Day Ten - Friday

WARM MILK??!

This section will be practically nonexistent, like my enjoyment of this moment:

Warm. Milk. In. My. Cereal.

Ugh.

There are no words for how absolutely disgusting warm milk is to me. I know, I know, it's supposed to relax you, but I do not need to be relaxed during my breakfast cereal.

In my defense, the milk was in the fridge. It felt cold when I held the carton in my hands (though granted, paperish cartons are not nearly so good at translating temperature as plastic ones). It didn't look warm when I poured it into my cereal.

And then, it was. There are no words to describe it's horrors. It just was.

Ugh.

WALK WITH ME

So I took a video of my excellent walk to class! It was only about ten minutes and pretty sweet, considering I walk to the Plaza Mayor every single day. My life pretty much rocks right now, yeah.

As soon as the internet stops being an idiot, I will upload the video for you all to watch! Until then stay tuned!

BOYS AND THEIR TOYS

In Cuentos today, Eva came in nervous and distracted all to heck. We asked what was wrong, and she started trying to laugh it off, though we could tell something is honestly bugging her. She finally told us the story, that it was “even worse than Plan Bolonia, because this could get me a divorce and not more of a headache from work.”

Hoo boy. This was going to be very interesting.

Apparently, her car had broken down the night before, and she desperately needed some means of getting to work. Her husband had offered to loan her his car for the next day, and then they would take hers to a shop over the weekend. While trying to reverse park, she had apparently rubbed up against a column and put a scratch in the paint job that could be seen from space.

As if that wasn't bad enough, this car was her husband's baby. He washed it at least once a week, kept it so fine-tuned that people could have easily mistaken it for still being on the lot, and he never let anyone touch it for the reason that he didn't want it to get damaged in any way. She was sure that as soon as she got home that there would be Hell to pay, so she had asked a colleague what to do; he had recommended that she not tell him and leave it to get fixed that afternoon while she was at work, and to never mention it again.

We were all slightly amused by the story, but she kept using phrases like “I just hope that he doesn't divorce me” and “if I'm not here tomorrow, there's a murderer in our house” and “I wonder if he'd use a gun or a kitchen knife?”, and it slowly became less and less funny until we were all horror-struck on her behalf. Granted, she was laughing, but still.

Still scratching my head on that one.

BEGGARS CAN BE WELL-DRESSED, TOO

I left class to go home, and on my way I stopped in McDonald's for a small french fry (because I was craving something so utterly American), and on my way out the door I was greeted by genuine violin music. I was so taken aback, I stopped mid-way down the steps and stared right ahead of me, where the sound was coming from. This middle-aged guy in pretty clean-cut clothes and a clean-shaven face was playing a violin along the side of the walkway, with his adorable scruffy dog asleep at his feet on a medium-sized dog bed. The song was unfamiliar, but it was beautiful – what he did was he played a CD that had the other parts of the symphony on them, and he accompanied it. There was a tiny hat in front of him for coins, so people would walk by and drop a few centimos into it and he would give them a smile in return.

Violin music has always been a touchy subject for me – I used to play violin (for like a year, and then I quit because I was both not good and uninterested in trying to get better), and I have horrifying memories of a song written for me that tortured me after the break-up... But listening to this stranger with his polish instrument and unpolished work boots, I felt completely at peace, on that step in the European sun with my french fries and my camera recording the song being played. I felt like this was exactly where I needed to be.

Later, when Chelsea left for Portugal and I was all alone (and sad *sniffle*) in the room, I watched that video over and over and remembered how the heat felt good on my skin and how the music was, for once, not threatening. And everything was right with the world.