cangas de onis.

here's something i find weird. other kids in my group here in spain are writing about stuff we're doing, seeing here in spain, like monuments, sights, things of that nature. all i ever want to write about is what i do with the people around me. for example, this weekend our whole uni group stayed the night in a hostel about an hour from oviedo. all i want to write about is the stuff we did, conversations i had, the dance party, potato jams. other kids are writing about real spanish stuff they are seeing, and i feel like a tool for not writing about that smart stuff too. but what interests me is seeing amazing things and writing about social interactions. so here's a recap of the weekend.

it started out a bit stressful on saturday morning. blake and kevin and i got shafted into taking a bus because there wasn't enough room in the cars for everybody. so i woke up too late, showered and packed super fast, my phone ran out of minutes so i couldn't call blake or kevin, so by the time i got to the bus station, i was already hot and sweaty. not the best start. but before the bus left, we had time to go buy donuts and orange juice, amazing, and then we had an hour bus ride to rest. once we got there, paula picked us up from the bus station with some more bad news. again, there wasn't enough room in the cars for everybody that wanted to go to the mountains, so they needed three people to stay behind. the three of us had some good vibes about the afternoon so we elected to be the ones to stay behind. as soon as everybody was gone though, blake came up with the genius idea of hiding all the mattresses, excluding the three we had claimed. the only really good place for the mattresses was up in the rafters of this little hostel we were staying in(the whole place was ours for the night), so we got to work. we made little signs for our beds and found a ladder and hauled all the mattresses up there. we were really proud of ourselves.

after our hard work was finished, we decided to take a leisure walk into town to buy some supplies and get some fresh air. oh man it was gorgeous out. a very pleasant walk down into town with mountains on all sides of us. we got into town, got what we needed, and headed back up. the walk up was a lot harder; shirts came off and the sweating started. we got back to the hostel and it was time to relax. kevin got out his guitar, we poured some drinks, and just lived. it was perfect. actually it was perfect minus two guitars. but still pretty close. three dudes in the mountains, beautiful weather, playing guitar and drinking. felt great. after an hour or so the others who had been horseback riding arrived, and then after awhile the rest of the mountaineers returned too. after that is sort of just a blur because so much happened. some people started cooking, some people went into town to buy alcohol and a few more food items for the group, and the rest of us just hung out. for like five hours or so i think. it was super fun too. i ended up playing a lot of guitar. like more or less the whole time. and man did it feel great. after i took a break for awhile, the next time i picked it up my fingers were killing me. it was awesome. my fingers haven't hurt that bad from guitar playing in like five years. such a great feeling.

dinner? outstanding. i think megan supervised it all, and she did a stellar job. we had loose-meat pork and chicken sandwiches, mashed potatoes, macaroni salad, and i know i'm leaving something else out. whatever though, everything was off the wall. super great stuff. by then it was around ten-ish i think (this was a whole week ago remember) and the fun really started. some people played uno, some more of us played guitar, some just hung around and talked. i don't know when it started, but at some point music was put on and those of us playing guitar were told to go outside. perfect time for the first potato jam.

ok kevin taught us this thing he calls a "potato jam". somebody gets on a guitar, or a drum or something, and throws down a bit of a rhythm/melody/chords/whatever. then the first person in the circle/group/whatever starts singing/rapping/making noise with the name of some kind of potato, like mashed potatoes, fresh fries, baked potato. example: "au gratin, au gratin, au-au-au gratin." that type of thing. the next person comes in with the same type of thing, some noise or melody or something with the name of a kind of potato. this continues until everybody in the group is singing some type of potato. and then usually it would turn into kevin throwing down a freestyle rap about a girl in the group or drinking in spain or something great. and he is actually way way good at freestyling. charmed all the ladies for sure. so that's a potato jam. that was the first of, i think, five or six throughout the night. fun times.

after that, the night is just a blur of dance party, potato jams, breaking firewood, watching people interact, watching people get drunk and trying to interact, more guitar playing, more eating, more dancing, more of everything. oh yeah, probably overall, one of the two best things of the night was that my spanish was just on. it's weird, when my mind loosens up a bit my spanish flows so much better. luna even said that to me, so that was good. i had a nice long talk with her, about lots of things. i think she's pegged me as the close-minded weird kid of the group who is far too sheltered and she basically disagrees with everything i believe about life. so it was a great talk. she found out i was homeschooled for the first time, so that gave us lots of talk about. it's interesting to try to defend my beliefs and/or belief system in another language in which i am not very fluent. but it was super fun.

