Another year, another chapter.

Well, I'm staring at a rough draft right now, but I suppose the final version will not be done until next year. Actually, there are a few of them that look like that now, so it's going better than some people may have expected, though as always not as well as I had hoped. That's all I have to say about the dissertation for now, otherwise I'll probably get distracted again...

Here we are at the end of December, and it is beginning to look like I've posted too many times in the past few weeks. Fortunately, I haven't run out of nothings to talk about! Obviously, the Christmas holiday is one of the many subjects of this post, but there will also be a bit in here about my guitar, and maybe something about how we won't be celebrating the New Year like everyone else we know.

First off, the most exciting thing to have happened in the last two days is that I finally got my guitar. Yes, that's right, my guitar is finally here, in my very own home, sitting quietly (for now) in its sad little cold room. It's not allowed into the "hot" part of the house just yet, because I'm convinced it will explode the instant warm air touches its fragile wood frame. See, I've even given it our guest bed, at least until we have company. Some of you will remember that the guitar was supposed to be here a few weeks ago, but such are the cruelties which I daily face that I was forced to send the original back to the manufacturer due to numerous miniscule imperfections in the finish around the guitar's shoulder. That was a sad day for me; I had been able to try out the 7c and the 5c after many weeks of patient waiting, and I had even decided that I much prefer the 7c to its less numerically impressive sibling (mostly because the shop clearly took a lot more time putting together the 7 than the 5--I can't guarantee that they sound substantially different, but I do believe that the action and scale on the 7 are marginally superior), only to discover the flaws that would force me to reject the chosen guitar and wait another uncertain period for the arrival of a more perfect instrument. I was very happy yesterday to determine that the replacement is far better than the original, and I can now finally get on with my life. Hopefully that will end the guitar saga.

Alicia and I were able to take some days away from home to visit another home, Portugal, with our friends Mariana and Alex. We ate food most of the time, but we also drank coffee, watched movies, explored certain parts of Lisbon, and hung out with some friends. All in all, we had an awesome time, but I think all four of us were left with the feeling that it would have been nice to spend at least some time with family during the Christmas holidays. After all, we graduate students spend little enough time with the family as it is, and moving overseas for an extended period like this certainly doesn't make that situation any better. On the other hand, I don't think I could have bought a Spanish guitar in the U.S. for even twice what I paid here, and then of course the coffee in Portugal is reason enough to justify a few months in Iberia. Oh, and the dissertation, that's a good reason too, the main reason, even...that's right.

As for the New Year's festivities, it doesn't look like we're going to have much of a celebration on that front. Maybe there will be some grape eating, though frankly I don't see the fascination of that particular tradition, but that's about it. Our friends (at least half of whom are named Paco these days, for real!) have invited us to the bar "Claca" or "Claka" for a celebration, but the tickets they had showed a price tag of 55 euros/person, which is about what I'd pay to see U2 here, but definitely more than I can justify for the right to sit in a very smoky bar and watch people get drunk. Thus, it appears quite likely that we'll wander the streets tomorrow evening and see how rowdy things get in a laid back provincial town before retiring to our home, where we'll probably watch a movie and get ready for a day of work on the 1st. Anyone jealous yet?

There you have it, my last blogging fit of 2008. Maybe I'll resolve to write more interesting things in 2009, but I might also resolve to only write when interesting things happen! Happy 2009 a day or two in advance!!!

A lot like Christmas?

You know that song, where the person sings "it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas"? That's not true here in Mérida. It's beginning to look a lot like it might rain some of the time, or randomly turn sunny at other times, but neither of these seems a clear sign of an impending Christmas. On the plus side, it has finally warmed up after our "cold" snap - we had almost a week of highs only in the 50s, which is just brutally cold as far as I'm concerned (if we ever get an electrical bill, I'm sure the cooler temps will look a lot worse!).

Since I last posted, only a few noteworthy things have happened. The first was my parents' visit for the Thanksgiving weekend. They brought a whole feast of traditional festive foods, so we were all stuffed for a few days. They also brought a car, which allowed us to visit a couple of the nearby points of interest, including the famous city of Trujillo and the less famous city of Zafra.

