Zumo

So i did indeed go back to the park and had a lovely picnic with some buds. We had a feast of bread, some unidentified cheese, olives, beer, and boxed sangria that was horrible. to my surprise i tried an olive and it was actually very tasty. normally i hate olives, but these olives tasted really different. a pity i don't remember the name of them. We spent several hours in the park (again) and then went to have a late afternoon, aka six-thirty, snack of patatas bravas and ice cream. patatas bravas is a tapa, basically potatoes with a spicy kind of tomato sauce on top. in spain, potatoes are called patatas, not papas like in latin america. at dinner, we watched this show about madrid people in other countries and this show was about boston. in the middle of watching, some madrileño was showing the show his meat shop, and my host mom asked me if i had tried this thing that i don't remember the word for. i said not that i knew of, she said it's really tasty but that if she told me what it was i would never want to try it. then she burst out into a hysterical laughing fit. from what i gather it is some strange animal part mixed with blood or something. i reaaaaaally wish i remembered the word haha.
Monday was fairly uneventful. I didn't have class until 5:30 so i hung around at home reading and doing a bit of homework. I'm reading The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon and i have only have about 100 pages left! It's a murder dectective mystery that takes place in an imaginary Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska. as i started reading it, i thought to myself, i don't remember all those jewish places everywhere when i was in sitka... so i looked it up and it turns out that Sitka was one of the places they wanted to make kind of a jewish commonwealth after the war but instead Israel was chosen. But Chabon chose to set his novel as if it had actually been Sitka. Anyway, it's a really interesting book, very well written. Then after I had grammar class, we went to go buy tickets to see Carmen. It seems like they have re-invented it into some kind of flamenco-esque thing instead of the traditional opera. We are going the first week of March, because it's all sold out until then.
Today- a full day at the university! On a whim, I went with my friends to check out a new class called Migration and Human Interconectedness under the Anthropology department, and i really liked it! the teacher was SO EXCITED that there were so many Erasmus kids and United States kids in it, to get our different views. It seems like perhaps a lot of outside work, but all pretty do-able. he speaks pretty clearly and slowly because he said when he was in the united states everyone would talk fast and he didn't know what they were saying, so he knows what we're going through. Then, i had my second class of the day, Social Transformations in 20th century British Writing. I like this class a lot. The teacher spent today explaining Modernism, and just lectured, but next week we are starting to discuss texts so it will be more exciting. Mrs. Dalloway is first up on the list, which i have read, but in a completely different setting, and i liked it anyway so i don't mind reading it again. After class, my two friends i'm taking the class with and i went to the international bookstore to buy Mrs. Dalloway, and amanda and i ended up spending about an hour and a half in there. it was incredible! they had so so much paul auster and murakami and really obscure authors that you perhaps wouldn't even find in american bookstores! i found a collection of short stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides called "My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead," and it's a collection of great love stories from chekhov to munro. i am excited about reading it. they also had a really great section about spain; i feel like i should return and buy a book about history or culture here. I really don't know that much about Spanish culture. I understand the civil war and franco and stuff, but that's just scratching the surface. perhaps i will gain some insight from my migration class about spanish culture? one can hope.
tomorrow's goal: put more money on phone and buy painting supplies/perhaps paint.