after having gone to bed about 7:30(yes, a.m.), i think i was one of the first ones up around 11 in the morning, and i walked around the hostel a bit, was about to go outside to get some fresh air, when i saw a bunch of cars outside that were not ours. there was an old church directly next door to this hostel, like literally with only a driveway in between the two buildings. unknown to all of us, including luna and paula(they said this had never happened before), there was a church service there in the morning and i think the church goers were a bit taken aback to see a bunch of branches and wood on the driveway outside from the night before(firewood). so after i saw all the cars, i decided to sit by the window and take in the air and wait for all the churchies to leave. unfortunately one of them had a different idea. this old spaniard man came into the living room at one point, the living room full of sleeping americans and three sleeping spaniards and said "hola! buenas dias!" to which i responded the same, since i was the only one close enough to talk to him. unfortunately he followed "hola buenas dias" up with something that sounded a tad bit stronger than irritated, to which all i could say was "espera espera por favor" and tried to rouse the spaniards up from their sleep. the old man just kept rambling though, and proceeded to go back outside. thanks luna/paula/soli. the only people who could actually speak real fluent spanish, too lazy to wake up and apologize to this old man for all the wood outside. just a stupid american kid in sweatpants and no shirt trying to mumble out "i'm sorry we'll clean everything up." sweet. so the morning started off a bit rocky for me.

after that though was great. blake made some stupendous fresh toast, with which we had scrambled eggs, syrup, real peter pan peanut butter!(that stuff is so ridiculously expensive here, like close to 10 euros = 14 dollars for a little tiny tub of it) and milk and other great stuff. it was awesome. after breakfast, everybody got packed up and cleaned the hostel up, then we headed into town to wait for the bus to leave. and this was one of the best parts of the weekend for me. luna and paula and soli wanted to wait until the three of us taking the bus back were able to leave on the bus, which wasn't for like two hours, so they gave us some free time in the town. however, most of us were way too tired to walk around, so those of us that didn't want to just sat in this little park area in the middle of downtown and laid around. we looked quite a mess. a bunch of unshowered, decently hung over american students just laying in the middle of a park. as soon as i got kevin's guitar out, wow, it was really bad then. a guitar bum, three kids actually straight up laying stomach down on the cement, everybody else just looking spacey. it was great. lots of great pictures were taken. for example: this picture is on facebook too but it's just too perfect to leave out of this post. kevin, you kill me. this was a fun time though, just a couple of bum american kids playing guitar and hanging out in the park.

then the bus came and it was time to go home. overall i really enjoyed myself. the whole night was just super interesting to me though, because it was a bunch of students who usually don't hang out all together, but nobody even mentioned it and we all just had a blast together. like within the kids from uni, we're all in our own little groups, but we never really hang out all together like that weekend. even more interesting, almost everybody got pretty drunk. so it's a bunch of kids from the same school who don't normally hang out all together, drinking a lot of alcohol and interacting and having a great time. just interesting dynamics between everybody. i can't even explain it any better than that. it was just interesting. lots and lots of fun.

in three hours i leave for bilbao, and after a five hour bus ride and a two hour wait in the airport, i fly to paris in the morning. exciting. until next week.

-jon

If I Could

i'm rediscovering jack johnson. this song in particular has just been breaking my heart.

If I Could

a brand new baby was born yesterday
just in time
papa cried, baby cried, said your tears are like mine
i heard some words from a friend on the phone
didn't sound so good
the doctor gave him two weeks to live
i'd give him
if i could

you know that i would now
if only i could
you know that i would now
if only i could

down the middle drops one more
grain of sand
they say that
new life makes losing life
easier to understand
and words are kind they help ease the mind
i'll miss my old friend
and though you gotta go
we'll keep a piece of your soul
one goes out
one comes in

you know that i would now
if only i could
you know that i would now
if only i could




listen and enjoy. what a songwriter.

just press play.

ok, new thing off to the right. go ahead, click the play button. enjoy. this is one of the greatest pop songs i've ever listened to in my life.

this music player thing is giving me a bit of a headache. i'm trying to figure out a way to embed a player right into a blog rather than just off to the side. the problem with the way it is now is that i can't modify that playlist at all, i can either take it down or leave it up, as/is. which is a bit frustrating because i want to be able to embed the player directly into a blog, so i can write something about a song and then have the song right there so you can listen to it. what a great thing that would be. if i could figure out how to do that, the number of blogs concerning music would very likely shoot through the roof.

until then, however, just listen to this classic mj tune while it's up. it will almost certainly make your day better.

