International Language Conspiracy

This weekend was a four day-er because Thursday was father´s day and the culmination of the fallos in Valencia, which is a giant fire festival that I wish I´d been to, but I think it was good to slow down my mentality of optimization and always trying for the best experience. I am for sure gonna try and make sure I get to do as much of the stuff that I want to as I can, but its also important not to make cramming the most amount of stuff into my time my main preoccupation here. This weekend was good for getting some valuable if not always positive life experience out of an unplanned and seemingly vacuous space of time.

Thursday night, after barely doing anything other than cutting my own hair with only scissors and my hands (which turned out pretty well, although the electric clippers are about 4 times as fast), I went out for a decent night with my housemate and some of her friends, that involved speaking plenty of Spanish with this Finnish girl (good to have another non-German) and making a whole transaction to buy beer in Euskara (we just learned numbers so now I can understand when I ask how much something is) and meeting these folks from Catalunya and trying to gather enough info from one of them, who said he had a bar in Barcelona I should go to, so that I would be able to actually remember and find it when Joshua and I are there. He told me the plaza, the bar, and his name, and suspecting I´d forget because we were at a bar, also gave me some tips on finding his facebook, which was still likely to be forgotten but I remembered one of his names that he spelled to me in catalan, the only difference being the way the x´s are pronounced (ixa(icksa), as opposed to equis in castellano, or ixa (eesha) in Euskara) but I got it, and describing that his profile picture had a dog flying through the air. I forgot some about the plaza where the bar is, but I for sure found a ridiculous picture of a dog flying in the air out of someones arms on facebook.

Saturday I went to my first real house party in Basque country. In general, people here go out to bars to party, and rarely have them at their houses. But this was a house with Germans and Americans. I went because I heard from my American friend, but my housemate also went who heard from her German friends. This house has paint everywhere, literally, the toilet was painted, the bathtub was painted, the walls had all kinds of mad poetry and drawings on them, some still fresh, necessitating caution when using walls as support. It kind of had the atmosphere of a drug house or a squat, which is not a bad thing. It was a nice change from always going around spending so much money at bars, because although they were still charging, it was much cheaper, and it was one place. There were at least two people who were born in Basque country, then lived in America, and are now back here and speak real American English and also good Basque, (although I didn´t ask if its more Batua,the standardized Euskara generally used in the schools these days, or the dialect from here), a lot of Italians, American, and Germans, some Polish folks, maybe some Finnish too. It was quite a party. Although all Germans learn at least like a working use of English, many here have as decent or better command of Spanish, and a lot of the other folk had good Spanish, too, sometimes better than their English, so there was a plenty healthy mix of languages.