There's 149 of them, all right here. That collection may well change as I edit them further and take photos taken by other students, but those are the ones that came from my very own camera. Hope you all enjoy.
Very much in one piece, and I completely beat jetlag since I got home right around midnight. I'm crazy busy with various little chores, but here are some things that I've been thinking are cool in the last few hours:-There's going to be a sequel to Sin, the baddest-ass FPS ever made, and it's going to be released in episodes on Steam, using the Source engine. I'm very happy.
-BMW's full maintenance program means for free, they come bring me a loan car while they take my car and do all the one-year maintenance stuff. Love it. Sadly, what's not cool at all is the horrendous London attacks that went down yesterday. My original travel plans would have had me there yesterday. I think it's just as tragic as 9/11 but even more disconcerting that world-class terrorism is getting more and more discreet. I never really believed the whole line that "9/11 changed the way the whole world has to do things," but after Madrid and now London I think it really is starting to say something. In a certain sense, I kind of wish I had been there, to be a sort of ambassador of American consolation. It certainly would have beat coming home to find Sandra Day O'Connor giving Bush a judicial nomination, finding that G8 accomplished about as much as the trailer park next to my neighborhood does on a Sunday, and finding that we here still love our bold Republican leadership. My mom and I have gotten serious about it: if the Republicans are re-elected, she's going to Canada and I'll go overseas. Screw this place, Europe is the fitting place for a fella like myself.
-BMW's full maintenance program means for free, they come bring me a loan car while they take my car and do all the one-year maintenance stuff. Love it. Sadly, what's not cool at all is the horrendous London attacks that went down yesterday. My original travel plans would have had me there yesterday. I think it's just as tragic as 9/11 but even more disconcerting that world-class terrorism is getting more and more discreet. I never really believed the whole line that "9/11 changed the way the whole world has to do things," but after Madrid and now London I think it really is starting to say something. In a certain sense, I kind of wish I had been there, to be a sort of ambassador of American consolation. It certainly would have beat coming home to find Sandra Day O'Connor giving Bush a judicial nomination, finding that G8 accomplished about as much as the trailer park next to my neighborhood does on a Sunday, and finding that we here still love our bold Republican leadership. My mom and I have gotten serious about it: if the Republicans are re-elected, she's going to Canada and I'll go overseas. Screw this place, Europe is the fitting place for a fella like myself.
spinning: John Mayer - ClarityIt finally clicked for me last night. Up until this point, I had been thinking about what to tell the friends and family about having just a decent time in Europe - not the time of my life, not an amazing experience, not having a trip worth some $5,000 of my own money. But last night, the real moral of the story caught up with me.It was in the nightclub with Maria Jose and Mei Lan. All the pieces were fitting just right that night - it was effortless to dance with two women and not look or feel stupid, effortless to move through a club where the guys don't obsess about how tough they think they are or how rich they dress, effortless to make my two new friends laugh. A night like that never happens so easily for me in the States. And when I realized how easy it was for me to fit in here, that's when the trip suddenly became worth the five grand, worth the airsickness, worth the month away from my technological creature comforts. It's always been virtually effortless when it all came down to it. Sure, the language barrier and shyness probably kept me away from a few valuable experiences, but those things are temporal and (relatively) easily conquered - definitely more easily than a stomach flu. And as of last night, I had conquered them - there I was, singing along to Coti with a club full of people I'll definitely never see again. There I was, building relationships with people I've been separated from by half a globe all my life. The moral of the story is that I had taken everything for granted - the ease of making people laugh, the cool car racing on TV, people who are well-preserved because they take good care of themselves - all things that I'll end up telling people about for years. What I had taken for granted was how easily I could fit in if I had lived here permanently. It's like some of the best things in my life, like gaming, driving and writing, they all just came to me naturally when I started. It all goes back to the numbness I felt in the weeks leading up to the trip. And now that I'm over the hill, now that I get it, I still feel numb, but in a different sense. I just saw a 50-year-old dude sunbathing in a thong - and I really wasn't surprised.
It's been a fantastic last day. I came home from the UT celebration dinner before 3am - as usualy, the others bored me - and woke up at 1pm today. Off to a good start.The weather, however, was up to no good. It was another November kind of day, so I wrote a jacket as I went to buy candy for mom and do one last email session instead of spending the day at the beach like the 15 old tourists who were out there. On the way home, I decided to go exploring through the Matalenas park near my apartment. I climbed through a few rocks and ended up right on the coast, with the ocean splashing up on my legs. It was the only serene, meditative kind of experience I'd had here.Returned home to my final dinner, Spanish tortilla and flan for dessert. Between that and my feeling of fluency today (random conversations are now effortless), I had a sense of accomplishment, like in 5 weeks I successfully integrated myself with the people of Santander. Tomorrow I fly home a month older, ages wiser, and bilingual. It'll be a great day to be me.
...so why the hell would I be in a cybercafe? The weather's crappy. It's very much like November in Texas: gray, drizzly at times, with a cold-ish breeze. So I could be wandering around taking pictures of the city and filling up my CF card, or chillin on the beach one last time, but it appears that won't be happening, and instead I went to a candy store and got some nice chocolate for Mom and some cookies for myself, and then I came here to do my 'last email check from Europe' one more time. But this time, it's for real: I get home in an hour or two, pack my bags, and then I get up at 6am tomorrow to fly home. I'll probably just crash out when I get home, but starting Friday it'll be a crazy schedule of hanging with A-town kids (plus Chloe, assuming she can get off work and come up to chill), telling stories to friends and family, uploading pictures, and..My entire trip diary will be going online.Hopefully I can get all that done before my crazy schedule of US travel begins in the middle of next week, when I'll be hitting Austin, Harlingen, and Taos. Good times ahead, and although I've fallen in love with what it means to live in Europe, I'm really excited to come home and see everyone. See you guys this weekend!