American in Spain

The other day I noticed an interesting article in Spain’s sports newspaper, MARCA. The article starts something like this like this:

Yeste walks towards the corner flag for a corner kick after two attacks on goal by Athletic Bilbao. He hasn’t yet set the ball down when a shout is heard from the far end of the bar: Gooooooal!!! Seconds afterwards, Yeste kicks the ball, which deflects off Lass in the first row, and Llorente scores the goal.

All the excitement of watching a soccer match has been ruined. What just happened?
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One thing I learned when I moved to Europe is that I really, really suck at foosball. The pub culture in Denmark, England and Spain has resulted in a very high average foosball skill level of any 20-40-year-old you find in a bar. I can probably beat the majority of ten-year-olds, but any older than that and you should bet on my opponent. This one foosball table at my in-laws social club always attracts my eye. I love the worn look of the wooden players. What better subject to play around with aperture and depth of field?
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It’s not much, but over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed several visitors coming to my blog, particularly from Germany and Austria, searching for things like “What does ‘a por ellos‘ mean?” and “What does ‘podemos‘ mean?” The answers to those questions are, indeed, here on my blog, here and here respectively. These two phrases that people are searching for are the two main Spanish soccer chants. Obviously the Spanish soccer team got some attention lately, particularly in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. It’s just neat when current events affect my traffic. I’m already starting to get hits for next week’s San Fermin festival.
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Wow! What a night! Who knew that an optimistic attitude like Podemos would really work? I was wondering the whole time if they would stop using that word for the Euro 2008 coverage if Spain got knocked out of the tournament. But I guess we’ll never know.

We were going to go to a local bar with people our age (although we know very few of them) to watch the final, like we had with many of the previous Euro 2008 games. But then we got invited by some of our older salsa dancing friends to a bar in Laredo to watch the game. We knew it was going to be a lower-key crowd, and therefore a little less fun, but we don’t have that many friends that call us to invite us for things like this, so we decided that in the long run it was better to go with them. (more…)

I thoroughly enjoyed watching Spain’s first game in the Euro 2008 soccer championship yesterday. They stomped Russia 4–1. Russia’s goal was pretty lucky, and all four of Spain’s were perfectly executed.

The motto for the Spanish team for the World Cup two years ago was, “¡A por ellos!” (which came with its own song). The motto for this Euro 2008 tournament is “¡Podemos!“.
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I have long been fascinated by the field of Artificial Intelligence. Everything about making computers more human is interesting to me. One particular challenge put forth to the AI community particularly intrigues me. It’s called RoboCup. The challenge is:

By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world soccer champion team.

This one challenge has fueled years of research into robotics and robotic vision and intelligent reasoning and planning algorithms.
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A few interesting things happening in Spain lately. Last Saturday, Marga and I decided to try the local pizza parlor for which we’ve said “We should try that place some time” every time we walk by it since we moved here two years ago. It was as expected: mediocre. While we were there, there was a soccer match on a muted television, as normal.
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As I’ve been going through my old posts and converting them to use Flickr for all image hosting, I’ve found some old photos that I had forgotten about that I really love. I thought I’d re-post a few here for you.
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Nothing new to post today, so I’m going with a themed Flickr post. Today’s theme: Friendship.
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As in 2002, I took advantage of my liberal employment schedule to watch most of the games of the World Cup. I enjoyed it as much as last time, too. I normally don’t watch much league soccer, even though Spain has the best league in the world, because I have been unable to choose a team to follow and support. But with the World Cup, I find myself much more interested in which country wins.
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