Cadiz

Hello, my devotees. I am in southern Spain right now, visiting my friend Ellie for three days before heading back to the US. The day of travelling yesterday was pretty harrowing, but I am happy to be here and Ellie is an excellent tour guide, although she has a lot of schoolwork to do at the moment. I have a nice sunburn on my legs today because we spent three hours at the beach, so I have, yet again, learned my lesson about sunscreen.

I have been once more reunited with the crazy European keyboard, lacking easily accessible apostrophes and question marks. These symbols though, ñ¿, are around. I guess this keyboard specializes in Spanish, because those are the only weird ones I can find right now. And another thing! About Spanish. I thought I spoke Spanish! That was a very silly, irrational thought. Even so, I could have gotten by all right before I went to Italy. Today, while trying to converse with the native Spaniards, I realized I learned just enough Italian to ruin my peremptory Spanish. My instincts are stuck in ´va bene´ and ´grazie´ and ´dové il...´ It´s very frustrating.

The hostel I am staying in is in a great spot, in the center of town, but I do have some problems with it: the main problem being that the music didn´t stop playing until roughly 430 am last night, while I meekly tried to fall asleep at 130. Also, I have had the unique opportunity of discovering the intensely squeaky properties of the typical Spanish hostel bunk bed, properties especially aggravated under the certain stress of an alcoholically-impaired female boarding the top bunk at well nigh five in the morning. Needless to say, last night was a little rough. So now, I´m typing downstairs until this bleepity-bleep music stops playing. If only I weren´t eighty years old....

I figured out the eccentricities of this keyboard. If you hit the apostrophe key twice, like so, you get an apostrophe: ´. If you hit it once, followed by a key able to be apostrophicized, you get that letter, apostrophicized (and ya, that´s a word, and a cool one). See look! óṕáśẃéŕýúíóṕḱĺńḿćźçǵ. Cool, huh¿

That´s all for now.