-jon

p.s. duh another super important blog i forgot about! i have this sweet playlist on itunes that has bunches of famous/not famous rap songs and the older tunes that they sample. if that doesn't make any sense, it will when i've finally written it. it'll be sweet though.

a blog about blogging? such self-reflexivity.

so far i feel pretty good about my blog activity since coming to spain. i've been writing a fair amount, and having lots of good ideas of things to write. i think to keep me accountable, i'm gonna start a list of blog ideas. i'll X them out as i write about them.

things i'd like to write about in the future:

my Top 5 Lists, including:
Top 5 Songs
Top 5 Artists
Top 5 Albums
Top 5 Producers
Top 5 Showbiz entertainers
Top 5 Breakup Songs
i could use suggestions.

i also have something in the works about rap music. what i love about it, different aspects, different artists, lots more. problem with this one is that i started it when i was heavy into kanye's graduation. i'm now listening to different albums and my intense love for rap music has subsided a bit. i'll keep writing as soon as kanye gets under my skin again.

i'd love to write about d'angelo's brilliant album "voodoo", but i'm not sure i could even do it justice. a few years ago john mayer wrote an open letter to d'angelo in esquire magazine, asking him to get back into the studio and record something new to follow up voodoo because it was one of the single best soul albums of the last ten or so years. he goes on to say marvelous things about voodoo, effectively everything i would want to say. bummer. so part of me really wants to write about voodoo cause i am just enamored of the album, and part of me doesn't even want to try and touch it cause voodoo is just that good.

obviously i'll keep writing about cool stuff that happens here on my trip while it happens. example: paris trip coming up in a week. getting incredibly psyched for it.

so i guess i don't really have any good ideas except writing about music. i bet if i had my guitar i wouldn't need to use this dumb blog as a musical outlet. buzzkill.

-jon

something new.

finally something worth writing about. the last like two weeks, really nothing out of the ordinary has happened except carnival in oviedo and that went down almost the same as it did in aviles, so it really wasn't worth writing about. other than that, i guess you could say i've hit my stride here in spain. which, to be honest, is sort of a disappointment. i don't really know what i was expecting, but not exactly this. i almost feel like i'm wasting my time, i can get into a daily routine in the states just fine; that's not what i want here. nowadays, i wake up about 10/11, get to the gym in the morning with my two buds, after that get back, shower, eat lunch, head to class usually by 2, stay at school most days until 8 when i'm done with class, head back home, grab dinner, then usually either head to the nearby internet cafe for a mac date or head to the central park for ping pong. usually i'm in bed and asleep by 2. certain days offer different options, but for the most part that is my daily routine. i don't want to say boring, but at times...almost.

the last few days have been great though. thursday was all sorts of great things. i woke up and went to the gym, the start of a normal day, headed home quick and met blake at the cafe at 1. we've had this idea knocking around since we got to spain to go visit paris (blake's got a friend from high school that lives in paris), and we finally worked out a perfect schedule for our weekend getaway. we worked all the details out right before our class, so we waited on actually buying airplane tickets until later and headed to class. my teacher didn't show up, holler, so i went to the nearby mall and checked out carrefour, this huge wal-mart-esque (is it gramatically acceptable to double-hyphenate a word?) store that had tons of stuff, including orange, two-star ping pong balls (ping pong balls come in quality of one, two, or three stars. i'm pretty psyched to play with my two-star pong balls.) they also had, and this was great, REAL mountain dew. this is literally the only place i've seen real mountain dew. i didn't buy any, but i will soon.

so i bought the pong balls and headed back to the cafe to meet blake. we finalized our plans and bought some airplane tickets. here is our tentative plan. different than what we had originally wanted (spend a full three days in paris and get back on monday in time for classes), but i'm really happy with this. thursday night at 1 we are catching a bus to bilbao, we'll get to bilbao around 5ish, chill for two hours, get on a plane at 7:30, arrive in paris about two hours later. meet up with blake's friend and explore the city of love. so great. even greater, blake and i basically had the same idea of what we want to do in paris: see the louvre, see the eiffel tower. whatever else happens is icing baby. so friday night maybe we'll go out, see the night life in paris, saturday do whatever else we have left to do, head back early sunday morning for bilbao. once we get to bilbao around lunch time, we have no pressing obligation to get back to oviedo so blake suggested we just spend the afternoon/evening at the guggenheim. ok i literally just went to the wikipedia site for the guggenheim for the first time, i didn't know anything about it other than it was a museum. seriously, go to that link. it looks incredible. i just got crazy excited about seeing that thing. so that will be an awesome sunday. then we hop on the bus back to oviedo around 6, get back around 11, be in bed at a modest 12 midnight. nice little weekend we have planned.

