Hi all, I hope you had a good weekend all. As I write, I am just realising that today is a public holiday in the UK and that´s why I haven´t got many responses from Friday yet. For my GS peeps who are always repping (by actually reading my journals), surely some of you are working today? Hahaha...ok, so where was I? Before I go on I must apologise in arrears and in advance for all the arrows I´ve blown in my journals (grammatical errors, typos etc) - I´ve been advised (by none less than my mum!) to proof read my journals before sending them out! Given that I expect you all to read it, that shouldn´t be too hard right? Well, I blame my short attention span on the fact that I´m a guy - probably the same reason why more girls read and reply to these journals than the guys - a statistic I kinda regret now, considering the fact that when a friend went to Costa Rica last year to learn Spanish just for 3 weeks, I couldn´t keep up with her journals!
Anyway I digress (as always!). The night life is Sevilla seems ok. Surprisingly, they seem to like their fair share of R´n´B and they´re also current enough. The best I had seen in three months in Valencia was a very poorly attended Erasmus party, then again in all fairness I didn´t get out much in Valencia. Here, I´ve been to one club called BOSS twice and another called The Empire once. I´m a bit tired of that now, so I think I will just stick to meeting up with the locals to practice my Spanish for my remaining two weeks here. I was going to do a business spanish exam also at the end of my stay here (for the Spanish chamber of commerce) but this weekend I realised that I´ve been giving myself stress that I don´t need for a qualification that I don´t need, when in reality, I need to be spending time preparing for my job when I get back - that extra piece of paper won´t pay the bills!
The weekends since I got here have been pretty interesting. The first one, we took a trip to the Rock of Gibraltar, which as you may know is a British colony on the south tip of Spain which is the closest point to Africa (Morocco to be precise). Apparently the history between Spain and Britain fighting for this territory goes way back, for any details more in-depth than that, you´re asking the wrong person. The Rock of Gibraltar is massive, we went most of the way up it in tour buses from where we had a beautiful view overlooking the town below. I was surprised by how much this town had it´s own unique cutlture, everything (roadsigns, shops etc) turns to English the moment you enter Gibraltar but they still drive on the right side of the road like in Spain. You pay for everything in Pounds too, you could pay in Euros too but you would get screwed over on the exchange rate. The kids we met on the way to the beach there effortlessly switched from Spanish to English to give us directions and back again afterwards. I guess because it´s Gibraltar, house prices are comparable to Central London, though one wonders why you would buy a house there unless you were actually from there - it is so secluded from the rest of Great Britain that you´d be forgiven for being ignorant of it´s existence. We even joked that someone needed to go to 10 Downing Street to remind Tony Blair he had people in Gibraltar. By far the coolest thing about this place were the monkeys! Yes, on the Rock, there were hundreds of monkeys. We took lots of pictures up close and personal with them being very careful not too touch them so as not to get bitten. We went on a tour inside the Rock too, learning about different myths such as how the monkeys were said to have come to Gibraltar from Morocco through underground caves through the Rock (Typical, isn´t it, that the monkeys must have come from AFRICA).
Did I mention that I almost didn´t make it into Gibraltar? Yes, green passport holders need to take good care when travelling anywhere. I mean, a whole UK resident like myself was being denied entry into "my own country"! The Spaniards didn´t really care if I entered Gibraltar, what they really wanted to know was if I could return to Spain from Gibraltar; in any case I had to prove that I had the right to do both. I´m sure you can imagine the scene, the other 30 people from my school being let pass, meanwhile I was immediately pulled aside the moment they saw the colour of my passport. On our way out of Gibraltar at the end of the day, I made a quick stop at the airport (which is the smallest I had ever seen), to see which flight I would have had to take out of Gibraltar in case I didn´t make it back to España. Interestingly, they only operate flights to Heathrow and Gatwick. Even more interestingly, they operate a level crossing for the plane because the single runway they have intersects the road on entry into Gibraltar. You can imagine our utter surprise when a British Airways jet zoomed right accross the road in front of us when we arrived in Gibraltar. Anyway, on leaving the town through customs, I just flashed my passport at the guy like everyone else in front of me and I didn´t wait for him to check if it was okay. Funnily enough, you could see his hesitation in letting me go, but I guess on that occasion he just couldn´t be bothered to call me back (I guess you now know how so many illegal immigrants make it into Europe from Africa, help me tell Daddy Chuks that he is all clear to begin his pilgrimage from Naija accross the Sahara desert!lol).