Okay, so neither of those is really famous, but the first one boasts its mighty status as the hometown of one Francisco Pizarro. Aside from that, it's an interesting little medieval town with a huge central plaza where parking is only permitted during the lunch hour.

Zafra, for its part, is a medieval walled city stuck in the middle of a modern city. It boasts a medium-sized plaza and a smaller one, but since everything was closed the Sunday we visited, I couldn't take advantage of the "two pairs of Kelmes for 36 euros" deal. I guess that gives us a good reason to go back someday!

So that all happened last weekend: fast-forward to this weekend (the week flew by with writing and writing and more writing, but the details of that activity are by no means worth discussing). This weekend, a couple of friends who are living in Madrid came out to visit us in the quaint countryside, which gave us a rare opportunity to visit a lot of the archaeological sites that I haven't been able to visit and photograph properly since we got here. I am hoping that at least some of the pictures that I took will turn out to be useful, but more importantly, we managed to drag our visitors to nearly every monument in the city in just two days. This is promising news for our Salamantican friends, whose visit later this month will prove a VERY welcome break from my upcoming days of toil and tedium.

See, here in Mérida, and maybe in Spain more generally, they have this thing called a fiesta. Back in the new country, we think of a fiesta as a chance to get together with some of our friends and celebrate. But note that we think of it as a punctual event, which has a finite slot of time (or at least a beginning, with perhaps a more indefinite end in the not-too-distant future) in our busy schedules. Thus, a Friday fiesta will only on the rarest of occasions bleed over into a Sunday afternoon event. By contrast, life in Spain seems to be a single, never-ending fiesta. Sure, people do occasionally go to work in the morning, which interrupts the party for a while, but breakfast comes soon enough, and lasts long enough, to remind them what life's really all about. Just as the average person is getting settled back into the tasks of "work" after desayuno, the clock tower strikes 2 or 2:30 or 3, and off they all scoot to their homes. The lunch section of the fiesta is a pretty serious one (not that desayuno isn't a biologically-mandated necessity, it's just not as intense as lunch), lasting between 2 and 3 hours and including the consumption of large quantities of everything, occasionally followed by a time of rest and relaxtion often referred to as a "siesta" (which I suspect may in fact be a simple mispronunciation of "fiesta"). The lunch hours are often interrupted later in the afternoon by a return to work, but the afternoon work hours are only long enough, as a rule, to inspire a hunger and thirst that can only be quenched on the way home by a visit to a tapas joint. Once the reveler has again staved off immanent starvation, he or she heads for home, where, the hour being advanced beyond 9 pm, dinner is just beginning to materialize. Since it's still just a little too early to dine, perhaps the entire family gathers to roam the streets with the countless other party-goers of the city, window-shopping down the walking streets and spitting their sunflower shells (or tossing their chestnut shells, now that it's the season!) all over the ground. The luckier partiers will arrive in the Plaza de España at just the right time to score an open table at one of the four corner cafes, and will thus be able to kill another hour in anticipation of dinner - over drinks and salty snacks.

So that's life on an average day. But now imagine that you don't have to work at all on Saturday, because it's an official, calendar fiesta. Since that fiesta happens to fall on a Saturday, you naturally can't be expected to have to undergo the pain and suffering of a normal "work day" on Monday, can you? Of course not. Then, imagine that Wednesday is the official fiesta of your town's patron saint, say Santa Eulalia, for example. Why in the world would anyone show up for work on Tuesday, since they've already had Monday off? They wouldn't. So what you're looking at here is a five-day weekend. Not bad, right? That's what I thought, anyway. But as it turns out, I was wrong. You see, the standard work week is really just a series of interruptions that are imposed on the fiesta that comprises real life. So a five-day weekend is really just a return to what should be, whereas the normal two-day weekend is more reasonably a set of concessions designed to prevent the rest of the world discovering how life really ought to be lived.

Clearly this posting is now too long, and I am now distracted by many trains running in various directions. Time to end it.