ok recap of the day so far, i worked out, found mt. dew and orange, two-star ping pong balls, and planned a trip to paris and bought airplane tickets. all by 4 pm. productivity sizzler. so after that, i went back to my house, got some food, read a bit, and headed back to class at 6. it's one of my two favorite classes, english-spanish translation. the teacher is great, he's a native spanish speaker but he learned english in the UK, so he speaks really fluent english like a brit. so awesome. i think i feel better about speaking spanish in that class because i know i've got a bit of a fall-back, he'll understand me better than a teacher that only speaks spanish. and he's just a fun guy. so class was fine. headed back to my house, had some dinner with my parents, and then something great happened. i forgot about this earlier, when i woke up i talked to my mom for a bit about something that had happened, their landlady had talked to them about her son-in-law wanting help learning english. guess what, i speak english really well so the son-in-law was wondering if i would be willing to help him learn english. for money. how killer is that? so of course i said yes and so she told me i would go over to his apartment later in the evening and meet him. so a little after 9 pm, me and jose, my host dad, headed to his apartment, literally one building away. this guy's name is, actually i just tried to remember but i can't. i met his wife though, and he's got two kids, this 12 year old boy i didn't meet and this super cute 7 year old daughter that i saw watching the jungle book. the guy, jose, and i went into his living room and just talked for awhile. and man the living room was nice. this guy is like fifty-three, works in aviles, and has a great apartment with super nice decorations and furniture. so i'm pretty psyched about it. and he speaks super basic english so it is gonna be eazy peazy lemon squeezy. and he's paying me! when we talked about that all i said was that obviously i'm not a real teacher or anything so whatever he wants to pay me is fine. cause i mean come on, i'm going to be speaking a lot of spanish with him, so i'm gonna be getting a lot of good out of this whole arrangement. so that is super super great. and i know he said some euro amount, but he said it super fast and i'm bad with spanish numbers so i just said sure. he's taking english classes right now which are finished at the end of this month so i don't start my "job" until march. but i was super psyched for that. and then i finished my evening back at the cafe having a special valentine's mac date with my gf. good good day.

and today i climbed a mountain. and then hiked along the sides of a bunch of others. and don't feel like writing about it too much. pictures will be on facebook. check it out.

-jon

quick rob. Top Five Music Crimes Perpetrated by Stevie Wonder in the 80s and 90s.

last night, for (at least) the 100th time, i listened to the song "baby be mine" by michael jackson. i only know i've listened to it (at least) 100 times because of its play count on my itunes library. this is the first song in my 7500+ music library that has reached this impressive mark. and now that the 100 plateau has been reached, i'm thinking of making the play count option invisible on itunes for awhile. i don't know what it is about them, but i am fascinated by the play counts of different tunes. i study my Top 100 Most Played constantly, and the Top 25 Most Played playlist is always something i look for right away when i get a chance to peruse someone else's itunes (that and albums without titles or songs without artist names, and also songs that are 759 minutes long*. all signs of a disorganized library.) for some reason i absolutely love looking to see what tunes are fighting for the top ten spots in my library, and also who is making up the Top 25 and Top 50. whenever i spend a lot of time on my ipod, i am always anxious to sync it to my computer right away and see how the number of times i listened to songs will affect the play counts in my library.

for the last year or two, since i've really started to explore this science, i've done as best as i can not to let the play counts affect my music listening. i don't listen to songs just to up their play counts. the only way (i feel) that this new "playcountology" has affected my music listening is when i'm listening to music, i always, always let the song go to completion before switching. for example, if a tune is winding down with, say, 20 seconds or so left, i don't switch right away to the next song, i wait until the first one is totally done and then switch. that way i'm sure to keep the play counts accurate. but i don't think i have ever listened to a song just to get its play count up. and i also haven't been tampering with the play counts unfairly. a person could, in theory, just click a song to the end and have its play count go up, but that's cheating. the only time i don't really listen to the songs that are playing is when i accidentally fall asleep with music playing, which doesn't happen very often, or when other people use my ipod/itunes, which is totally legit with me because the song is still getting played and listened to by someone.

