Vuelvo!

This morning as the plane was landing and the jet-lag was starting to settle in, my stomach flipped-with excitement! I never thought I'd be so positive about returning to Madrid.

My piso is empty because my roommates are still on vacation. It is awesome.

Traveling was smooth. Due to my penny-pinching creativity, Anna and I had the most complicated and ridiculous travel plans ever. Her amazing parents drove us to the train station at 4 in the morning. When we arrived in Chicago, our amtrak train took us right by stations we would see again soon. We took the amtrak all the way into Chicago, walked three blocks through the city, climbed three flights of stairs to the above-ground metro (remember all this is with about 100 lbs of luggage-plus whatever Anna was carrying), and rode the orange line back out of the city. Chicago is beautiful! Wow! The waits in Midway and the Atlanta airport are still blurred in my mind. Highlights? Reading OK's exclusive interview with Jamie-Lynn Spears, an amazing berry smoothie and pizza!

The flight to Madrid felt long. I had been traveling since December 28th at 5:30AM when Mom woke us up and we left Dallas. So between the 28th and the 30th, I was in Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Georgia and Spain. Let me just say: I have had enough of all this sitting. It is nice to be done traveling! And I am so glad to be back in a country where I have to speak Spanish.

The reason I was homesick

I grew up in Columbia, Missouri. It was always a source of pride to me that I was born in Tacoma, Washington-it meant I was a little bit cooler than the rest of Central Missouri. But I would never tell someone I was from the Pacific Northwest anymore.

Lee Elementary school made me culturally aware to things other than the Spice Girls. Then there was a dry spell where I grew up and tried to fight off suburban white culture. I escaped and ended up back on Paquin, living behind Lee Elementary. I worked at a coffee shop and regained that pride. But now I was proud of being from Columbia. Every detail of downtown life felt cool. I refused to call it "The District." I made a point of only shopping local. My bike was my favorite possession. I relished the fact that I could have no plans on a Friday afternoon, but be at THE party by Friday night.

I left all this-a community that took me 18 years to find-for Spain. And was surprised when I didn't find a great coffee shop in four months? It will take time to have such a rich life in Madrid, and it may be that instead of having a regular bar and a predictable party, I experience life by wandering a bit.

I am glad I'm going back to Madrid because I think I can do it better than I have been. I can do it with more fervor, creativity and inquisition! But for the next week, I am enjoying how great it is to have a place where everybody knows your name.

Columbia things I am really excited about!:
1. Our beloved theater Ragtag is finally moving.
2. The amazing downtown community is once again buzzing about the True/False film festival. Columbia: Go! See a documentary! It is the best weekend of the year.
3. The Missouri Theater is expanding. I am torn-upset to lose the charming but crumbling old building, but hopeful that they will do the new place up right.
4. All of my friends seem full of ideas-most are going off to study abroad, the rest seem to be planning escapes to bigger and better lives. My heart is bursting with their excitement.
5. The fact that this still exists-and it was featured in the worst magazine in Columbia! Thanks to the J-school, my town is very well-documented, so believe me when I say this publication sucks. My friend Kyle says the articles are mostly on etiquette for Republican fondue parties and how to make your house bigger. With stories like that, a feature on MSR3000 is especially sweet. I'll leave the magazine unnamed, but you should all check out Kyle & Tony's 2AM radio show on KOPN.
6. Snow.
7. Mike the carpenter, who sits outside Ragtag everyday full of stories about growing up in the Haight-Ashbury district and hitch-hiking through Europe.

If you are bored in Columbia, please take a stroll downtown. There is life on those streets and passion in every single coffee shop on 9th St. Considering there are like 17, there's probably enough passion to go around.

Merry Christmas!

America!

On Friday night, I left Sol around 4AM, was in bed by 4:30 and then this happened: 2 hours of sleep, met Anna in the metro, a 10 hour flight, delays for rain and snow, a 1 hour flight, 3 hours in a car lost in Chicago with my huge suitcase on my lap, savored time with dear Nancy, 2 hours sleeping on her couch, a taxi that almost didn't show up, a taxi that sped just enough to get us to Union Station on time, a 5 hour train ride that lasted 7 hours, 5 hours of sleep sitting up in the train, meeting Anna's family and the best BLT of my life, sleeping in the car to Columbia, loving on my family, slightly surreal (due to lack of sleep) Artisan Xmas party.

Highlights: sleeping sitting up, meeting Nancy's family, talking in English, stealing a pack of cloves at the Artisan gift exchange.

Mostly I am jet-lagged and wondering what I am doing here in Missouri. Home feels weirder than I thought it would.

Tomorrow: Artisan, Lakota, Kaldi's, Main Squeeze. And then repeat.

José

I have only really met one of my neighbors. His name is either José or Joseph, he never introduced himself. I'm going to go with José since that is a Spanish name. So, José is older and lives by himself. Dawn has these crazy stories about him showing her the pheasants he cooks. The weirdest story she has involves him showing her his new shower. That all said, the only thing he's ever showed me is his nativity scene-he is totally harmless. He always mentions how he lives alone. Anyway, after he showed me his nativity set I thought I'd like to do something for him. He seems like a cool guy and I welcome any Spanish friend.

