The pig kill him, with a knife.

I love these guys and I wish I were a groupie in 1960s Brazil. When I was down in Peru I saw a Bossanova band playing my first

night there and then I went to see them again just about every night that followed until I left. On my last evening in town the lead singer pulled me under the bar-rail and into the back of the kitchen where he told me to close my eyes so he could give me "a present". He had a tattoo on his face and I called him Tattoo Face (in my thoughts).

Yesterday I went and heard some live music here at this really cool little bar that's mostly underground with crumbly brick walls that come off in your hands when you brush against them. It looks like a crypt and it's small and intimate and there really weren't that many people at the show which made it even better. The band was playing a combination of flamenco and I think some salsa beats and other things I'm not probably qualified to identify, but they were good. Also I got my hair stuck in some guy's coat zipper when he walked past while I was sitting on the steps. Contrary to what I would have expected it didn't just rip out the hairs but instead dragged me along a foot or two before the guy noticed the human head attached to his jacket and set me free.

This past week has been BUSY and I can't believe how exhausted I get from teaching. Well plus grad classes. And the private English lessons I give. And going out to watch the football at night rather than staying in and sleeping. I have my Fridays off from Colegio which is great, but Thursday evenings are tough and this week I fell asleep rather than make the 45 minute trip to Las Suertes for grad class. As luck would have it I woke up in time for football, and met my first Couch Surfing rando from Israel. I don't host people overnight in my apartment because I don't have the space or the time or the balls to commit to it, but my profile is set so that if travelers to Madrid want to meet up for coffee or a drink or whatever, they can get in touch with me. It's a pretty cool system but would be a lot cooler if I had endless free time and no homework or responsibilities and could do it more often. I'm supposed to be working on the lesson plan presentation for my Biliteracy class tonight and it is not being fun because hey guess what I've been teaching for two weeks and I don't know what to do for a unit's worth of lessons. I changed my topic just a couple days ago to the State Fair and so far it's mainly photos of enormous pigs and enormous Americans eating fried foods and a dwarf swallowing fire.

That will be my task for this coming week along with HALLOWEEN! Halloween isn't really celebrated here like it is in the States, and what is celebrated is just due to U.S. influence rather than it being a Spanish thing. In my English lesson for the teachers, one of them told me people celebrate by throwing eggs (which everyone else denied), and the day after Halloween (which they have off) is spent visiting the graves of relatives. On Thursday I read my class the beginning of a Halloween story and had them come up with their own endings. The story was about a sister and brother who are out in their family's barn and they hear a loud scraping noise coming from the loft and they get SCARED! This is one of the endings I got from a 15-year-old student (bear in mind it's a second language):

"The girl was so afraid so she stayed just near the door. The brother go upstairs to investigate what was really happening. And suddenly, Michael saw their farm animals hung, and crying because of the pain. There was a pig who was still alive, so he tried to help it but when he was so closed to the animal, the pig kill him, with a knife. Then Michael's sister heard a noise (her brother's one), she found him. (IT ISN'T FINISHED!!)"

Kinda makes you want to be a vegetarian, huh? Huh?