Le falta Family Guy

So we´re still in this kind of orientation period where we´re constantly kept busy, so we tend to have the problem of not knowing what to do with ourselves once we don´t have anything scheduled. After class the other day, I was walking with Miles, and it was just like "I don´t really want to do anything, but I don´t want to go back to my house and do nothing. What I really want to do is sit in the dorm and watch Family Guy." That´s whats so different here: we all live at opposite ends of the city, so we can´t do that casual dorm drop in with no obligation to do anything interesting. But we kept walking, and wound up at some little street cafe and had a thing of Sangria. We hung out there for a while, then Miranda called, and we did the same thing with her somewhere else. It hit me that this is our analogue to sitting around watching family guy here. You can just sit down somewhere, get a glass of something for like two euro, and just chill. I gotta say I´m a fan.

I´m also a fan of Madrid at night. Like, can we talk about it? I´m hesitant to make any judgements about the city, since I´ve been here for three days with no work to do, but I´m quite the fan. We´ve kind of gone out the last couple of nights, and it´s so cool to just discover little places to hang out. It´s kind of hard to communicate why I like it, but it´s just a much more exciting atmosphere, but at the same time still mellow and cool. It´s a kind of a perfect blend of our dorm parties, about which I agree with Eddy, and the massive sketch parties. There´s lots of excitement, yeah, but not that kind of popped collar "whoa bra" college douche/"I´m visibly anxious to prove I´m cool" freshman excitement. It´s like a lot of people having tiny dorm parties together.

Speaking of which, that´s another thing I like about Madrid: it could just be me, but it seems like there´s a really legit mix of different ages here. We have yet to be in a place that´s just a bunch of young people. We´ll be sitting in a plaza, and there´s parents playing with their children, and old couples walking together; or we´ll be in a bar that´s kind of an older crowd that´s just chilling, rather than getting hammered. I am, to repete myself, a fan.


Oh, and after reading Eddie´s last post, I want to contribute a similar problem of my own. I´m at the point where I don´t have to translate everything I hear--it´s still hard to say anything, but if I´m just listening in class it´s not really work. The problem is, every twenty minutes or so I realize that I´m doing this, and it´s like trying not to think of something: everything instantly dissolves and, as if I´m trying to prove to myself that I really can understand what I´m hearing, I start translating everything. Then I have to make an effort to kind of zone out and start listening naturally again. It drives me crazy.