So, I made a ton of food the other night for John & Vincent's Christmas party. I saved back a few lemon bars and a cookie for my neighbor. Then today I made snow slugs, a Shearrer favorite. Before I left I devised exit strategies with my roommate (I have cookies in the oven!).

José invited me in and took me into his kitchen. This is where I got confused. He took a bottle of maple syrup out of his fridge and showed me how the fridge was a General Electric fridge from the USA. Then he said something about "brujas" (witches) and waved the syrup bottle around for emphasis. Then he let me leave. He was talking a mile a minute with a huge grin on his face. I really have no idea what he said. Before I left he asked me if he had shown me his nativity set and then thanked me for the cookies.

Hey, Feliz Navidad.

Revisiting the Library

Today I finally went to visit a professor during office hours. Profesora Ruiz Montejo is my favorite for two reasons.
1. I understand 90% of what she says.
2. She smiles.
She explained the final exam to me: 6 short questions over 6 slides, 10 minutes for each question. Obviously, I need to study the images, so I explained my trouble with the library. She told me to try again and that the books are organized by class.
So I gave it another shot-I had time to kill before my next class anyway. I went to the 2nd floor, to the art section, and there, to my surprise, were about 1/2 of the books on my bibliography list-all on one shelf.
The library immediately seemed a little brighter. I noticed windows letting in the ever-bright sun. There were nice long tables with individual lamps. It was quiet.
My sports-fan-like devotion to Ellis began to fade.
So maybe it is just that the geographers and the historians have one up on the Filología department, but I sat there with a book in my hands not caring where the difference lay. The photos and the font in the book were HUGE. It was in Spanish, English, French and German. I'd have to be a blind idiot not to learn something! That said, I still need to look up the meaning of "soteriological."
Besos!

P.S. The doctrine of slavation through Jesus Christ. What a word.

Mi amor: Barcelona

Highlights of the week:
1. I realized Rick Steves is not some lame dude my Grandpa swears by, he actually knows his stuff. For 15 euros a night we stayed at Hostel Malda in a huge room in what appears to be a really freaking old (and therefore sweet!) building.
2. In the midst of being lost, the metro conductor closed the doors so fast that Patrick and I got stuck on the train (Anna might say we left her at the station, this is a bold falsification). The group of Barcelona kids drinking rum and cokes out of plastic bottles behind us thought it was hilarious.
3. I woke up early one morning to explore and get breakfast alone. No one was in the streets. It was so peaceful to walk through the tiny, old, clean alleys in silence. In the States, this peacefulness only exists around 6 in the morning. It was almost 9. Maybe I can be a morning person in Spain.
4. From the ancient-feeling stone alleys of Barrio Gótico to the wide streets on the hill by Parc Güell to the colorful, narrow alleyways to the beach, there wasn't a single place I wouldn't want to live forever.
5. One word: bicycles.
6. I speak Spanish. Barcelona speaks Catalán. Therefore I must speak Catalán.
7. Washing off our feet as we left the beach, an older woman opened up to us. She cried about the power of God but never lost her composure. She opened up to us. Her favorite things in life: coffee, the beach and God.
8. Drinking the cheapest beer in Spain and watching FCB win a game!
9. Pat's pasteurized milk. I had forgotten how much I love that stuff.
10. Collecting beach glass by the water and thinking about how I get to see my Grandma in a week or so. I wasn't happy on the beach-I was content. Much better if you ask me. I wasn't excited about Barcelona like I was about Paris, but I did feel like I had found a potential home.

Possibility

I have been thinking a lot about community lately. Being the liberal peace-loving hippie I am, community means a lot to me. I left my strong community in downtown Columbia to live abroad this year and sometimes I wonder why I gave up that family. What I didn't anticipate was what my community would look like in Madrid. I knew I would have one, but I expected it to focus around a café like my community in Columbia did. I expected it to be made up of madrileños and Spanish students.

Instead I find myself in a community of Erasmus students from all over Europe and our meeting place changes every night. I went out for a drink tonight with one of the first people I got to know in Madrid. Giovanni, this Italian guy that I thought looked so cool with his Ray-Bans. He has lived in several places and told me tonight about how he has the travel bug and wants to leave Madrid.

I knew living here would change me, but I didn't anticipate finding this international community. Tonight Giovanni and I marveled over how unique it was to have a community that isn't defined by a place. In fact, the opposite: The international community is defined by travel and being in a place that is strange to you.

The verdict is still out on whether or not I will catch the travel bug and spend my years bartending in foreign languages. But it is a romantic idea. Though I could pass my years on the corner of 9th and Cherry very peacefully, I might learn Italian and French and live in Argentina photographing for a magazine or in Uganda working in an Irish pub.

Some things are the same everywhere...

...like Texas Hold'em. The game was in true Erasmus style: We played in three languages and were always a little confused, we took a long white bread and nutella break and practiced our Spanish profanity, which is probably only funny to us.

I couldn't even beat him at a staring contest.

You know that feeling you get when you realize someone you love is way cooler than you realized?

Alberto and Adam came into the bar last night and put a euro down on the foosball table. They then proceeded to kick ass. They beat the undefeated and then everyone else in the bar-twice. Then they played the first guys again and beat them about 8 times over. No one in the bar had any euros left to play my friends.

3 hours. Not a minute wasted.