Procrastination and nudity: Easter in Alcalá

Instead of the sunny weather continuing into our Easter holidays, which would have been ideal, we have had a week’s worth of rain, thunder and lightning and grey, overcast skies.  Accordingly, instead of our pre-planned day trips and topping up our tans in the park, we’ve been stuck in the flat all week doing very little other than watching with an air of sadness as our skin pales from lack of sunshine. This means that I have had a free week, which, if I'd have put my mind to it, could have been very productive. However, that didn’t exactly happen...

Productive things I have achieved this week:

-Finally writing that essay I was given to do back in February.

Unproductive things I have done this week:

-Watching all the movies from the past five years that I never got round to seeing

-Sitting in a pitch black living room watching the sheets of purple lightning fill the sky

-Getting so outrageously drunk on Thursday that on Friday I was forced to set up camp in the bathroom, I discovered two bruises and one cut of unknown origin and I vowed never to drink again (for the tenth time this year)

-Watching all the episodes of 90210, The Big Bang Theory and Desperate Housewives that I’ve missed since being away

-Getting up at 3pm for lack of anything else to do

-Making a cup of tea every half an hour

-Writing lists of things I have to do (nothing)

-Rewriting the lists once every two days

-Joining StumbleUpon. I only joined yesterday and I’ve already come across the top ten ways to annoy people, a frog that looked like it had swallowed a chunk of a red lightsaber and some baby pandas playing in the snow, none of which are particularly useful pieces of information.

Despite the fact that the ratio of unproductive things to productive things I have achieved is 9:1, I’ve still not managed to find the time to go to the gym. I still cross it off my to-do list at the end of each day though, so I still feel a vague sense of guilty accomplishment, albeit hugely undeserved: I don’t think my gym card has seen the light of day for about five weeks. 

Speaking of the gym, it came as little surprise to me that a gym in the Basque region of Spain has begun offering naked classes and workouts. Yes, I know that Spain is a Catholic country. And yes, despite the heat wave last week, the Spaniards refused to remove even their coats. However, if any country was going to come up with this wacky initiative, it would be Spain; happy-go-lucky, carefree, just plain weird Spain. I sort of understand the concept of nudist beaches (of which there are hundreds along the Spanish coastline), but nudist gyms seem not only more than a little odd, but also rather impractical. Apologies to any males reading this, but I think any girl would agree that running on the treadmill without a sports bra would be hugely uncomfortable. Secondly, as the BBC article pointed out, where does all the sweat go that is usually caught by gym gear? You’d probably need a suction to remove the pools of sweat that would collect around the machines, or failing that, an excellent air conditioning system – either of which would cost an arm and a leg (or perhaps more suitably, a boob and a bum cheek). Taking this, and the fact that only four people turned up to the first session, this apparent recession-countering initiative isn’t exactly set for success. The same gym is apparently planning naked yoga classes too. One (non-existent) word: ugh! The objective of yoga is to attain perfect tranquillity. Imagine firstly doing, and secondly watching someone else do these positions in the nude:

Perfect tranquillity my arse (no pun intended). An afflicting state of distress, more like, and sin duda enough to put you off yoga for life. Fun fact about naturism before I bring this blog to a close: in the world of nudists, people who wear clothes are known as ‘textiles’ (reminiscent of Muggles), as if we are the exception, a strange species of clothes-wearing people.

There are two days left of our Easter holiday (although I may take Tuesday off if it’s sunny and drag my flatmate to the zoo, treating myself to a well-deserved – hmm – three-day week). I did actually have plans today – the King of Spain, Juan Carlos I, was due to pop into Alcalá de Henares to present the Premio Cervantes, a Spanish literature prize in honour of the 16^th century novelist and author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes. However, like I’ve been doing all week due to the miserable weather, he cancelled his plans and is now due on Wednesday instead – although I doubt he’ll have been spending the resulting spare time this afternoon finding pictures of glowing frogs or catching up on Desperate Housewives.  

Oddities in Alcalá: classroom paedophilia, dressing for the Arctic and putting the ‘p’ in plaza

I am familiar with the fact that this country operates very differently to England. I am also aware that there seems to be no logic in anything anyone in this country does. Despite this knowledge however, I am still constantly surprised at the things I see or hear...

1)   We saw a woman wearing odd shoes. Not odd socks, odd shoes. One black and one red. It really was very bizarre.