as much as i love thumbing through my play counts however, a tiny little party of my brain keeps nagging at me and telling me that i am taking some joy or something inherent out of the music. i should listen to music not because of what its rank is in a top 100 list, but because the song touches me and makes me feel or think. i want to listen to music to get my foot tapping or my tookis moving, not cause it's close to upsetting the Top Ten. and as much as i want to defend this love of mine by saying it hasn't affected what i've listened to, for the next month, i am going ot make the play counts invisible and see what happens.

to me, this seems way drastic. i think the longest i've gone recently without checking play counts was a week. it was a bad week. so we'll see if i can actually make it a month. i just want to see what happens when i try my best to forget about play counts and just listen to music with no hidden motives. here, though, is where i run into the problem. if i was truly adamant about this, i would highlight my entire library and click "reset play counts". my brain might implode if i was ever to do that, so that's not going to happen. just thinking about going a month without checking the play counts, i'm so excited to see how they will have changed and what will have moved where and by how much. i'm already psyched to see a new Top Ten. and to me, that sort of defeats the purpose of this whole thing, undermines the whole idea. but i'm gonna give it a go anyway.

the other issue i'm struggling with is the problem of my current Top 100 Most Played list. right now it is a "smart" playlist, designed to automatically update itself with only the top 100 songs with the highest play counts. now i can make this playlist so that it will keep updating itself, but it won't show me the order in which the songs are arranged by play count. there will just be a big random playlist of 100 tunes that have been most played but in no specific order. is this still copping out a little? just by having this list at all? because obviously since it's full of my favorite songs, it is the perfect thing to just click shuffle and play on my ipod, tons of great tunes all in one place. i feel like i'm unfairly favoring my current Top 100 over the rest of my music. should i get rid of this playlist all together for the next month or should i keep listening to it when i want, just forgetting the play counts? i need advise here(adam).

so there you have it. my first real experiment in playcountology. i'm excited to see how it turns out. and what great music i will be listening to. just for the record though, let me give you my current Top Ten Most Played:

1. Baby Be Mine - Michael Jackson
2. Flashing Lights - Kanye West Feat. Dwele
3. P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing) - Michael Jackson
4. Good Life - Kanye West Feat. T-Pain
5. Lesson Learned - Alicia Keys Feat. John Mayer
6. I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You) - John Mayer
7. Slow Dancing In A Burning Room - John Mayer
8. Until The End Of Time Ft. The Benjamin Wright Orchestra - Justin Timberlake
9. Champion - Kanye West
10. Digital Love - Daft Punk

i'm pretty proud of that Top Ten. well-rounded; seven different main artists; a genre-spanning set of songs. but who knows? in one month this whole thing could be completely different. it probably will be. get ready though, March 11 is coming soon. i'm excited already.

just think, if i could channel all this energy and thought into anything even remotely useful.

-jon

* if anybody has a song(s) in their itunes library that is 759 minutes long, it means there was an error when you were copying the information from the cd, and that file is unplayable. please, please! erase this defective file from your computer. it makes your itunes library look terrible.

carnival!

so tuesday was carnival. cities around the world celebrate it, and spain has their celebrations spread out a bit. different cities, different days, you get the idea. this last weekend, avilés held their carnival festival. avilés is a town about half an hour from oviedo, and buses ran all night, making it a perfect place to visit for our first carnival experience.

here's how most of spain celebrates carnival: everybody dresses up in costumes and parties. easy enough. here's how avilés celebrates carnival: everybody dresses up in costumes, there is a lot of foam sprayed, and a lot of water is thrown. that's basically all i knew about it going in. sean and blake and i needed a costume, so saturday afternoon we shopped around a bit. we ended up finding some cheap asian hats, the ones they used to wear in the rice fields, and decided just to go as chinos. my initial reaction to this idea was negative, thinking it might be borderline offensive, but then i realized the owner of the store (one of many stores which the spanish citizens call "chinos") was himself asian, and if he had a problem with it, he shouldn't have been selling the hats in the first place. for dress, we decided on these full-body paper suits that one would use for painting or something like that. to accentuate the asian(-ness?) of the costumes, we drew the japanese symbols for "ping pong" on the backs of them (copied from the phenomenal japanese movie of the same name), and a bright red star on our left shoulder. they actually turned out awesome.

