIDNIGHT IT'S MY BIRTHDAY FLAMING SHOTS FOR ALL! :runs away:
And so much more.
More later. Goodnight.