2)   A grandfather let his grandson urinate in the plaza, at the bottom of one of the benches where people sit. As well as being a beautiful sight while we were trying to sunbathe, I absolutely understood why he let the little boy do this – it would have been a lot of effort to take him to the public toilets located less than a minute’s walk away.

3)   Our philosophy teacher said that we should call him if we ever think we’ll need to miss a lesson. One of the Spanish students then proceeded to give him her number, as if this suggestion was perfectly normal. I suppose it sort of makes sense as they don’t seem to use email here, however, if you take away the classroom situation, what she did was give her number to a (albeit very nice) 60-year-old man. Us girls have had so many awful experiences here with the creepy old men – one came within millimetres of me the other day while I was sunbathing in the plaza and leaned over me so that when I opened my eyes, there he was, walking stick and all. Marvellous. So, bearing that in mind, giving my phone number to my elderly philosophy teacher wasn’t something I was terribly inclined to do. 

4)   On walking into Carrefour the other day, the sign on the whiteboard that they use to advertise any offers read: Rape entera €6.90. A whole rape for just €6.90? Golly. What a treat living in a country that effectively encourages rape and paedophilia.

5)   Urban Dictionary’s definition of ‘flash mob’: A group of people who appear from out of nowhere to perform predetermined actions, designed to amuse and confuse surrounding people. The group performs these actions for a short amount of time before quickly dispersing. Alcalá de Henares’ definition of flash mob: Announce the start of the flash mob to everyone in the plaza with two loud blasts so that everyone knows that something is about to happen. Create no confusion whatsoever. Then instead of dispersing quickly, get everyone to join in at the end with the Macarena.  

  

6)   As the temperature rises, so seemingly do the number of layers the Spanish wear. What on earth do they think when they wake up and see 30°C on the temperature gauge? A lovely, summery overcoat to leave as much skin uncovered as possible? A big pair of Ugg boots to keep my feet cool? Some tight jeans to let my skin breathe? Perfect. And a big woolly scarf to finish. It’s madness! I swelter in just shorts and a strappy top, let alone all these layers the Spanish bundle themselves in. The classrooms get so hot sometimes too. As soon as we walked into the classroom for our Spanish theatre lesson last Wednesday, we opened the windows to let some air in. Alas – as soon as the teacher walked in, wearing a jacket may I add, she went over to the window and shut it, as if she were a little on the chilly side. In 30°C heat. She then sat serenely in her chair at the front of the room and started to chatter away, perfectly comfortable. Meanwhile, us English lot were feeling very much the opposite of comfortable. Stuck to our seats, we spent the entire lesson wiping sweat from our foreheads, gulping down our body’s weight in water, fanning our faces with an agitated desperation and feeling as though we were about to faint. Combined with a hangover, as is often the case during this particular class, it’s about ten times worse. If only the classes weren’t timetabled for such early hours. Midday really is too much, especially when you’ve been drinking the night before.

7)   The storks have started swooping a lot lower than they ever did before. This worries me slightly – while researching out of interest what the storks eat, we were informed firstly from WikiAnswers that they live on a diet of hot-dogs and vegetables (that would have been my first guess too), and then from Wikipedia that one of their actual food sources, along with fish, insects and small birds, is apparently small mammals. To which one of my flatmates said to me (5’2’’) that I’d better start keeping an eye out on my way into university and around town. Obviously I realise that this is a joke...but they’ve also started circling in an almost vulture-like manner in recent weeks. I’m definitely never letting myself fall asleep in the sun – staying still for too long under the glare of several stork nests could potentially bring this lovely Erasmus year to a rather undesirable close. 

That’s all for now, but no doubt I’ll have more Spanish strangeness to add to this come tomorrow!  

Out and about continued...

Really?

Finding Neverland

Today (29^th March at time of writing), I woke up, had a shower, went to my lesson, sat in the plaza sunbathing, went for tapas and drank tinto de verano (a mixture of red wine and lemonade). And I am exhausted. 

The old me would have been hugely unimpressed with this lack of productivity, but my new Spanishified self is quite content with a life where the only thing on my to-do-list is ‘go to Whelan’s’ (the Irish pub around the corner) or something along similar lines. I don’t know why I still bother setting alarms when there’s nothing to get up for other than the odd lesson and a spot of sunbathing – maybe to exercise some form of control over my increasingly lazy lifestyle – although I generally sleep through them anyway.

