Jess and I met in Ecuador and she's a Boston University grad from Bermuda. She's going to be doing a month of prep classes and then begin teaching English at a language company about twenty minutes from my apartment. It's her first time in continental Europe, after having visited the U.K. when she was nine, sooo, enhorabuena a Yessica.
Yesterday we visited a couple of apartments in the area, hoping to find one she can move into in the next little bit rather than on the first of December. House hunting is weird here. Or maybe everywhere and I've just never had to do it anywhere else.. You call up the person who's listing you're interested in and ask if you can come in and take a look. Normal. So you go check it out, yada yada, it's nice, me gusta, ah qué buena la terraza, etc., and at the end the apartment dwellers tell you that they'll talk it over and let you know in a couple days. It's kind of like an interview or audition and I'm sure really nerve-wracking if you're on the receiving end i.e. the homeless person. Jess hasn't spoken Spanish in about a year either, and the Spanish that she's used to is South American, so I'm having to do a lot of the talking and the poor girl just looks terrified. I have high hopes, though. We saw a really nice one yesterday where two 25-year-old students were living, and they were listening to Radiohead and cooking something edible and one's studying Bellas Artes (cool), so all things point to not-psychotic. We're going to check out some more later today, too.
Of course Jessica needed a drink afterwards so of course we went to Dublin. Sign of how I spend far too much time in this bar: it was the second visit of the day. Sign two: the bartenders knew we'd be back so they told us not to close the tab out after round one. Jorge's going to make us Pisco Sours on Tuesday, too, which is great because that's when las chicas and I have decided to get together and book our tickets for Christmas break once and for all, and what better way to celebrate than with raw egg, liquor and cinnamon?
Last night my new new roommate moved in. Alexandra the short-lived French girl left sometime over the weekend without mentioning it to me.. I found out from the doorman when he told me Lorena from the Canary Islands would be taking her place. Perhaps this was a good thing because my apartment was becoming decidedly Frenchifreaky what with two French roommates always twittering about in their
French way. I thought maybe I'd absorb some of the language by osmosis and there must be some truth to that because when I picked up my roommates Parisian magazine the other day and read the headline Les éjaculateurs précoces sont-ils égoïstes?, I knew exactly what it meant, although I'll leave it up to you to make your own decision about that one.
I don't entirely get the fascination with France. When I was
in London it seemed like they had a major inferiority complex with the French, but if you ask me Sarkozy's a nutter and I don't like french fries anyway. On the interesting side, if you do a good image search for 'French,' you will get an image that was also included in my slideshow presentation on the Minnesota State Fair. Mira: the "Fry Dog". It's a corndog covered in french fries and it makes me kind of light-headed if I look at it for too long. It actually kind of looks like Spam tartare on the inside; another unlikely pairing of France and Minnesota.
Speaking of us, this is from the Culture Focus article I read my students in class today: "Studies in the USA show that today's children are fatter than they were before. When they're watching TV, American children eat and eat!" Thank you blatant stereotypization.
Let us all raise a symbolic Fry Dog to that. Cin-cin.
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