BO (and no, it does't stand for body odour)

Clockwise from top left: the pub where we watched the game; Rebecca, Mark, me and Mel at dinner; the beach; statue of Mary and baby Jesus; sand sculptors; escargots for dinner.

Last weekend I went to France with Mel, to a French Basque town called Biarritz. Mel's new flatmate Rebecca is French and she wanted to watch the rugby game between the French team BO (I have no idea what it stands for) and The Munsters which are from Ireland or England... some part of that side of the world. Most of BO come from Biarritz so it was supposed to be especially exciting to watch the game in their home town.

Because of the game, the only hotel/hostel room we could find was a single, so Mel checked in to the hotel and I just dumped my stuff and came back with her at night and we had to share the bed. Which wasn't too bad; my dog kicks more than she does. The game started at 4 and was agonising. Agonisingly boring. Because the screen in the pub was so small, every time someone shifted I had to shift as well, to see. I don't understand rugby and I had no idea what was going on. Despite all the cheering and shouting, towards the last 20 minutes of the game I was so tired I started dozing off and had to lean on the door frame to stop myself from falling over.

BO lost, something like 27-26. Or not. I can't remember. That's how intruiging the game was. But it was fun, being in France, watching French people cheer on the rugby match. We also met up with Mark, a friend of Rebecca. He was really nice, and when I told him that usually French people were uptight and snobby (I wasn't being rude, he asked) he just laughed and said it sounded right. He took us to this fantastic restaurant which looked like a ship inside and out and I had escargots, creme brulee and pizza for dinner. SO tasty. The food was amazing the whole weekend, actually.

On Sunday, Mel and I had croissants for breakfast and went and sunbaked a bit because it was dazzlingly hot and beautiful. Then Rebecca and Mark joined us and we had lunch- magrot (sort of like smoked duck) and foie gras salad. And then we sunbaked and slept on the beach all afternoon. We were supposed to leave for Logrono at 6 pm but Rebecca heard the team was coming back, so we hung around and found them. Two of them gave interviews and the rest were at the pub where we watched the game so we went over and had a drink there as well and admired their buff bodies and muscly legs up close.

By the time we left, it was 8 and I was feeling slightly sunburnt and extremely satisfied.

Clockwise from top left: a house built into a rock face; one of the BO players giving an interview on the news; buck's night party; a BO player at the pub; fans and BO outside the casino in Biarritz.

Forty-two hours of non-stop party

So- I have a new keyboard. On Sunday, my space bar suddenly stopped functioning. I had an assessment task due the next day in Australia and I absolutely freaked out. The shops don't open on Sunday here either so I ended up assigning a new key to 'space' on Microsoft Word and cutting + pasting a 'space' every time I needed to search for something on the web. So frustrating I nearly cried. Actually, I threw a tantrum at my poor creature over the phone. Not at him, just near him. Then Mel came over and we ate a medium sized pizza each, I was so distressed.

Friday was supposed to be the university's birthday or something so someone decided to cancel all classes from Thursday onwards and have a massive 42 hour party, starting at 2pm on Thursday and finishing sometime on Saturday. They set up a tent near the gym and each faculty sets up a stall inside where they serve drinks non-stop for the duration of the celebration. I didn't go on Thursday, but I went on Friday night, from about midnight till 8am. (SO glad I skipped Thursday.) Ion, Breda's friend, was serving drinks and kept plying us with double portions of beer. Then Javier and his friends wanted to go for breakfast but I just wanted to sleep. Ended up getting home at around 9 am.

When I woke up, I felt improportionately hung over to the amount I'd drunk but then it turned out I had food poisoning. Probably from the dodgy breakfast place we went to- it was the only place open we could find.

Photo1: Tent on arrival
Photo 2: Javier's friends
Photo 3: Tent on departure

My new keyboard is strange. It has a different layout to the normal Australian one (with the 'n' with the squiggle on top and the 'c' with a tail) and the punctuation is situated differently as well, but when I use it, it's just the same as my normal one. So I can't use the squiggly 'n' and I can't really look at the keyboard when I type or I'll get confused. I felt so debilitated without a space bar.

