Thursday, November 27, 2008

Happy Thanksgiv-a-dring-a-dring-ling


So Thanksgiving in Spain is just another Thursday. An effort was made to celebrate here in the apartment, but two of my roommates have relatives in town, so Megan, Renee, and Emma were all out visiting, and for dinner it was just me and the three vegetarians. Dinner was pretty yummy anyway, but I'm struggling to deal with the fact that this is apparently a pie-free country.

Christmas decorations went up on Tuesday, because we got tired of waiting. There's me and the tree on the left. It was sort of an adventure, because we were all working in a confined space, with Juan up on a ladder, and the one person (Ana) who was trying to coordinate our efforts was speaking only in Spanish. I've got a few more pictures of the decorating, in various stages of completion, which you can see if you follow this link.

If you scroll down below, you will see that I have finally finished my post about Rome, which is backdated to the end of last month (between "When in Rome" and "Juan-ish"), when I actually wrote most of it. It's actually been written for a while, I was just too lazy to type it up. My photos of Rome (which may look suspiciously similar to some that I took when I was there two years ago) are all here, although I have not managed to caption or even tag most of them.

I've got a write up of my Berlin trip written and typed, but it needs to be cleaned up (and possibly broken into pieces, I was pretty long-winded there) before it will be readable. In the meantime, you can see my photos of the trip (again, caption free at the moment) here.

London, I have neither written or typed about, but here's the link to the photos.

In the next couple of days, I mean to get captions up on all of those, even if they're just of the "this is a building" variety. In the meantime, if there is any of them catch your eye and you want to know more, either comment here or send me an e-mail and I'll do my best to answer questions.

For something more interesting than a list of things I haven't done, I now turn to Juan who recently explained to us how Obama ruined Christmas *:
-His first act as President-Elect was to free the Elves who were forced to work in Santa's North Pole Sweat Shop
-This has brought Santa's entire operation to a halt (no elves = no toys)
-Even if there were toys, they could not be delivered, as Rudolph's nose was found to be causing global warming
-Rudolph was then shot by Bruce Willis, who was quoted as saying "Yippie-ki-yay"**

Later,


*Loosely Translated from the Original Juan-ish [back]
**Explination for Mom and Other People Who Don't Watch Action Movies: this is a reference to the "Die Hard" series (starting liberal actor Bruce Willis), the first of which did take place at an office Christmas party. [back]

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Ceci n'est pas un Update

Sorry for the quietness of late. I have much to tell, but it will have to come later, as I'm going to London for the weekend.

-Ely

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

But I Don't Want to Be a Socialist

Unfortunatly, there are fewer and fewer places in the world I can go to get away from socialism.

That's all I've got to say about that.

Monday, November 03, 2008

Juan-ish

My host father, Juan, does not speak English. He does not speak Spanish either. He speaks Juan-ish, which requires special skill to translate.

Things I've learned today:
-Juan is from Ft. Leramie, Wyoming
-Juan is the 5th Beatle
-Ringo Star is not Chinese
-"Jingle Bells" actually begins "Wrinkle birds, wrinkle birds" and is properly sung to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"
-Pallea is made from Jackalope
-Amanda is from the North (New Hampshire), therefore all her family members are all penguins, and when they go to vote, they drop sardines in the ballot box.

Speaking of voting, don't forget to vote tomorrow. You'd be better off going earlier in the day then later if you want to avoid a line. Maya's boyfriend Nick (who is visiting us this week) voted early, and he said he stood in line for an hour, and this was in Orange Country. I voted absentee (mailed my ballot a couple of weeks ago, thanks for asking). The statistics-making-people are saying that in this election roughly a third of the voters have voted early or absentee, which I think is interesting.

Tomorrow night I'm planning on staying up for the election watching party, which really means getting up early on Wednesday. 7:00 in the central time zone in midnight here. So, even though the polls should be closing on the west coast at about 2 a.m. my time, I'll be stuck at school because the metro doesn't re-open until five or six. Watching returns means an all-nighter, but it's OK, pizza will be for sale.

-Ely