A M E R I C A

I havent posted in a while so there will be a flurry of posts this week. I wrote this last week but never got around to adding the pictures. But here it is, a bit late...

While I have very little attachment to my country of birth, I have recently been missing many of the people and the happenings of the good ol' United States. Joined in this longing for past times by Jessica, Chris, and many of the American frisbee players, we decided to host an "American Party" this weekend. While I realize that I only make posts about drinking extravaganzas, this will soon change with a post all about my job. But first, I give you "La Fiesta Americana", viewable in facebook.

The latter part of last week, Chris, Jessica and I slaved away to make the party happen as planned. We decked out our apartment with American pictures and American things and concocted ideas of stereotypical American foods that are also stereotypically delicious. This left us with an apartment ready and waiting to show Spain an American Party. The entryway was "Ellis Island" and had a sign in sheet for all foreigners to sign. The living room was decorated with a big "Welcome to America" banner (made by Jessica) and a bunch of pictures of American things - Barack Obama, Nascar, Landing on the moon. You get the point. An unfortunate twist of events led to the poor state of New Jersey being the bathroom. I would also like to note that the bathroom contained all of the beer in the bathtub - i.e. ok Jersey may smell but we at least hold down the party.


A big portion of the frisbee team attended so we had representatives from Mexico, Spain, Venezuela, Germany, and many others. Good times. We rocked beer pong, flip cup, a good list of american tunes, and a spanish game oddly similar to robo (I obviosuly dominated). All in all, a great success and a great time with new friends but also a great reminder of the good times had at home and of the people that we all miss.

On Sunday, Chris and I went and walked around this placed called "Lago" which, ironically, is a big lake on the outskirts of the city. It was really pretty and a great place to hang out.


A post about work to come later this week! Miss you guys! If you actually read my blog, send me an update or something!

The Beach in the Fall

Chris and I spent this weekend (friday to sunday night) in Punta Umbria, a beach town in the very southwest of Spain. We played in our second frisbee tournament with the Madrid team, Los Quijotes. It was pretty amazing. The weather was beautiful (21 C which is warm enough for no shirt and tanning the hams) and the company was even better. The tournament was the Spanish national championship for Open (men only ironically) and Women so our women's team was there too.

We drove down in a rental car driven by a German named Chris. German Chris is quite a character and a really jolly and fun individual. He does, however, drives like a bat out of hell. The upside to this was that we got there quickly. The downside was that I almost had to be asleep to prevent being extremely stressed out haha. Friday night was the birthday of one of our players, Juan, so we all helped him celebrate in great fashion - i.e. by playing a Venezuelan version of Thumper that involved drinking a nice helping of beer if you happened to lose. German Chris had been drinking for quite a while and was thus in even jollier spirits at this point in the night. When Britney Spears "Hit me baby one more time" came on, he just couldn't resist and he broke out in song. After these escapades, my brother says "Man is he wasted!". I quickly reply "No, he isnt that drunk at all...". As I finish the sentence, chris knocks a 40 off the table and the glass bottle shatters on the floor, making for great irony.

Throughout the tournament, we played 6 games, winning 5 of them. We played pretty well overall and ended up finishing in 3rd place. Our women's team finished in 2nd which was also pretty baller. One thing to note about the tournament was the selection of food given to us. For those of you uncultured swine, at American ultimate tournaments, the gold standard for food is bagels and peanut butter. Here in Spain, apparently, they put a Spanish twist to the tourney food. Rather than bagels, you get baguettes, and rather than peanut butter, you get assorted spanish meats and some cheese and tomatoes. I thought it was priceless.

Overall, a fantastic weekend away from the cold weather of Madrid and a great tournament. The results bode well for the Mixed (guys+girls playing together) tournament that is in 3 weeks.

H A L L O W E E N

So. We had originally planned to be ninja turtles for Halloween but this plan fell through the cracks when we realized that none of us wanted to go to a club wearing a cardboard jankity-ass shell on our backs (since we obviously arent going to spend money on a costume). This plan quickly degraded into apathy and as Halloween neared,we still didnt have costumes. Jessica and I decided to salvage the night by buying vampire teeth, dressing up in black clothes, and drinking orange colored drinks (Tang, Vodka, and Fanta). Good Stuff.

We headed out to a local bar right next to our apartment to listen to some live Funk music and wait for the much anticipated arrival of Namita and Joe. The two guests came around 1 am so we left the club and met them at the nearby Burger King - the logical predetermined meeting spot. After meeting up, we decided to head out for a bit to a nearby dance club called Fog. It was extremely packed and we danced to such all star jams as Sean Paul - Give me the light. Or maybe it was some other Sean Paul song but, lets be honest, nobody knows the difference. Surrounded by some crazy spanish Halloween costumes, we enjoyed ourselves until around 4 am and headed home.