I killed a spider today

I was at the gym; its body was the size of a pea, but black and hairy with fuzzy white bits. When I dropped the 1.25 kg weight on it, I felt its muscles tense up as it thought "I can hold it... I can hold it... no I can't..." and the weight was suspended for a microsecond before it went crunch. I felt so bad.

Later some guy picked up the weight and I saw its crumpled little body. When I came back to it, it was gone. Someone must have stepped on it and smeared it remnants across the gym on the sole of his shoe.

What a senseless waste.

Dear little Spider,
I'm so sorry I killed you. So very very very very sorry. I know it can't mean much because you're dead, but I want to extend my apology to your descendants as well and all the descendants you'll never have now because I've exterminated you. You were so foul and hideous in life, so helpless, so dead and motionless in death. I can't sleep tonight because I'm thinking of my murderous deed. Perhaps I'll cry myself to sleep at dawn. Will it make you feel better to know that? I guess not because you've expired.

All the best in the after-life,
Sincerely, Cath

Once

There are these stalls here in Logrono that sell lottery tickets and the money goes to the society for visually impaired people. They have ONCE written on them and usually a bored looking man or woman reading a newspaper inside. When Mum and Allen were in Logrono, we walked past a stall and a german shepherd was doing a shift inside. It was the cutest thing I'd ever seen. Allen tried to buy a ticket from him but he sort of just stared at Allen and looked away. He had his paws resting on the table and everything. Very official looking.

Los toros

Went to see my first and last bull fight yesterday. It was really sad. Actually I saw three bulls being killed before I left. I'm not sure how many bull fights there are per session but three was enough for me. The first one was all right, because we weren't seated and I wasn't wearing my glasses so I could only see the back of the person in front of me. But the second and the third... really, the bulls don't have a chance. The red and yellow striped things sticking out of the bull are darts that get chucked at it to weaken it. I think three or four people have a go at chucking them, which means the bull could be stabbed eight times before the matador, the star of the show, comes out and has a go at stabbing the bull with his sword/foil/rapier. In all fairness, the matador must be pretty brave to get in a ring with a bull, but the bull doesn't have much of a chance.

It was very depressing. The bulls are feisty and one of them nearly gored the matador but in the end, with blood running down their backs, panting heavily and with the matadors closing in on them for the final stab, they stumble and go down. And then they get harnessed to some horses and dragged out of the arena. I'm not sure if they're even dead then.

They'd be so confused, people waving pink and red capes at them, random stinging pains in their back, cheering crowds...

I don't see the glamour or the excitement. Sure, I wanted to go once, for a 'Spanish experience' but all three fights started and ended the same way, and the middle was pretty much the same. It could be scripted, for all the variety there was. I wonder how many end with people getting killed.

Laure, my flatmate was saying how crazy Spanish people are, that they have the bull as their national symbol and yet go around stabbing and killing them for entertainment.

Portugal

Portugal was fantastic. The first thing we did when we got there (after checking in at our residencial) was buy and eat a Portuguese tart. We had chicken too, which I assume is Portuguese chicken although not very similar to Australian Portuguese chicken. Portuguese chicken in Australia is always splayed wherease the ones we found in Lisbon were neatly tucked in, looking like they'd been killed while asleep. They're tastier too. The old hag at our residencial was the freakiest piece of leather I've ever seen. She had goggly eyes that popped out when she started speaking, and would roll them around her head and she was balding slightly but still did her hair up in some pouffy style, dyed orangey pink with grey roots. She walked around in tracksuits and ugh boots and the first time we got there, we rang the doorbell three times in five minutes because she took forever to answer and we weren't sure if there was even anyone there and she screamed at us and said 'ONCE! ONCE ONLY I CAN HEAR YOU NO NEED TO RING IT AGAIN AND AGAIN!!!' And then she had the nerve to ask Mum for a tip when we left. Mum didn't understand her Portuguese because half her front teeth were missing, and she said 'Give me your wallet and I'll show you what I mean,' to Mum. Ha!

