It has been rainy in Alicante for two days. Gray and wet and cold, pretty icky. Yesterday I was going to go to the "Gran Paella" meal with Velia but they had to cancel it because it was supposed to be in the parking lot and it was pouring rain. Velia and I ate on campus and talked... I do like her. Going to do something with her this weekend, a movie or maybe go to this lecture and meal about violence against women-- this month there is a big focus on that with lots of discussions and lectures, the 25th is the national day against domestic violence. So I want to go and check out the feminist scene in Alicante. Tomorrow I am hopping on the trainette with Amy and Ellie to go somewhere, Benidorm or Denia or something, for the day. I hope the rain stops by then. I have been getting some interesting information from home lately, like the statement that "Jesse really does capture the essence of Jesus," or that his father "can´t imagine a better part for him." I guess I knew that he was the lead and that the show was Godspell, but I suddenly realized that he is playing Jesus Christ and apparently doing a great job. No more Barnaby Tucker for that boy, I guess. In other news, Julia Weinberg is now standing at the record Weinberg family female height of 5 feet 4 and a half inches. I am 5´3" and a quarter, when I left for Spain I had about half a centimeter on that girl, and I knew that when I returned she would be taller. But I thought that she would be a little bit taller, like we´d have to stand back to back and it would be evident but we´d be close... Apparently not. Apparently there will be no contest. This is a very, very, very weird thing to think about. It reminds me of this conversation I had yesterday over tea with a woman I met at the University. She is from the study abroad staff at the University of Iowa and so she is spending a week checking out some of the programs that they send their students to in Spain. So I was telling her about the program and about my experience. We talked for a little while about study abroad and relationships, and people who leave their loves at home or who bring them along on teh programs, and how sometimes it would have been better for everyone if they each had gone on different programs or how different people think about it and about their goals for study abroad... They are trying to put together some kind of discussion or brochure or soemthing to address the issue, because it is one that a lot of people deal with, without making ultimatums or getting too involved in people´s personal lives. Interesting. Anyway, after we talked about that, she asked if I had thought a lot about going home. I told her that I had been recently, and she said, "You are going to be surprised when you go home." Why, the weather? The culture? She said that people always think that when they go home everything will be familiar and the same and comfortable, but in fact, even if we think we haven´t changed or been affected by studying abroad, we have. And when we get home there will be nobody who can relate to that, nobody else who knows what it was like in Spain or who wants to hear any more of your stories that, to them, have no meaning. I hadn´t thought about that, and I definately have been thinking about home as a familiar good place that I want to be. But if I am different, it´s not going to be the same... And it will be nice to have familiar things like foods or warm showers or music, but suddenly cutting off this part of my life really is going to be very strange.... It´s going to feel much more final than I had realized. Because, for what it´s worth, this is my life now. Leaving home was like going on vacation, because I knew I´d be back after a time. Leaving here will be confining this entire world of big places and people and bus routes and phone numbers and tastes and plans and this life that progresses with motion and fluidity to a tiny storage place of memory that all of you reading this can´t imagine, don´t know. Cut off, back to the past, which will be different as well, with giant sisters and new roofs. Y ya esta. That´s it. No more. Let´s go to Mayfair. I won´t see that man I see right now out of the window, in the tall yellow boots and green uniform, bucket and net thing in hand, going off to clean the fountains at school. No more 2 dollar coins. I feel very weird. I didn´t realize this knowledge that I have been acquiring. I am still anxious to come home, I still have things I like or don´t like about Alicante, but... it will be sad to try and explain, because you can´t explain a life to somebody. Though I attempt to do so on this silly weblog every day! :)

"Aim drimin af a wait crismas, yes laik de wans ai yus tu nou...." Such is the Spanish pronunciation guide to the new piece of music we got in choir last night. I think it is kind of ridiculous that we keep getting new music, that is invariably too difficult for the choir, when we cannot yet sing any of the music we already have. And so far everything we have worked on has been in English, although as of yet we still have not tried singing with words. It is also almost entirely music that I know very well and have sung before. Silvia wasn´t at choir last night and I was feeling sick and exhausted, and that song hit home a little too much so I went home and went to bed. The sun is shining, the grass is green, the orange and palm trees sway. There´s never been such a day, aqui en Alicante. And I am longing to be up north... The truth is I am dreaming of a White Christmas, just like the ones I used to know. With every email and blog entry I write, I am thinking more and more about coming home lately, and that song plus thinking about Ben all day because of our anniversary was a little too sentimental after a long day of classes. Plus it just wasn´t the same, singing only the solfegg with all these tone deaf Spanish people. On Thanksgiving, I am going to call home to hear everybody sing Johnny Appleseed. I´ll be home for Christmas...

Remind me never again to have all of my classes on the same day. It is a draaaaaaaaag. Classes are still good but it is impossible to be focused and pay attention for this many hours of the day. Here is what I don´t understand. If it is 68 degrees Farenheight right now and the low for tonight is 58, why am I so cold. Why do we have problems starting the car in the morning, when the transmission bucks us all the way to school/work. I am seriously worried that my sense of temperature has just been totally screwed up. After working outside painting all summer, spending all day every day in the hot sun sweating bullets (is that phrase right? can´t speak english now.) and feeling chilly inside my air conditioned house, and now living on the coast of the Mediterranean, how am I ever going to make it in Milwaukee? Or walking around even our tiny campus of Macalester in St. Paul, MN? And how am I going to manage to jump into Lake Michigan on New Years morning? Maybe that will freak my system back into midwest temperature mode. Today is the three year anniversary of my first date with Benjamin Evan Chandler. It´s weird because we have more than an ocean between us and I don´t think we are even going to speak to each other today. But we both wrote the romantic and sappy and wonderful emails to each other, so I guess the sentiment is there. It´s amazing though, kind of overwhelming and making me feel too sentimental. I am looking forward to spending the week and a half that we´ll have together at home over Christmas and everything before Ben leaves to study in South Africa. Ah, counting the days, but they are flying by here, which is good. I´d enjoy our anniversary today much more if we could celebrate it by doing something silly together, like cooking dinner and going to a cozy coffee shop and walking around downtown watching them put up Christmas lights. Is this happening yet? They put up some giant white wire nativity scene figures above the doors at El Corte Inglés. We don´t have to wait for Thanksgiving. Not that the big department stores in the States ever did anyway.