When I took a recent ten-day trip back to England for my birthday, on my second day I got up at 8am, dashed into town to pick up a few things that I needed (two new bikinis were definitely necessary), rushed into a nearby town to buy my mum a gift for mother’s day and to hit Tesco, finished making and wrapping presents for my friends’ 21^st birthdays, sorted out student finance and went through my bank statements, leaving enough time to chill out in front of the TV before bed. In Spain, there is no such thing as ‘dashing’ and ‘rushing’ – in fact, I think the only word in that whole sentence that can be applied to Spain is ‘chill.’ The difference in the pace of life between two countries just a two-hour flight away is quite astounding. I originally thought that this had something to do with the sun absorbing the Spaniards’ energy, leaving drowsiness in its wake, but they go about their business in just as leisurely a manner in the winter, so that lays that theory to rest. We don’t often have the sun and energy-stealing problem in England. We tend to get so bewildered on seeing this glowing white ball in the sky that we shake it off as some sort of illusion, thereby not giving it grounds to absorb a single morsel of energy - and if we do naively let ourselves believe for one minute that this glorious, heat-emitting device is actually real, it only serves to disappoint when it gets swallowed up by an angry black cloud shortly afterwards, enraged by the fact that this foreign object has momentarily invaded on its territory. And with that, England is once again plunged into obscurity (when I went to Egypt during the summer, I was asked by one of the hotel attendants where I was from. “England” I replied. “Ah yes”, he nodded, “the country of darkness.” According to the same man, my friends and I were also “white as cheese” from lack of sunlight).

Anyway, having digressed on a tangent yet again, I want to go back to talking about my stay in England. The whole reason I’d gone back was because it was my 21^st birthday – and I spent the entire ten days denying it. I went to a model village which I used to frequent when I was five, the giant toy store Hamleys where, bar the shop assistants, we were the oldest people there, and instead of doing grown-up things when I went to go and visit a friend in London, we went on a search i.e. a treasure-hunt, for the seven noses of Soho (apparently there are seven life-size noses stuck on the walls of various streets in the square mile that is Soho. We found four, so three to go in the summer, and according to a myth, finding all seven brings infinite wealth which would be quite handy). I’m also planning on going to the zoo next week. All in all, I think I’m doing a fairly good job, although in the end I may as well not have bothered, as the whole world seems to be denying it for me. I went to get a manicure at my local beauty parlour and the beautician asked if I was getting my nails done for any particular reason, to which I replied that yes, there was an occasion – I would be 21 on Saturday. To which she looked me up and down, then in the eye with disbelief and came out with “You’re 21?!” An excellent start. Later that day, I was in Sainsbury’s with a friend just looking at the Malibu, trying to decide which size bottle to buy (the cute baby ones or the mammoth ones – it was more a question of what instinct to follow: the girly, maternal one or our instinct as rum-obsessed alcoholics) when a shelf-stacker came up to us asking our age. We said 20 (truthfully!) but with a certain hint of scorn in his voice, he repeated “Twenty?” and asked to see our I.D. For being in the alcohol aisle! However, despite feeling a little indignant at his attitude, mission Peter-Pan was going very well. Furthermore, in my birthday card from my brother, he wrote something along the lines of: “And even though the digits should probably be reversed to more accurately reflect your age, happy 21^st birthday.” Lastly, turning 21 is when you’re supposed to symbolically receive the keys to the door. The keys to my Spanish flat have stopped working. And only when I use them – when my flatmates try, they work perfectly. Either I actually am a complete retard, as many people have suspected for years, or someone out there really is trying to tell me something. 

I also took advantage of being home by getting a haircut. I’ve been too scared to get one here in case I get a word wrong and they cut it all off or something equally horrifying. However, as it turns out I may as well have braved it in Spain, as the language barrier also seemed to exist between me and my English-speaking hairdresser – having said I wanted a “trim”, she somehow interpreted this as “Please take five inches off my lovely long hair that I’ve been growing for three years.” ¡Joder! Once I had returned to Spain, any relief at being a safe number of miles from my hairdresser and her ruinous scissors quickly dematerialized as I experienced my first embarrassing moment since being back (within about half an hour of landing). I couldn’t find the slot in which to put my train ticket to make the gates open so had to stand there like an idiot waiting for someone else to come along to see how they got through. Not only did that someone turn out to be an 80-year old couple, it also turned out that the gates were automatic and to make them open, all you had to do was walk up to them. Duh. I think all the drinking must have killed off the majority of my brain cells. It doesn’t help that I already know that this was just one embarrassing incident of many more to come in the next two months. However, with the recent glorious sun racking up 30°C and cloudless blue skies, I find it very difficult to care!