Episode 9, 5/20/2009 – Just a walk in the park.

I’m a little behind on my blogging, and as expected, some things are beginning to run together in my head. Forgive me if some of this is not exactly chronological, but I promise I’ll be more up to date with it soon.

The day was pretty uneventful, but the night was interesting. Nick, David, Sarah, Rachael, Holli and I decided to go out and take a walk to central city, and we saw some cool things along the way that I thought I should share with you guys. First, the central city is like a gigantic spiderweb. If you look at it on a map, there is no set infrastructure plan. The streets are no wider than a mini-cooper and the tall building obscure one’s ability to find one’s way be sight alone. They all diverge in complex, sharp turns here and there with at least 3 changes to the street name in 100 feet or so. The best method of finding one’s way is just knowing in what direction the destination lies, and then meander towards it as best as possible. Needless to say, in this labyrinth of streets, there are all sorts of bizarre and interesting shops just waiting for study-abroad students to explore.

That wasn’t our goal for the night, however. We ended up wandering around, as we always do, and conversing. Nick, Rachael and myself were walking on a particularly weird and confusing street when a Spanish woman on roller blades made eye contact with us and started screaming and gesturing “Cuidado! Cuidado!” and gesturing us to the other side of the street. Quite confused, we hurried out of the way. A half-second later a train of roller-bladers come streaming down the street, all linking by hands-on-shoulders and shouting something that sounded like “ole!” It was quite funny, looking back. And that, is Spain in a nutshell.

As I recall in my mind, we ended up walking to el centro and getting ice cream and walking back. Again, the details are a little fuzzy, but that’ll be fixed once I get more regular with the blog posting.