once i was the king of spain...now i eat humble pie

ah, moxy fruvous.

say what you will about the exotic atmosphere of barcelona, but madrid is hawt. maybe that´s just because i´m coming from rainy london, but it´s only spring here in the capital city of madrid and already i´ve discovered the importance of an afternoon siesta. and the unbelievable beauty of tapas. the tradition here of providing free platefuls of snacks with your booze sure makes canadian bars seem sleazy and cheap. why don´t we do this in our country? instead of sitting down to fancy restaurants yesterday, olaya and i basically cruised for spanish snacks with our canas. we did so much tapas yesterday, all the spanish i´ve picked up so far is alcohol-related. as a result, my stomache´s been feeling pretty weird lately. i´m not sure what aspect of the food it is here (maybe its very rich?) but i haven´t quite adjusted to it yet.

interesting fact: the entire population of spain appears to be conceived in national parks. i only come to this conclusion because in all the parks that Olaya and i visited (madrid has a LOT of greenspace for a big city), there were a lot of couples making out under every tree. maybe its the cute spaniards. maybe it´s madrid´s beautiful scenery. maybe it´s the spring air. maybe it´s the fact that Canada is 95% winter so we can´t get it on outside most of the time even if we wanted to. it was rather...startling, to say the least. not that i´m opposed in anyway to spring time spanish baby-making.

olaya has been a great host, and i got to meet a lot of her friends over tapas. one of them, mumu, is a makeup artist for one of Spain´s biggest musicals, so it was cool to meet her. conversing with her friends was tricky though...all of them spoke Spanish, of course, but i didn´t, and some of them spoke french and some of them spoke english, so there were at least three languages going around the table last night, depending on who was speaking to whom. i wish i was a little more fluent in French - i´m sure my anglophone inadequacies will surface even more painfully when i go to paris.

hola!

as i type this, i can see outside of my window the former house of the old Spanish dictator Franco. Olaya´s house, in this quaint spanish town just outside of madrid, is so cool. at first she told me it was like a suburb, but it is really nothing like Kanata. her neighbourhood is built into the mountainside and the houses are scattered between the trees and lakes along the valley, as Franco´s house looks down sternly over everything. meanwhile, kanata boasts of...the scotiabank centre.

i totally do not get foreign keyboards. it took me forever to figure out how to do the "at" sign, and i´ve forgotten again.

i met olaya from the university of ottawa when she was staying in Canada on exchange. she is a totally cool young filmmaker and a student at one of the public universities here. we made a few films together while we were in ottawa. she´s also a musician, and we´ve written some music together, but i can´t seem to find the tracks we recorded last year. she speaks all sorts of languages, and i´m so glad to have her around, because my spanish is pretty atrocious. she´s been helping me pick up a few basic phrases (like how to swear!). i´ve been communicating with olaya´s mom mostly in French, because her mom used to study in Paris, but i´m still a little shy because my french is pretty rusty too, even if i am an ottawa girl. ah well. i´ll have a much harder time in poland, i know.

i saw somewhere that it is supposed to rain in madrid. it better damn well not. i feel like i am the rain goddess that bad weather follows around.

okay gotta split... olaya is playing tour guide today and showing me madrid, which may or may not involve tapas. woo! until then, i leave you with one of the goofy fun movies that olaya and i made together over a year ago: