The Ultimate Consumer in Europe's oldest town

Today i made a truly remarkable discovery in this, the oldest town in Europe, with tiny streets, dilapidated buildings, and rustic charm: a gigantic uber-department store/movie theatre/discount retailer/grocery store rolled into one: el Corte Inglés. This place has everything: toys, electronics, clothes, furniture, 5 restaurants, a bookstore, a candy store, a magazine store, i mean everything. Then, attached to it is a gigantic retailer/grocery store (think a slightly higher class wal-mart) that's integrated with the other parts. Oh yeah - I forgot the movie theatre on the 2nd floor: with 10 screens, it shows about 80 movies a day. And it's all Americanized: I was giddy with excitement, feeling like I was in "ultimate consumer" paradise...

Although finding the store was a great accomplishment, the more remarkable thing about my experience at el corte ingles was that I actually didn't buy anything there. I went looking for three things: a charger for my cell phone, a program for my Palm that has all the maps of Europe on it, and a book that I need for my course teaching English. Sadly, I found none of them. I bought the charger on ebay, decided not to buy the maps, and (mom you can skip the rest of the sentence and move on to the next paragraph) am probably out of luck with the book, which was the only thing I really needed to start my course on Monday.

If anyone has ridden in a car with me, you know that I have not only a terrible sense of direction, but a penchant for not listening when directions are given to me, wanting to appear like I just needed a little steering in the right direction. In reality, I need someone to hold my hand through the process, probably draw me a map, and then give me a phone number to call when I get lost. So you can imagine what happens when I attempt to do this in a foreign language...

Spanish television strikes again: now i'm watching a reality-tv show where they just shot a lion with a tranquilizer and watched it vomit all over the cage. Sorry "Jackass"- I think this show's got you beat in the ridiculous quotient....

Tomorrow I wake up with the Cadistas (fútbol fans) to mill around outside the gates of the soccer game and eventually purchase a ticket to the game for €400, only to find out it's for next week's exhibition game against the minor league team. Next week, I'll find out that the ticket just gets me in the grounds, and doesn't even let me past the gates so I can actually see the game. But it'll be cool - I wore my Cádiz soccer jersey today and caught the approving eye of many elderly men around town, and that's gotta be worth something...

Day 2 in Cadiz

Although I slept most of the day, I still managed to get a few things done today: namely getting a cell phone. You can now call me at (+34) 686-002-678 and it's free for me... so, for example, if you have skypeOut, you can call me for about 2 cents per minute, and i won't pay anything either... sounds like a deal, huh? just wait 5 years when we'll all be talking for free... Yeah, so I just found out that that part isn't actually true: I exhausted my €7 balance in an hour's time. Not understanding what happened, I looked around on the website and found out that 2 cents per min is only for Spanish landlines; cell phones are €.22 per min. I guess we'll have to wait a while for cheaper communication on cell phones...

I was listening to my mp3 player as I was walking down the street after dinner. Specifically I was listening to the trailer music from the movie Troy, a typical Hans Zimmer knockoff type piece. I couldn't hear anything but the rousing score, and I just couldn't help but think that I was Achilles and everyone on the street was about to attack me, but I had ridiculous fighting skills and could take them all... then I couldn't help but think I was a little strange, and I changed the song...

The nudity epidemic continued today - between halves in the Liverpool soccer game (which you can watch for free, while the Cadiz home team games cost money to watch on TV; no wonder everyone here's a Real Madrid fan: you can actually watch their games...) the guy at the internet cafe switched it to rabbit ear TV and sure enough there's another topless woman. This is local tv, not even cable - I can't help but realize the US is so much more conservative than Europe....

I chat with every old man I can to find out whether it's possible to get tickets for the Cadiz-Real Madrid season opener on Sunday... I keep trying to translate the word 'scalper' with phrases like "one who sells tickets illegally on game day" but it doesn't seem to work out too well... An old man at my hotel who speaks in a raspy, thickly accented Castillano, said something about €500, and that's what I saw on the internet. I told him how you could go to a Yankees game - our equivalent of Real Madrid - for 30 bucks and he just about had a heart attack imagining seeing a soccer game for that cheap. In any case, I'm just going to show up at the stadium with lots of euros and hope I can get in...

Llego a Cadiz

As I was walking past the giant Cathedral after a pleasant paella dinner in Cadiz, I watched a little girl, no more than 5 years old, bend down to pick up a full bottle of lemon-flavored fruit juice, as almost any kid would do. If you remember SqueezIts, that's what it looked like - a clear plastic bottle of fruit juice that you could squeeze to get more juice out. As suddenly as she stopped to pick it up, however, her Spanish father snatched her by the hand, cursed at her in Spanish, and kicked the bottle away, which seemed slightly more flexible after the kick than it did at first.

Astonished by her father's abrupt and angry reaction, I examined the bottle more closely to see what the big deal was. It was then that I realized it wasn't a "El SqueezÍto" but a condom, filled with urine. I couldn't contain myself and started laughing out loud, albeit to the glare of her father, who probably assumed I left it there, waiting for that moment...

