Eugh. New record. I crawled into bed at 6 this morning. I had the best night though and I think it was absolutely worthwhile. There's a guy here in our program named Rico who is from Indiana. He's just an absolute riot, always upbeat and ready to go out and do something and also honest and straightforward. He's also gay, but not the sort of flamboyant and melodramatically over-the-top all the time. All in all just a cool guy to have around and I'm glad to have met him. Anyways, he had expressed some frustration earlier in the week that our group is always going out to bars and dance clubs but when he wants to go to a gay club everybody just shuts him down. Eddie and I expressed a willingness to go and he thought we were just saying it to make him feel better but we convinced him that no, we really were perfectly fine going out with him and having a good time regardless. Eddie wasn't feeling too well last night so he called it quits early but I was still more than happy to go with Rico. Several of the girls in our group bailed so it ended up being Rico, Ellie (from Boston) and I. 10E at the door got us in and two free drinks, which comparatively is a very good deal. Many places we have been are 10E at the door and then you're not getting anything from the bar for less than 5-7E. I don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about how "comfortable" I am with my sexuality or any of that nonsense and I wasn't worried about being in a club full of gay guys at all. Eddie has expressed some apprehension about it, especially given that he has gotten hit on by guys at bars and clubs. My attitude going in was the right one I think. I'm not exactly sure how it works (though I could speculate) but people figured out pretty quickly I was straight. This caused a fair amount of disappointment among the male population there, especially the friendly gentleman who decided to take the liberty of running his hand up under my shirt all casual like. Surprisingly, I did not react poorly to any of the attention. I was friendly and smiled a lot, and herein lies one of the reasons it was such a worthwhile evening: I had several conversations with guys and girls, people I had never met before, in Spanish. When our group goes out we just use English for comfort's sake, and several of the bars we frequent are international hangouts so the opportunity to interact with Spaniards has been lamentably limited. Even better, Rico only has a very basic handle on Spanish so I ended up being de facto translator for him with several of the people he met. Hilarity ensued because Rico was pretty lit up, I was sober, he was trying to hit on these guys, but it was coming from me in the best way I knew how to express it. He got a couple numbers, and when we were heading home afterwards he expressed so much gratitude for my willingness to go out with him and just have a good time. Oh and walking afterwards we bought churros from a street stand. Best churro I have ever tasted. 5 AM and ravenous will do that to you.
Now, a comment on something kind of amusing that is going on with Eddie and I at home. I'm not entirely sure but I think we have lost our AC privileges. I believe I have mentioned the near-obsessive attitude towards the use of electricity in this society and especially with leaving lights on in a vacant room or having the AC running during the day. Eddie and I both clearly remember him turning off the AC when we left for the beach early Friday morning. When we got home Reme chewed us out for leaving it on again. I'm not sure who is right. I'm not going to call her a liar or crazy or anything, but either way it could be a very tough week without AC. The temperatures are supposed to be back up and Eddie and I don't sleep very well during the week as it is. Along with this, I'm having trouble discerning the tones used to speak to us. Most of the time it's normal sort of Mom talk when she is advising us or we're just talking about everyday stuff. But when something happens that she needs to advise us about the tone isn't advising. It's closer to yelling at a stupidly impetuous child. The best example occurred when we got back from the beach. Eddie thought he lost his credit/debit card on the beach. When we sat down to dinner we were both completely wiped out from being out all day and understandably subdued. When Reme asked how the day went Eddie related how he had been worried about the card but found it when he got home. Instead of commenting on how good it was that it didn't end up lost, she launched into 5 minutes of ripping Eddie apart for being stupid enough to take his card on a day visit. She told him to just take cash for anything where we didn't absolutely need a card or our passports. Eddie, exhausted and beginning to get frustrated as this went on, was unable to explain that he could not just take cash because he had none in his account and was waiting for his mother to move money into his checking later in the week. So Eddie and I just sort of sat there and let her berate us. I am not exaggerating when I say it was 5+ minutes. She went on and on, and she did wrap up by saying that if we lose something like that, and she has seen it with other students, it is so difficult to fix and she doesn't want it to happen to us. I think it might be something like my experience with Nick's family, all Cuban. If you were to hang out with a large group of them you would think they were all yelling at each other all the time. In reality, they are just loud people and when you put a lot of them together the volume goes up necessarily. They love each other to death and even if they do argue it's never truly vicious or combative. I know Reme only has our best interests at heart and Eddie and I are infinitely grateful for this family's willingness to take us in for this time. We'll just have to get used to taking in what it said and not how it is said.
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