Carnavales fever

I now have six little kiddies I'm privately tutoring. The youngest one turned four in December. I also meet up with my friend on Thursday afternoons at the pub to practice English and then afterwards head off for my Thursday night pints in the old part of town. They've been putting on live jazz music at a bar for the last few weeks on Thursday nights and I've been a few times, which was pretty cool. (Photo: With Javi during Carnaval)

They also ran this cinematic cycle of phantasmagoria every Tuesday night for five weeks. At one of the cinemas, they showed an old film in original version with Spanish subtitles for the bargain price of 3 euros. I missed the first two films, but went with Ana and Beza to see The Other, A Matter of Life and Death and The Haunting. Afterwards we'd always head to Laurel for dinner. Unfortunately it finished up this Tuesday. But Bola joined us for The Haunting and is considering doing a cinematic screening every Tuesday night at The Pad/El Piso, which would be awesome.

We thought all the films were horror/suspense/thrillers and ten minutes into A Matter of Life and Death, we turned to each other, completely bewildered, because it's less horrific than a Disney film.

Two weekends ago was Carnavales. The teachers at Cenicero got dressed up as native American Indians. We spent an afternoon at the school cutting up cloth to make our costumes and then painted them ourselves (except I cheated and got Beza to help me because he studied something arty at uni and if I may say so myself, my costume was the best). It was insanely fun.

All the students dressed up as well and at recess they had a parade and some parents prepared hot chocolate and biscuits for everyone. Afterwards the teachers went and did a wine tasting and had lunch at a swanky, delicious restaurant.

Then we went back to Logroño and had more drinks. On Saturday night, went over to Beza's place, had dinner, watched Tropic Thunder on DVD and got dressed. I went as a Japanese schoolgirl while he went as a Dutch pianist, complete with fully functioning mini-keyboard. Javi dressed as Wolverine, Millán as an astronaut and the rest of the guys as Rafael Nadal, which was hilarious. They bought these musclemen costumes off the internet, cut off the right arm and bought ridiculous wigs. Unfortunately, Adres, whose idea it was, had the flu so couldn't come out and Jorge went out on Friday night and spent all Saturday throwing up, so didn't join us either.

Generally, the costumes were nowhere near as spectacular as in 2006, but it was still an insane night. Some guys dressed up as Wall-E with glowing lightbulbs for eyes. Theirs were probably the best costumes on Saturday night but it would've been a pain in the arse to get into the bars. The prize for overall best costume this year has to go to the little boy at school who dressed up as a transformer.