There's something about Europe that I'm sure many of you who've been are aware of, but I was not: nudity is apparently commonplace and accepted. I was walking past a woman's boutique when I noticed a "Invisible" push-up bra advertisement. Apparently, the manufacturer deemed it necessary to demonstrate just how invisible the bra was - and sure enough, it was invisible: I didn't see any bra at all, only a woman's exposed bust. Stunned, I continued on, only to find out that even ads that, unlike the bra ad, didn't have to show nudity to demonstrate their product (like a body lotion ad - the US agencies typically highlight legs rather than chests) had the model showing off her bare breasts. And it went on and on; I saw a topless girl at the beach, the tabloids have full frontals and aren't even in the sealed plastic wrappers that keep 14-year old eyes out. Naturally, I would assume that this exposure to nudity would make the adolescent males more mature and polite towards women, but remembering some of my friends' stories of Italian boys, I guess that's not the case...


Someone needs to tell me that I'm not a tourist - I'm actually living here. Because I'm tipping like one, and it's killing my wallet. Everytime someone does something nice for me, I have to tip somewhere between 30 and 50%. I tipped 3.12 on a 3.87 taxi ride today because the driver was speaking slowly and using words I could understand to tell me his love for the fútbol team here, and since I like the fútbol team as well, I gave him the nearly 50% tip. I gave my taxi driver that helped me find a hostal the change from a €10 bill. The taxi cost €4-something. It goes on and on, but in general, I'm just being appreciative when everyone's nice to me for butchering their language. I guess I should learn that they're just more patient and polite here...

Now it's time to get ready for my fantasy football (American style) draft - which starts in an hour and a half (3AM my time) because my jealous friends have tried to stop me from winning for the third time by scheduling it for a time when they knew I would be in a brand new city in Europe that most likely didn't have internet. After learning that I would get internet starting Sunday, they rescheduled the draft from the weekend following to tonight. But I have prevailed. I found a place that had internet and was open 24 hours (a luxury hotel), paid my €12 for the 24 hr access and €7 for the cab, and even found a current-converter in a store where a Chinese woman who spoke neither Spanish nor English somehow told me that they definitely did not have any current-converters for UK to Spanish current.

Tomorrow - when I wake up - I'll go to the beach (sorry Chicago - Cadiz has got you beat with the whole beach in the middle of the city thing) and maybe even a run...

Sevilla at night

After an extended delay at the London airport that consisted of 1) Iberia Airlines not telling us the gate until 20 minutes prior to departure, prompting a stampede of Brits and Spaniards to an inefficient and worthless bottleneck checkpoint; 2) Everyone in the aircraft (i´m serious) watching the safety demonstration while I read my newspaper; and 3) while taxiing on the runway, a loud screeching/clunking sound that i swear was the airplane wheels running over a large metal pipe, forcing us to stop the plane while the stewardesses ran around the airplane like decapitated chickens and did nothing to assuage our fears, we finally took off without much fanfare and left the dreary English countryside for the Andalucian sun.

Sevilla was exactly like I imagined Spain would be like: narrow, cobblestoned alley-streets with soft yellow lamps lighting the way for Vespas, walking tourists and the occassional French Connection/Bourne Identity car chase scene going past. I´ll have a picture tomorrow from right outside my hostel, but this computer won´t let me put anything up. I walked around at about 11 pm, and most of the restaurants had tons of people sitting outside in tables, drinking wine and eating tapas. Most of them, however, were tourists, from Spain or otherwise. I even ran into a girl I went to high school with, but I turned down her offer to come party on the river with a bunch of other exchange students because it seemed like a token invite and her description of where to go consisted of ¨someplace down by the river¨. I wasn´t too confident that my carrier pigeon sense of direction was capable of finding her, since I couldn´t remember her name either...

My room is the size of a standard broom closet, and yet somehow there´s a sink in it. I also managed to swing a hot shower with good water pressure down the hall, and despite a tube of shampoo puncturing itself and then after making a hole in the ziploc bag that was supposed to prevent this from happening, proceeded to leak all over my clothes...

Tomorrow I´ll look around the city for a current converter (despite my mom buying three for me, none of them work) and then head for Cadiz...

The Adventure Begins

I've arrived in London Heathrow airport for the first day of my journey. I have a 4 hour layover here before I get on Iberia flight 4143 to Sevilla. The plane ride was uneventful; I was just happy I wasn't sitting in the middle of 12 Jamaican tourists who hadn't showered for the duration of their 6-day vacation in New York...

I knew I was in England when we dropped out of the cloud cover and it was foggy and raining. That made me happy. We also flew over some part of London that I'm going to pretend was Wimbledon or something else famous, because it looked just what I thought London was supposed to look like.

One interesting thing about this airport is that all the employees are of Arab descent, instead of hispanic or black, as they are in most of the American airports...

more updates to come...