"Botellon" --defined as a massive out door drinking party

Friday night: botellon
Saturday day: sleep
Saturday night: Spanish movie
Sunday: complain about homework and waste time by blogging.

Well this weekend was my first truly Spanish one. On Friday night I attended a 'Botellon' (derived from botella meaning bottle) at a large park near the monastery at which I was staying. Initially in the company of only a couple of the undergrads I live with, we met up with one more and her entire tourism class in the park. In a fun twist of I don't know what half of her class was Chinese! (The very same Chinese who share a Spanish language class with me).

Sidenote on Spanish schedule of a party night:
Dinner at 9-10
Shower and do make up for 2 hours
Leave to drink in park at midnight
Socialize in park for 3 hours
at 3 AM relocate to bar/club
At 5 consider going home
At 6 start doing so
at 7 sleep
at 2 in afternoon the following day have new friends pound on door/head to wake you up for dinner.

Back to the botellon:
One of the great things about hanging out with people studying tourism is that they are psyched to meet any American/English speaker. They also are very nice about complimenting my Spanish, I assume so that I am reminded to talk slowly in english:)

The botellon is essentially what I imagine a slightly tamer version of fraternity row in, say, the University of Arizona is like, lots of distinct groups of people in clusters drinking and chatting. I would try to do a compare contrast of the club as well, but what with my youthful inexperience/being under 21 I have never been in one in the States!

Saturday was far more mundane, which is certainly for the best. Jen and I have met a British girl named Millie from Manchester at the monastery and spent the day with her at the shopping mall, where I did my best gay best friend impression as long as I could but eventually had to escape from the clothes shopping. The shopping mall was creepily similar to one in the states, if it wasn't for language and tighter jeans I would not have known the difference!

That night we returned to the shopping center with the help of one of my friends from English class and watched 'El Secreto de tus Ojos' which is a remarkably disturbing Argentinean film about a police investigation of a murder/rape/law and order SVU at its worst. And yet it was a good movie, if I didn't catch all of the words the Argentinean accent was at least comforting!

And so here is Sunday, with half an hour till lunch and no desire to study the ever-present and ever-mundane difference between ser and estar. I would complain, but as my Spanish friends point out, there is a whole lot more hard stuff in English than in Spanish.

And as a closing thought, this was the last thing I expected to find in a small town in catholic Spain: a condom vending machine.