American in Spain

The other night, I watched Déjà vu, the current best selling movie in the iTunes Store. It stars Denzel Washington, Paula Patton, and Val Kilmer. I’m guessing you’ve only heard of two of those people.
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Colindres is growing at an incredible rate. There are currently at least 10 different apartment buildings under construction. Due to all the construction work, occasionally, they have to cut off the water supply to certain neighborhoods. This happens about every two months, and it’s rarely off for more than two or three hours.

Yesterday, the water was turned off to our house from 8:00 to 16:00. That’s eight hours!
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For my post yesterday, I tried to upload, to Revver, the following video of the birthday trio blowing out their candles.
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This weekend, we went to Mondragon to celebrate the birthday of Marce, (Marga’s mother) Alejo (a friend of the family), and Inés (Marga’s aunt). Today is also Mother’s Day in Spain.
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One of the many, many varieties of candy available here is a little chewy piece of candy called a meón. The word “meón” literally means “pisser”, or to be slightly less vulgar, “one who urinates”. The shape of the candy has always struck me as humorously vulgar, which is the intent, I think.
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I just found one of the more clever usages I’ve seen of a tag cloud. A tag cloud is a new form of histogram chart where words or “tags” that appear more often are shown in a larger font. The first one I ever saw was on Flickr a year or two ago, but they’ve since become quite popular. I even have one right here on my blog for my post topics (see “Topic Cloud” left sidebar).
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Today is a holiday in Spain. It’s Labor Day, or Workers’ Day. Somehow, it got conveniently placed right on an ancient Pagan holiday celebrating the begin of summer. The Spanish are clever, and often, when a holiday falls on a Tuesday or Thursday, they say, “Aw, what the heck? Let’s make it a four-day weekend!” This is called, quite reasonably, a “puente” (“bridge”). So most people didn’t work yesterday.

On Sunday, I was informed that I wouldn’t be working on Monday either. Marga’s sister (with boyfriend), aunt, two cousins, and parents took me shopping for a vest (and shirt and tie and shoes) to go with my suit for the wedding. Marga’s employer doesn’t do puentes, so she had to work.
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