The next day passed uneventfully. This was necessary, however, in order to allow for such an eventful night. We started with a good home cooked meal made by Joe and Namita, accompanied by beer and wine. We continued to drink and decided to make it interesting by taking shots through straws. We ended up having so much fun that we didnt leave the apartment until 2 AM. We started walking to a district called Huertas about 20 minutes south of our place. On the way we encountered a very angry man involved in a heated domestic dispute. In the middle of a blocked off construction-site-type-thing this guy was yelling at these two girls and chasing after them and kind of hitting them, though not really. Out of nowhere he picked up a large brick and started chasing one of the women down the street. Absolutely insane. After buying beers from shady street vendors (selling them out of backpacks), losing Joe and Jessica once, we found our way to the club and enjoyed ourselves until 4:30ish. After drinking quite a bit we were all dancing like absolute lunatics. It came to the point where some random guy told Joe to "tranquilo" aka "chill the f out". A pretty phenomenal night in summary.

The remainder of the weekend Joe and Namita attempted to sell the bikes they had bought in Barcelona and prepared to head off to Cairo. It was great to see some familiar faces and have a taste of the good old princeton life. Made me a bit nostalgic for the last four years but also excited for the next 5 (or 6)...

Work and Coworkers

Two weeks have gone by since I posted about that crazy guy who was dancing at that club (see video below). The previous two weekends have escalated in such a way that suggests to me that I may have become that guy this past Saturday. Unfortunately I will write about this past weekend in the next post.

So the story begins...
Last Saturday, Jessica and I made plans to go out with some of my coworkers. In my school there are a handful of younger teachers that are all good friends. These include Carlos (teaches 3rd grade with me), Manuel (teaches P.E. with me and other things) and Laura (teaches the 5 year olds with me). In my work schedule I have 15 classes split among these 3 people and 1 class with someone else. So I spend a lot of time with them.

Jess and I had dinner with some other friends at a delishious mexican restaurant which ended with a round of tequila shots which killed my stomach. In the picture is our friend Nicole, a girl from the states who is over here doing a masters in Spanish. She is one of the many people we have befriended through frisbee.

We decided to go out to a club called Chango. We met up at our apartment at midnight since the club was very close to our place. A bottle of rum later we left for the club. By this time it was 2:45ish. Needless to say, the night was a long one. Filled with techno music, techno music, and techno music. Both Jess and I had a great time with my coworkers and I'm really looking forward to going out with them again. We ended up staying out until 5:30 AM which is our new Spain record for latest night out. Good stuff.

The week passed relatively uneventfully. A huge cold front came in and brought a lot of rainy weather with it which was no fun. So lots of time inside. Being a teacher has been really rewarding/fun lately. I've been giving a lot of oral exams to the students to test their knowledge orally because most of them understand things better orally than written. The third graders did really well on this last exam. I even gave an "exam" to the 5 year olds and a few of the students knew all of the colors, circle, square, big, small, the numbers 1-6, boy, girl, teacher, and the parts of the body (eyes, mouth, nose, ears, hair, tummy, shoulders, arms, hands, fingers, legs, knees, and feet). Pretty impressive.

Namita Bisaria and Joe Rokicki came to visit this weekend as a stop on their world tour. Great times were had by all. Check the next post for the low down on the shenanigans.

Becoming Madrileños

This post is from last weekend but I couldn't get the video to upload at first so i postponed posting until the video was ready. Enjoy.

The past few days have been awesome. I'm really not sure where to start so I guess I'll just pretend to remember when the weekend began. It began on Thursday because that's how we roll - not to be confused with how we ride (Dirty). It was Jessica's birthday so we went out to a nice dinner and then passed out like old people. When Friday rolled around, we were ready to party, after a fair amount of pregaming, Chris, Jessica, and I went out to explore our district of the city. The funny thing about our district of the city is that it melds with the gay district (Chueca) which is a place with tons of bars and places to go. We made our first stop at a new bar/club called Mint. Here we found overpriced drinks and a group of guys jamming out to every tune that was played. We eventually tired of the people watching and set out to find free drinks at other bars. While walking, it is very common to be handed a voucher for a free drink at a random place. So this is what we did for the remainder of the night...not bad.