so with our costumes ready, we hopped the bus with some friends and headed for avilés. we got there, got totally ready (which means put our costumes on and drew squinty eyes on our faces with eye liner, horrible i know.) and headed downtown. there was a big parade going on, and what looked like the aftermath of a huge foam explosion. we had missed the foam stuff, but the whole street was just covered in the stuff. it was seriously like what happens in cartoons when a character puts too much soap in the washing machine and it overflows. it was really cool. there were tons of people in costumes and tons in normal clothes as well, and kids were everywhere, wrestling and slipping and sliding in the foam.

since none of us really wanted to get wet with foamy moisture, we decided to look for some food and ended up at a supermarket. we ate a little, hung around, then decided to find a bar to hang out in and sit down for awhile. during our search we met up with two guys from our classes, phil, an american, and tatsuro, the one japanese guy in our international student program. this is where i ran into a dilemma. do i talk to the one person in this whole city that could potentially be offended by our costumes or just let it be the elephant in the room? i went for it. we started talking, he thought our costumes were hilarious, albeit ridiculous. on top of that, he was able to read the japanese on our backs and knew the movie we were referencing, which was incredible. this cranked my night to an 11 for sure. here's why: tatsuro's the guy on the left. if you weren't sure.

so our big group continued to look for a place, ending up at a bar with not enough room for everyone, so some of us ended up just hanging out on the street. this was super fun though, we got to see all the crazy costumes* people had on, talk to random strangers, made two new friends from south america, and just have a good time in general. it was a lot of fun. one of the best parts was making friends with this ten year old and his buddy, they were dressed as an american indian and zorro, and they were way fun. the indian liked to shoot at us with his bow and arrow, and zorro took to hitting us in the chest with the flat end of his sword. that kid wouldn't have lasted thirty seconds in a real sword fight. they were fun though, at one point we saw this person dressed up in a some gross creature costume and the indian said "gollum!" awesome. so we learned how to say "lord of the rings" in spanish and then their moms came out of the bar and talked with us for awhile. they were really nice too. the other friends we made were two girls from south america, one from brazil and one from argentina, really nice girls. tatsuro roped them in first, talking to them by himself and introducing them to the group, but i really think they got a kick out of the three american boys dressed as chinos, trying to speak spanish. they were cool though, they ended up joining our group for the rest of the evening.

after awhile we all decided to go see what else there was to see, and ended up in this huge courtyard area with two huge stages. some bad spanish pop cover band was playing one of the stages so we joined the big crowd and started to dance along with everybody else. that was a lot of fun. one of my favorite pictures from this part of the night:

look closely. you can see three chino hats headed into the crowd, just left off the center. that's us. and that's also the concert. we ended up right next to the stage on the right hand side of the picture. there were multiple pairs of leather pants being worn on stage by the various singers, flamboyant spaniards singing and dancing choreographed dances. obviously this made it very fun. another highlight, this girl dressed exactly like a member of KISS was super drunk and playing a gigantic fake wooden guitar that she had along with band. unfortunately, she was right next to us. at one point though she got the great idea to head up onto the stage (there was surprisingly easy access to the stage from a staircase off to the left). as soon as she got onto the stage, one of the singers actually started pushing this girl back towards the stairs while she is resisting slash playing wooden guitar and giving the classic KISS-tongue face. as soon as the singer had gotten her pushed to the stairs security (for a free concert?) guards pulled her down the rest of the way and ended up breaking her wooden guitar in half! oh man it was such a riot. sean took a hilarious video of The Push, and then my face laughing at her and blake dancing. great stuff.

after the concert ended we sort of just wandered around and then decided to call it a night. and that was carnival in avilés. lots and lots of fun, and we get to try our chino costumes again this saturday here in our own stomping grounds. i'm excited.

-jon


* Top Five Costumes Seen In Avilés (excluding our chino costumes)

1. Bert. straight up, huge yellow head, stripe-for-stripe sweater, everything. it was perfect.
2. Stewie from family guy. just a guy with a cardboard cut-out of stewie's face taped to his head.
   
3. A smurf. this international student went shirtless and painted his top half of his body blue. poor guy couldn't get it all off either, the next day we saw him at the superbowl "party" and his arms were still blue.
   
4. Black Face. this actually was not a good costume, it was just a spaniard in a bar (he looked like a respectable adult too) who had painted his face with black face. just his face, not even his hands or anything else. after i saw him i felt less bad about our chino costumes.
5. there were lots of cute kids dressed as cows. this only made the list because i couldn't think of any other good number fives.