Tuesday, May 6, 2008

once i was the king of spain...now i eat humble pie

ah, moxy fruvous.

say what you will about the exotic atmosphere of barcelona, but madrid is hawt. maybe that´s just because i´m coming from rainy london, but it´s only spring here in the capital city of madrid and already i´ve discovered the importance of an afternoon siesta. and the unbelievable beauty of tapas. the tradition here of providing free platefuls of snacks with your booze sure makes canadian bars seem sleazy and cheap. why don´t we do this in our country? instead of sitting down to fancy restaurants yesterday, olaya and i basically cruised for spanish snacks with our canas. we did so much tapas yesterday, all the spanish i´ve picked up so far is alcohol-related. as a result, my stomache´s been feeling pretty weird lately. i´m not sure what aspect of the food it is here (maybe its very rich?) but i haven´t quite adjusted to it yet.

interesting fact: the entire population of spain appears to be conceived in national parks. i only come to this conclusion because in all the parks that Olaya and i visited (madrid has a LOT of greenspace for a big city), there were a lot of couples making out under every tree. maybe its the cute spaniards. maybe it´s madrid´s beautiful scenery. maybe it´s the spring air. maybe it´s the fact that Canada is 95% winter so we can´t get it on outside most of the time even if we wanted to. it was rather...startling, to say the least. not that i´m opposed in anyway to spring time spanish baby-making.

olaya has been a great host, and i got to meet a lot of her friends over tapas. one of them, mumu, is a makeup artist for one of Spain´s biggest musicals, so it was cool to meet her. conversing with her friends was tricky though...all of them spoke Spanish, of course, but i didn´t, and some of them spoke french and some of them spoke english, so there were at least three languages going around the table last night, depending on who was speaking to whom. i wish i was a little more fluent in French - i´m sure my anglophone inadequacies will surface even more painfully when i go to paris.