Year Abroad: The Friday night where we were very international...

    The weekend after I spent a lot of time wrapped up in blankets and the weekend before I repeated this was a busy busy weekend filled with foreign people, foreign food and foreign languages.
 
     On Friday I had a dress rehearsal before the re-scheduled concert in the Saturday.  After this finished I had arranged to meet up with some of my friends and we all headed to Gonzalo's flat where they made me teach them some Scottish Country Dancing...ok so maybe I sort of forced them to participate but Anna was willing enough and with some more practice and a bigger room to dance in she shall conquer the Gay Gordons.  Gonzalo, who is a bilingual music teacher at the other high school in my town, is an amazing violin player and started to play along to the snippets of music from the weird instructional video I had found.

     After the dancing session and once the others had arrived we all headed out to what is surely the most frequented place by the assistants this year, Cafe Najera.  This place is famous for both its proprietor el Chino (who isn't Chinese...just has small eyes...yes the Spanish don't really seem to be down with political correctness) and for its Jarras...essentially one litre jars of beer.  Since I don't drink beer I have never experienced a Jarra.  Perhaps one night before I leave...I'd rather it be filled with juice though.  Also this place gives you ridiculous amounts of tapas, depending on how busy it is.  We met up with two of the other assistants who live in Baeza, an Australian girl and another American called Megan as well as a French girl Clemante who is an au pair.  Clemante is just slightly older than me and is also a language student on her year abroad.  Her languages are Spanish and English and she works for an English woman who lives here.  Gonzalo speaks French so they spent a lot of time talking in French and this led me to a discovery...I still understand French, I can't speak a word (apart from your very basic present tense and a little of the continous), but I understand spoken French enough to follow conversations and reply in another language.
 
   I spent a lot of that night talking with the Australian girl as our cultures seem to overlap more than they do with the Americans.  We chatted about which TV shows and stuff had made it from Aus to the UK and vice-versa and I got to find out an answer to a question I'd wanted to know for a while "Do Australians know what I'm A Celebrity is?"...the answer is yes, some do because Jason Donovan was in it, but she didn't know that it was filmed in Australia.
     After a while some of the people left to go dancing and this left Anna, Clemante, Gonzalo and I sitting in Cafe Najera.  Gonzalo was taking an age to finish his Jarra and was in the process of getting pretty drunk.  We discovered that for both Gonzalo and Clemante my Glasweigan accent was easier to understand than Anna's Iowan one...progress...but Dave still has problems understanding me...

     Leaving the bar Gonzalo discovered that there were some people from close to his home in the north.  They were asking where we were from and I think they were a bit surprised to find a Scot, an American and a French girl in a small quiet town in the middle of Jaen.

     The quote of this evening most definitely has to be Gonzalo's drunken shouting in English through the streets of Baeza: "In this weather, in Canatbria, the people go to the beach and play with the sharks!".