Travelled all over Lisbon by bus, foot and metro. Went to the Alfama region (the photo above is of St. Vincent's preserved hand, a relic in Se Cathedral), Belem, where we managed to catch a Frida Kahlo exhibition as well, to the Monument to Christ on the other side of the river... amongst other things. Very touristy but loved it. Allen and I went to Lux nightclub near St. Apolonia station. It was great! We got there at around midnight but the club didn't open till around 12:30, so we were waiting behind a group of around nine British girls all dressed up in stilettos and cocktail dresses, hair that they probably spent two hours on and makeup an inch thick, all chattering excitedly and laughing and giggling. Anyway, this very cool looking woman came up to them with a clipboard in her hand and asked them 'Are you on the guest list?' One of the girls said, 'No. We called yesterday and the woman we spoke to said there wasn't a guest list.' And the cool lady said 'Well, I'm afraid there is a guest list. If you're not on the guest list you need to pay 180 Euros to get in.' The girls started arguing furiously on the verge of tears but the lady was unmoveable. She gave them a name of another club that they could go to and as they left, one of the girls said 'I've never been rejected from a club before. How humiliating!' Anyway, Allen said to me 'Well, I'm not paying 180 Euros to get in, let's go home.' But I was determined to get in because we'd walked around half an hour to get there. So I made him ask the bouncer if we needed to be on the guest list, and he told us to wait till the British girls (who Allen and I called LEPers, short for Loud English People) had all left and then talk to the lady. To us she was very nice; she smiled and told us it was 12 Euros but the money was exchangeable at the bar for drinks and wished us a nice night. It's not really a nightclub at all, no dancing, no dance area, just a really decked out, glorified bar. Very nice decor and heaps and heaps of benches to sit on. But the drinks were only average.

We also went to Sintra and Coimbra. I think my favourite tourist place in Portugal was the library in Coimbra. They have the oldest university in Portugal there, and the library was just... it smelt like old books, had shelves lined with leatherbound volumes, wooden tables, wooden chairs, gold... Just imagine studying there. I don't think it's actually used as a library any more but it was so worth the visit.

When we got back to Madrid, we had an hour to get to the bus station for a bus back to Logrono. We got to the station at 6:45, wanted to catch the 7 pm bus back but the line for tickets was out the door. And people kept holding up the line. These three Spanish idiots in front of us had probably 15 minutes to decide where they wanted to go, when, what time etc. and still took 10 minutes going 'Oh, wait, maybe we should catch it an hour earlier... wait, do we want to get return as well... can we ask for seats at the back... wait, no we want the later one...' If they spoke English I would have happily abused them. Luckily I was wrong about the bus time- it left at 7:30 instead- because by the time we got to the front of the queue it was 7:15. Some woman in another queue went nuts at the man at the front ordering his tickets. Kept calling him a son of a bitch, harrassing him for taking forever. I really don't like the queue system here. Basically you get into the queue with the least amount of people and hope no one takes his/her time. I once read an article about those people whose job it is to make companies more efficient. Anyway, if you have a queue where all the people line up in the same queue and go to the next available desk, there's an average waiting time of a few seconds less than if you have the system that you find in Spain. But it's a lot fairer because everyone ends up waiting almost the same amount of time.

The ATM ate my card

Yesterday, when I went to withdraw money from the ATM, I accidentally put in my visa card instead of my bank card and my card got swallowed. So this morning, I went back to the bank to ask for my card back and the bank dude said when cards get swallowed they drop into a special box and the box gets sent to a special card office where cards go to die. Like an elephant graveyard for cards. When I told my dad, he laughed, the unsympathetic beast. He did offer to give me his card number though so I could make internet bookings for flights but now I don't have a card. So vexed. I had to eat an icecream for consolation.

My creature and my mum left me on Monday for Madrid. So devastated. It was a public holiday too, so I couldn't go for a consolation shop. The icecream shop was open though and most conveniently situated between the bus station and my house so I got an extra big one and ate it all the way home. Then I invited Mel over and she ate my goat's cheese for me, which Mum had bought and I refused to eat and I ate a quiche. A whole quiche defrosted in the microwave. So gross.

Our tutor came from Australia to visit us and talk to us about our research projects. She gave me a good mark for my assessment! The one I wrote when I was sick. Perhaps I should thank the disease. We went for tapas afterwards too and I ate too much.

When we were in Madrid, we saw meerkats at a pet store. I was looking at them, thinking, is that what I think it is? And one of them stood up and peered down at us. The picture is pretty bad quality but we couldn't go inside because it was Easter Monday and the pet store was closed.