IN HIDING FROM NONEXISTENT DANGER
Most of today was spent in hiding from the elections, but there were a few high points to my day! Apparently PP won the elections overall, well done them. There wasn't a lot of activity in Salamanca, meaning riots and stuff. We were pretty safe :) I'm going to emerge from my bubble of safe and blissful ignorance and read the papers, I promise.
WRITING FUTURE
So in yesterday's post I mentioned that there was a new novel in the mix... there will be more details in the weeks to come, but I plan to incorporate a lot of my experiences into it, and it will probably be written in blog format. So yeah, you'll get more details about that in a few weeks, once the storyline and cast is fleshed out!
Also, I have been writing slam poetry like a fiend this past week and a half, practically every night before I go to sleep. I'm either editing/adding to an old piece or writing a new one. It feels so freaking good to be inspired again! It's not that they're all about Spain or anything, but I think that the change in scenery has definitely made me stop and see some things about myself, how the world works, and how everything does and does not make sense.
I know, so deep. Restrain your applause, por favor.
MAYBE HE WAS FASCINATED BY THE TALKING MOVING PICTURES
This section has two parts to it:
- I FINALLY GOT TO TALK TO SAM VIA SKYPE AND IT WAS AMAZING AND I WAS SO HAPPY TO SEE HIM AND I MISS HIM SO MUCH AND AND AAAAAAAAAAAH
- The creepy old man watching me Skype with Sam in McDonald's
Let's start with the happy and end with the hilarious:
Skype, as it turns out, does work in McDonald's because their Wi-Fi connection is pretty decent, so while it's not a perfect data stream it's good enough for a nice chat with someone. I set up my computer with my attachable web-cam precariously balanced on the top of my laptop like a sad-looking tumor and logged in. Since I had just signed up, I got one call free (which was excellent because I planned to chat with Sam for as long as I possibly could), so I quickly called him... ring... ring... ring... Video and audio worked! “Hello?”
You can ask anyone that was in McDonald's at 6:43pm. I literally squealed and jumped around in my seat like a deranged escaped mental patient that had just had their happy pills. I was that excited to see him. Of course, my microphone for some reason didn't work (even though it totally had the day before with gchat), so I typed and he talked, but I didn't care because I got to see him and hear him and yay <3 I would bore you all with my yammering on and on and on about him and my love for him and how he's awesome, but I'll spare you... though I now have a screen-shot of us talking on Skype as my desktop background. Don't you dare judge me.
Now, the second part of the story: while I was talking with Sam, I could see the video that I was sending to him in the lower corner of my screen. Sitting at the table behind me, happily situated by the window, was this older gentleman that kept looking over my shoulder at Sam's and my conversation. It was incredibly strange. At one point, I looked over my shoulder right at him and smiled, giving him this face that I'm sure said the equivalent of “I can totally see what you're doing, don't think that you're getting away with being a creeper”. He stopped doing it after that. Huzzah for quiet authority!
HEL-ARTE & SUDDEN STORMING
Once I left McDonald's (because my battery died due to their sockets sucking at doing their job, which is to provide energy to electronic devices), I headed out onto the street... and discovered a very bad thing.
It is called Hel-Arte. It's cute, because it's really good ice cream, which is helado in Spanish, and it's artsy, which is arte. Get it? Get it? (I know, I'm a dork...)
Turns out, I could mix flavors and it would still be the same price as if I had paid for one! This is dangerous. So dangerous, I immediately threw myself off of that cliff and bought a single scoop of a combination of raspberry and chocolate ice creams. This is also commonly referred to as “Nirvana”, and is sought after by an entire religious belief system (and for good reason!).
I walked all the way home with my happiness from seeing my man, my happiness from the most delicious of hel-arte, and the happiness of it suddenly pouring down rain from out of nowhere (well, I was so happy from the other two things that I really didn't notice, actually). Life was good.
DAMN RIGHT I'M CREATIVE
When I got home, Pepita had dinner prepped for me (which was not spoiled by the ice cream, actually – it was incredibly small, so it was more like a palette cleanser than anything), so I ate and then went back to my evening routine. About an hour or so later, Chelsea came home a LOT earlier than I had expected her to! I was SO thrilled to have my roomie back – being alone in your apartment is one thing. Being alone in a foreign country where you only understand at maximum about 75% of what your madre is saying at any given time unless she speaks incredibly deliberately and slowly for you is another thing.
Dropping her stuff on her bed, Chelsea immediately started talking about Portugal and what they had seen and done – it all sounded like so much fun, I plan to live vicariously through her photos – but was so incredibly sad, because the zipper pull on her favorite purse had broken off! My ears immediately perked up, and I asked for her to show it to me. She still had the pull, so she showed me how the O-ring holding the whole thing together had simply come apart enough to let it out, which I had been fixing for years with my jewelry-making hobby!
Immediately I said, “hang on, let me get some pliers,” and I went and asked Juan, “hey Juan, do you have any pliers?” A weird look and a half later, Juan handed me some industrial-grade pliers (a far cry from needle-nose, let me tell ya) and I got to work trying to find the best way to jerry-rig the zipper pull back together. It turned out that I needed something else to hold it together, so I ended up using some nail clippers turned on their sides to hold the other side of the ring to get it to open.
As I struggled with this and Chelsea unpacked the rest of her belongingss, Juan came in to see what I needed the pliers for: once he saw what I was doing, he insisted that it was too challenging and that “my brother can handle that, he can fix these things for you, don't you worry about it anymore” and walked off.
Some of you might have gone and asked Angel Luis for help. I dug my heels in and refused to give up. About two minutes later, it was as if the bag had never been broken.
Dad, if you're reading this, you will be so proud to know that all the way in Spain, a belt was totally hitched up. Heck yes, I felt awesome.
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