Saturday was a whole new ballgame. We made plans to go out on the town with our cousins Ana and Almudena. We met up and walked around for a bit, stopping every now and then to grab a beer and chat. Our final stop was a club called Morocco which turned out to be a jammin nightclub with a bit of a twist. The twist came in the form of one of the craziest dancers i have ever encountered. This guy was nutso-city. Words cannot describe him. Fortunately, they dont have to because I have ample video footage of his shenanigans:



This went on for multiple hours. Between dancing, watching this guy, and havin a good time, we stayed at Morocco until around 4 AM. We are getting closer and closer to becoming real Spaniards who stay out past 6 AM and act like thats totally normal. On the walk back from the club, I found a seemingly decent pot on the side of the rode in a pile of trash. My first, and logically correct, instinct was to pick it up and take it home. I proceeded to carry this pot all the way home through crowds of people making comments such as "look at this guy walking home with tomorrow's lunch". To this I responded by inviting them to come back and eat. The pot is actually awesome and inebriated Ryan wins again.

Last Weekend

I'll humor myself for a second and pretend that people are actually still reading this by apologizing for not posting anything last weekend. It was busy...

Last weekend my Dad came to Madrid to visit us, visit his family, and bring 2 suitcases full of goodies for our apartment. The goodies included such things as clothes hangers (which cost a small fortune in Spain - 3 euros for 4 hangers) and Ranch Dressing. With our Dad here, we spent the whole weekend with family doing family things. The big trip was an excursion to a vineyard owned by my aunt Marta and uncle Titin to a town called Penafiel, a small town well known for its vineyards. All of the grapes produced in this region, La Ribera del Duero, produce a wine with the same name. Almost the entire extended family met at the vineyard - my grandmother, her 8 children, their spouses, and their kids, along with some of my grandmothers sisters. All in all, we were missing my Mom and one cousin. We sat around and talked for quite a while before lunch. Included in this discussion was an argument about how American beer is way better than Spanish beer. Spanish beer pretty much sucks. No dark beers, no beers with flavors. Nothing too exciting, just good old fashioned family time. It was really interesting to have all 8 of my grandmother's children present because I dont think this has happened for many years. Good times all around.

This past week was also Jessica's birthday so we had oodles of fun with that. On Wednesday we went to an orchestra concert of the UBS Verbier Festival Orchestra. A good friend/townie from Princeton plays in the orchestra which was on an interational tour. The concert was absolutely amazing. While I am no musical conoseiur, the members of the orchestra (All under 30) were some of the most talented musicians I've ever had the pleasure of watching. Absolutely amazing.

Work last week was also pretty baller. We had a new assistant come to our school which meant that we had to change schedules to accomodate the new guy. This gave me the choice of which class I wanted to work with and I chose to work primarily with the 3rd years - a class full of really intelligent kids who can speak an impressive amount of English at the ripe age of 8. So now I have classes with the 3rd years and the infantiles (5 years old). Great stuff because both of the teachers for these classes are awesome, fun, young, and legit.

A Big Weekend

Not really.

This weekend was very low key. We had lunch with a bunch of my Spanish family on Saturday but I was too beat after Friday night's festivities to hit the calle again. So Saturday passed uneventfully.

Unfortunately for us, Sunday was not so uneventful. We kicked off the morning with a trip to El Rastro, a huge open air flea market. Jessica haggled with some antique dealer for a while in order to buy some semi-useless trinkets and a set of tea cups. I bought a pair of sunglasses that will undoubtedly be broken by the time you read this. In El Rastro are a bunch of crazy goods. Anything from thongs to irons, one of the thousands of stands probably sells it. To make everything even better, we encountered this crazy gypsy looking lady who was sitting in the middle of the way turning a hand crank on this gypsy-cart looking thing that made music with the turning of the crank. Chris described her as "looking like she should have a monkey on her shoulder". I belive you will agree given the picture. However, after El Rastro, it was all downhill.


The afternoon plan was to go to Ikea. BIG DAY. We were planning on going to Bed Bath and Beyond if we had time...but we didnt. Ikea is a good 50 minute metro ride and then a 15 minute walk. We spent a long time in Ikea buying cheap odds and ends for our apartment and then decided to buy desks and desk chairs. Our landlord was going to reimburse us for the desks and chairs since the apartment was supposed to be "furnished". Long story short, we get to the cashier and they tell us it will be 50 Euros to have the desks etc delivered. Well...we were scared that we wouldnt get reimbursed to we opted to carry everything all the way home. I wish we had brought the camera because it was ridiculous. I cant even begin to describe how long it took or how uncomfortable it was to lug the boxed up furniture and goodies back to the metro, through multiple metro stations, and then back to our apartment. Needless to say, no time for Bed Bath and Beyond...