I went to choir last night even though I wasn´t sure my voice was going to make it-- I have been kind of sick and my throat is really sore. Sucking on lots of vitamin C drops but sadly my ecchinacea supply got moldy in the ziplock bag and they don´t sell it here. I´m having other kinds of tea all the time though. Anyway, choir was fun and it was exciting to see Silvia again. I brought her some CDs to borrow and showed her some pictures of my life at home. We were in the middle of looking at the pictures after choir when the director came up to me and asked me if I had ever sung Bach´s Magnificat. I told him no, and then after too many moments of frustrated misunderstanding I realized that he was asking me if I wanted to sing it with a special smaller choir which was rehearsing at that moment in another building. There will be a little performance on December 13 right before I leave. I went-- we had to sing in this weight room place because nowhere else was available. There were a lot of other really great singers from the community and a few university students and other people from the regular choir. We basically read through the whole thing, aided by the electric music of luis´s laptop as usual. It was really fast and they had been practicing for a month. I did my best to follow along. It was good to be with some real musicians though instead of the remarkably tone deaf choir... I´m going to do it I think. They practice on monday nights after the other choir rehearsal, so I have to get a ride home because it´s over after the busses stop running. I just have to practice on my own because I have a lot of catching up to do. But I am honored that he asked me and it is going to be fun to sing. I´ll just have to deal with the normal end-of-the-semester stress in December and some hungry monday nights; didn´t eat last night until 11:45.

Got my registration forms for next semester in the mail today. Weird. I had a great weekend. Friday night I went to see Gato Negro Gato Blanco with Velia and her friends, who turned out to be fun theater people. They were kind of hard to keep up with but I enjoyed their company. The movie was great, hilarious, and I managed to handle the subtitles in Spanish pretty well. Afterwards we went to a couple of cafés, including one where white wine was the specialty and they served it to you in tiny little white bowls. Met up with some people in the barrio for a while and walked home with Michelle and Roberto. Saturday the choir had the dumb little song thing-- we sang the school song at some ceremony and afterwards hung out in the lobby eating tapas and talking. I was with the group who was last to leave (hooray for familiarity) and went home with Silvia for paella. Her other roommates in her apartment were gone for the weekend and so it was just the two of us. She showed me how to make paella and we talked about a million things, cultural differences and september 11 and music. The paella was great and afterwards we had coffee and she got out her guitar and played some Tracy Chapman and some songs she wrote. She is really awesome... She said that there are some people in life who she will encounter for the first time and think, "We should get to know each other, we will be friends." and she thought that when she first saw me. I thought the same and I´m really happy that we´re getting to know each other! I stayed at her house all day, her friend JuanRa came over with truffles and another friend as well... good times. I left her house and went to meet Ellie and Amy at the Panoramis to see a movie-- Sweet Home Alabama. It was dubbed over in Spanish and I think it lost a lot without the good down-home southern accents and stuff, but it was pretty easy to follow and when the movie was over and we came out into the mall and got popcorn and cookies (there were cookies at the sub shop!!!) I felt totally seperate from Spanish culture and much more like I was immersed in American culture. Which is kind of funny considering we had just watched a whole movie that was in español. And that we could buy beer with our meal at the little Pan & Co. fast food sub shop in the mall. Sunday was another day spent with españoles; Maria, the teacher from the colégio, picked me up with her husband and we drove to the golf course because they go there every sunday morning (noon is sunday morning) for a walk. It is the only place in Alicante where there is grass and trees and little ponds and ducks and everything... Really beautiful. They are building a new subdivision kind of area right around the golf course and Maria and her husband just bought a plot of land there where they are going to build a new house. The houses in the area were really gorgeous... A great neighborhood. They invited me over to their house for comida (big mid-day meal) which on Sundays is prepared by their two daughters. They are 17 and 14 and seemed like really nice girls. The whole family is great, the apartment is great. I had a really good time. Food was fairly simple but good. Maria explained to me ahead of time that in her family they do kind of the opposite of the rest of Spain-- on Sunday, they want to take it easy! So they don´t go to the trouble of preparing a huge fancy meal, and have a normal meal instead. It was rice with garlic, fried egg and tomato, a typical spanish salad with everything from apples to corn to white asparagus to garlic cloves to carrots, and homemade ice cream for dessert, how yummy! After we ate Maria and I talked for a long time, told each other bad words and phrases and colloquialisms in our languages. Looked at lots of pictures, one of her daughters played the piano for us (a piano!!! electric, but still!!!), and just took it easy. It was great, very homey and fun. It really is true that when I hang out with Spanish people I seem to have a better time than with the Americans. Maybe I´ve just met cooler Spaniards than Americans, or maybe I just like hanging out in houses more than in bars. Anyway, the weekend was great, and I think my speaking abilities are really going to solidify. They are pretty good now, so I have been told. And I´m really proud that I spoke so much Spanish this weekend. Awwwiiiiiiiiiiigght. I cannot express my jealousy of everyone who went to see Godspell and You´re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. I heard they were fantastic... thought about them all the time. I can´t wait for the videos. I can´t wait to give big hugs to the stars.