This weekend just past, there was a 3-day trip to Morocco.....you can guess that I sat my ass down in Sevilla! Apart from having to remember that I can´t afford to pretend I am just on one long holiday, I didn´t even want to start finding out what kind of visa I needed to get into Morocco with my Nigerian passport, let alone where to go get it from! I had a quiet weekend, I did go to see The Star Wars movie solo, it was cool. What I really wanted to know going into the movie was why Darth Vader always subjected himself to such poor fashion sense when Anakin Skywalker was such a strapping young handsome lad - I got my answer in emphatic fashion! That was my favourite part of the movie, apart from that it wasn´t so great, it only served to tie up the loose ends and bring us to where Episode IV (the original Star Wars began). And what has that got to do with my Spanish diaries I here you ask? Absolutely nothing, well except that I watched the movie in Spanish...Next weekend we´re meant to be going for a day trip to Cadiz which is also by the coast and has some nice beaches too. I hear that that´s actually still in Spain so I just might go on that trip.
The last thing, and certainly not the least that I´ll leave with, is that I went to see a Bull fight here in Sevilla last Sunday. I certainly have never seen anything like it before. Has anyone been to see one in Mexico or Spain? It really is a spectacle but also it is very cruel. If you are totally against cruelty to animals (which ofcourse I am), I suggest that you stop reading here (if you actually managed to get this far!). Now, most of us have seen the fairy-tale versions of bull fights in cartoons growing up, you know, where the matador waves around the "muleta" (the red cloth on a stick) with much artistry for the bull to charge at. It wasn´t until I was firmly in my seat that I realised that we were going to watch the animals die a slow, cruel and painful death. At the beginning, the bull rages out into the arena attacking all the torreros (matadors) in every direction who run behind the wall of the arena to get away from it. The main guy enters the arena taunts the bull with his evasive manouvres using a "capote" (a larger rug which is purple and yellow). Suddenly a trumpet blows and two men on horses (both man and horse are fully amoured) called "picadores" come in and the men proceed to stab the bull with long spears or lances. After this, the matador taunts it some more and then 3 men (banderilleros) with 2 hooks each (banderillas), come in, run towards the bull, jump and stab it in the back with the banderillas, at the same time avoiding the onrushing bull and running for safety before it gets them. By this time, the bull has become very weak, and after the matador taunts it´s some more this time with the muleta to show his masterity and dominance over the bull, and takes applause from the crowd, he gets a sharp spear and runs it through the bull, like the final nail in it´s coffin. Once the bull falls to it´s knees, another guy takes a knife and stabs it in the neck to ensure it´s death. Finally a chariot comes in, they attach the bull to the end of the chariot and they drag it away "in disgrace", it appears.
In each Corrida (bull fight), three toreros or matadors kill six bulls like this in just over two hours. The American girls with us left after the first bull was killed, the rest of us left after three bulls had been killed. I really did think it was inhumane but by the third one I had gotten quite desensitised and could have watched the whole thing (call it the male hunter/killer genes in me). What was most interesting was the first matador actually got lifted by the horns of the first bull, and seemingly to salvage his honour, he still got up limping to continue the fight. Crazy, cause me I for just pick race comot. All of us there actually felt strangely glad that the matador got a taste of his own medicine....have you seen anything like this? And killing chickens in your backyard for easter or your Christmas goat in Naija doesn´t count....I´ll leave you with an little urban legend from my school here in Sevilla. They once had a Japanese student who came to study Spanish here and he decided to become a torero. It would have sounded like a money spinner at the time, after all, those guys can make upwards of 50,000 euros each corrida, and there would probably have been a big market to see the first ever Japanese torero. Sadly, the story doesn´t end nicely, the poor guy ended up getting paralysed from the neck down or something like that! And it´s not a myth either, apparently it really happened, and not too long ago either...I guess the lesson learnt here was way too costly for him - in his twenties he tried to become a torero when those guys actually start from the age of 10 and actually hit their prime at 20.
Okay, this was a pretty long one, but I really hope it was worth it, I think I´ve been here way over a couple of hours, just got carried away typing! Oh, and I´ve proof read the whole thing and it´s safe to read, I promise! Well, if you´ve come this far, you would know that already! All the best people, and hopefully the next time you hear from me, it will be from the South of France!
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