Homo: Nyms and Phones.

What I learned today: Nada and nata.

Nada as in “he swims” and “nothing” and “nata” as in “cream“.
All together now: Nada en nata o nada!

(Hey, no one’s making you read this crap.)

-who else?

Impending Tole-doom!

So we’re taking another excursion this weekend to Toledo, the namesake of Al’s hometown and a little under an hour south of Madrid. It’s a wicked cool place, apparently, but since I’ve never been there, and the whole damn tour will be exclusively in Spanish, and I’m only on lesson 4.5 of a 20-some-odd lesson Spanish course, I’ve been doing some preparatory research with the DK Eyewitness Travel Guide to Spain and Wikipedia. In English.

The travel guide is great, but I find the call-outs to be a little thin.

Thank Jesús in all his dulce-ness there’s the good ole Wiki (and the unlimited timescale that the unemployed lifestyle provides). An hour and a half ago, I started there trying to figure out what the hell Mudéjar style was ’cause it’s been at least six years since I cracked an art history book (it’s basically Christian Gothic design with Moorish and Jewish influence as developed in and around Toledo during Islamic occupation of the Iberian peninsula, between the 700’s CE and the Reconquista in 1492. Geometric patterns, tilework, intricate wood carvings, etc. Hot stuff.) As you can see by the plethora (do you even know what a plethora eees?) of hotlinks, I was one again sucked in by the seductive power of the Wiki. I’m now reading about the Visigoths, ’cause after the Romans, they were the next conquistadors of Spain.

Once I get some real data and shots this weekend, I’ll give a more sophisticated and learned download.

I could probably add some more links, but that’d just be gratuitous, wouldn’t it?

-bdmc

love it

“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.”

-Mark Twain

Mis cosas favoritas

After an intense bout of homesickness this evening (spurred on by bdmc saying “wouldn’t it be nice to be sitting on our front porch with a beer right now?”) I arrived back to the apartment to find a full jar of olives, an almost full bottle of wine and some jamon serrano awaiting me. All helped to assuage the homesickness and also got me thinking about my favorite things in Spain. So without further ado, mi lista de mis cosas favoritas (in no particular order, and to be added to in the future):

01) Jamon serrano: kicks the crap out of prosciutto. Sorry, Italy.

02) Olives: they just taste better in Spain. (And there’s my white person statement for the day).

03) Walking through Retiro Park on my way to class: I doubt I will ever again have this beautiful of a walk to “work.”

04) And, oh yeah, “working” for three hours a day: okay, granted, this is specific to our trip and not completely about Spain, but not working beats the crap out of working.

05) The Spanish Language: it’s just so much more descriptive and flowery than the English language. Everything is just a little more beautiful/funny/interesting in castellano.

06) Four hundred verbs meaning “to lay down”: so you know how Inuits have about a thousand words for snow? The Spanish have about a thousand verbs that all basically mean “to lay down.” No wonder this is the country that created the proverb, “How beautiful it is to do nothing and then rest afterwards.”

07) El Prado, Thyssen-Bornemisza, Reina Sofia: We live in a city with three fantastic museums, not to mention other galleries and exhibits dispersed throughout Madrid.

08) The satisfying “thunk” of a cork being pulled from a €3 bottle of wine that kicks the living crap out of a $15 bottle of US wine. Now that’s the sound of progress.

09) Sitting in a bar or restaurant with friends and suddenly looking up and remembering that I’m in another country: it’s strange how quickly you start to feel like this foreign country is your own. That is, of course, until you try to pay your bill and the bartender asks you something in Spanish and you completely misunderstand him and it all goes downhill from there and then somehow you find yourself washing dishes for the rest of the evening. But for a short period of time, it almost feels like home.

-cuptastic