People of Cadiz

Met some cool people tonight. I´ll elaborate later. Talia, Talia´s mom, Jocelyn, David, the two Italian guys, the two Finnish guys, Kieran the New Zealander, Scott, Rob the Canadian surfer....I think that´s all for now.

I guess I´ll elaborate now. I have three hours before my six AM train leaves for Jerez, from where I´ll board a bus to Jerez de la Frontera (an airport), and thus to London for one day of packing, then from London to Los Angeles, LA to San Francisco, and SF to Klamath Falls. Quite a stint of traveling I am about to embark on. Anyway, I thought it might be a little more worthwhile to stay up for a couple hours and head to the train station rather than fall asleep and rely on my feeble watch alarm to wake me up.

Cadiz has been really cool. Today I slept until around eleven. It was the complete opposite of my first night here. My room was empty, and the place quieted down at two in the morning. I got a great night of sleep. I asked some of the workers for some suggestions for activities today, and the owner of the hostel told me about a tower in the center of the old part of town which is worth a visit. I went. It has a veranda which offers a view of Cadiz in all directions, and it is beautiful. The main attraction was something called the Camara Obscura. Using a mirror and a slit in the roof, they created a projection of the view onto a curved viewing surface in a dark room just below the veranda. It was really cool. You could see people doing their laundry on rooftops, and the focus varied depending on slight adjustments of the viewing surface´s height. I also met a couple there from Oregon and talked to them for a while.

After the tower, I walked to the waterfront and strolled along the water on the outskirts of town. It was cloudy. I bought a pizza and enjoyed it in a small park near Ellie´s school. I wandered some more and eventually returned to the hostel to read a bit before Ellie came to pick me up to go hang out with her and her friends while they worked on a project. She was worried I was bored while she worked on her project, but it´s nice when traveling just to be with friends and relax, not necessarily running from landmark to landmark. So it was nice. Especially because Talia offered me some free food from her host mother, who doted on me like one of her own. I had some pasta-garbanzo bean-soup and some bread, and some amazing melon, and some crackers and cheese. It was awesome, even beyond the level of awesomeness which free food automatically receives.

Ellie´s friend Jocelyn offered to take me out tonight, so we met up and went to a couple different bars. I met David the surfer, who was a cool surfer from Cadiz and spoke just a little English. It was a good opportunity to practice my Spanish, which is still pretty abysmal. Jocelyn speaks fluent Spanish and French (and English), of which I am very jealous. A couple of Italian friends of hers came to meet her later that night also. It was an interesting encounter. One spoke Italian and Spanish, the other Italian and French, so Jocelyn could speak to one at a time, and then there was me, who has almost mastered English and still largely remains ignorant of the magnitude of my ignorance. It was fun though, if difficult.

Tonight (or this morning) at the hostel I met some cool people too. I talked to Kieren (pretty sure I butchered his name), a New Zealander hanging out in Cadiz for awhile, and Scott, an Australian street performer (marionette puppets) also hanging out. They both work at this hostel. I´m pretty jealous of these perpetual travelers. There were also a couple of Finnish people, who taught Scott how to say ´I am a dirty mermaid´ in Finnish. Wholesome world travel, no doubt.

And now I just said goodnight to Rob, the very cool night watchman of sorts around here. He gave me his beer to sip on as I wait the long two hours until my train leaves. I don´t know what to do. Youtube maybe. Ellie if you ever read this, I´m so glad you showed me around town and shared your cool friends with me. I had a great time in Cadiz.