Pieces of my mind

Random snippets...

Planning all this traveling is more simultaneously exciting and stressful than any of my classes. (She says, the week before midterms. Hah? Yeah...)

Running four internet chat/voice/video programs (GChat, Facebookchat, Skype, and iChat) simultaneously is quite stressful on both me and my computer, especially at night when all my Europe friends are home for dinner and all you people in the States are waking up. If I suddenly start ignoring you, I promise it isn't because I don't love you - I'm either distracted to the point of tearing out my hair, or my computer has begun to whir and make sad noises at me.

Another problem with all this rain (though as I write this it's slightly cloudy and breezy but not raining) is that your laundry builds up because there's no way to dry it. I have run out of clean pants.

The Euro-dollar exchange rate right now is really, really excellent. At the risk of sounding like an insensitive American (which pretty much comes with the territory at this point), don't hurry and fix your economy, Greece! This is great!

I have now planned trips to France on two separate occasions (Lyon and Marseille!), which will be the true test of the degree to which Spanish has killed my other language skills. Best case scenario: I sound like an idiot (slash a Catalan or Portuguese stroke victim)* for twelve hours before my brain figures it out and remembers how I used to be fluent in French. Worst case scenario: I lose the remainder of my ability to express myself clearly and effectively in any language.

Tomorrow we are going to go look at Velázquez in the Prado, and I am very excited.

A real post about Madrid is coming soon, I'm just too preoccupied by plane tickets at the moment, so it'll probably appear sometime tomorrow or Friday after I (theoretically) work everything out.

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*Caveat: I am not actually a horrible person. Mixing Spanish and French generally produces something that sounds close to either Portuguese or Catalan, depending on which elements of each language you transfer, and how many words you make up. And I am going to stop myself there to avoid another linguistics essay on phonetics and second-language learning.