Back. For Good This Time.

Hello again!

It has been quite a while since I last was able to post, but this time I am writing directly from the comfort of my apartment. We were finally able to get internet at home a few weeks ago. We had some trouble getting the Telefonica guy to show up – he kept missing us – but now we have ADSL (the “A”, by the way, stands for “Asymmetrical”, because the download speed is faster than the upload speed). I can’t tell you how awesome it really is to be reconnected to the world. You don’t know how much you acutally NEED to do on the internet until you have only an hour every couple of weekdays and start making To-Do lists that don’t get finished in that brief window…

So, now that we are reconnected to the world, here are the times you should Skype me: all the time.

Well, more specifically, anytime on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (assuming I’m awake and not out of town), anytime until 5pm Spanish time on Mondays, and anytime after 3pm on Thursdays. I want to hear from everyone!

In general, things have been coming together quite nicely. I finally got paid on Thursday. It seems that is going to be a bit of a problem for a while… the Ministry of Education hasn’t sent the money to the school yet, so they reallocated some for me. But I have a bank account – although not a card, because they use these odd cartilla things and several tons of paper – and I’m told they can set up direct deposit pretty soon. Things are good with the NIE (my residency card), too: just today we all went into Jaén to get fingerprinted. We have to go back in about a month, and then we should have the card. That will be a huge relief.

On top of that, I’ve even sent in three graduate school applications. They’re not quite complete, but everything I can send them has been sent to them. It’s a huge weight off my back. A lot more writing and three applications more to go.

On the other hand, there are two things that haven’t gone well. Firstly, I haven’t found a church and I don’t think I’m likely to unless I convert to Catholicism, which, despite the very nice commercials they have on TV (yes, I’m serious), I don’t think I’ll be doing. I thought I had found one, but the first week I went I was an hour early since I didn’t know Daylight Savings Time had begun, and the second time it was just closed. Upon further reflection, I have come to believe that it’s nothing more than a closed up storefront, like so many of the shops in town. And going to one in Jaén or Granada (which is even farther away) is prohibitively costly in both time and money.

Secondly, my external hard drive died this week. It sounds like a disaster – and, yeah, it is – but it’s not as bad as it could have been. I had it on the table and tripped on the cord, pulling the damn thing off so it hit the ground pretty hard. And that was it. Something is loose inside and it only clicks when it is plugged in… *sigh* Thankfully, after the last time a hard drive died I learned my lesson and have been backing everything up every few months, so the only things that are lost for good – that I can think of – are about a month and a half of photos. Yes, there are low-ish-res watermarked versions of some of them online, but the RAW files are kaput. =( The real problem is that, well, I’m in Spain. The backups of everything are in storage in New Jersey. So… I’m kind of short on music. There’s some I have on my laptop and a little on my mp3 players, but it’s not the same.

So I’m looking at it as an opportunity. Or trying to. I ordered a smaller-sized, higher capacity, more portable hard drive from Amazon UK, which, believe it or not, had better prices once you translated to dollars than my local electronics stores or El Corte Inglés. It should be here in a week or so. Also, I’m going to take this opportunity to dig deeper into the stuff that I still have, the samplers I get from Paste and elsewhere, and what my friends (aka anyone reading this) want to give me, be it on a mix or something else.

What I will not be digging into is Spanish music, because, WOW… so bad. I recently finished re-reading John Hooper’s The New Spaniards
(much more on that in a later post), and this quote stuck out to me:

“It is in the field of pop and rock that Spain lags. During nearly two decades of association with the country, I doubt if I have heard more than a half-a-dozen numbers I would want to listen to again, and hundreds – no, thousands – I would pay good money not to.”

Because it’s true.

I have been developing a theory about Andalucian music, though. It goes like this: flamenco is the Spanish equivalent of country music.

Ok, I admit that sounds like sacrilege. I love flamenco. I do. I think it’s amazing and emotional, active, and passionate like nothing else. I love the improvisational aspect of it. But here in Andalucía it’s everywhere. People have it on their cell phone rings. Drivers can tune into flamenco radio. Sunday nights on Canal Sur (I think) they have a program called Flamenko. What I have been learning is that 1) it’s nothing special to Spaniards, 2) they love it in rural and southern areas, and 3) there is far more bad/poppy flamenco than there is good/artsy flamenco. It’s kind of crazy once you start getting into other people’s heads to realize just how different things are from what you thought they were.

In other news, I want to punt the neighbor’s dog off the roof. I think my roommates would agree with me. And I normally like dogs!

A few weeks ago, I went up to Madrid to visit my Uncle Peter, who I haven’t seen for several years. He’s a computer programmer who focuses on accessibility issues. He established a consortium to bid for a research grant from the European Commission and they won, so he was in town to meet with ONCE (Orginasación Nacional de Ciegos Españoles), who naturally have a pretty big stake in it. Anyway, we spent a day and half or so just hanging out, wandering around Madrid. We went to the Reina Sofia, mostly to see “Guernica”, which you’ll notice in the above picture.

No other major trips, although I am planning to head up to Utrecht to visit a few friends over New Year’s, and I might get to go to Sevilla for a bit at the beginning of December. We’ll see. Instead of travelling, I’ve been entertaining myself here in Martos. I have now been up La Peña twice (again, more on that later), baked a pumpkin pie, and had the opportunity to teach kids about Halloween (more on that coming, too). It’s been fun.

So that’s what’s been going on with me. Now that I’m back online, I’ve been planning out a couple of posts that I think you’ll enjoy. Other than the ones mentioned above, I’m planning on covering a couple local legends, our new favorite TV show, and little bit of Spanish politics. And as soon as they finish construction outside, I’ll give you a tour of my apartment.

Skype me!