Harry and I spent the days moving up to the new year with a group of his old, dear friends in a big house in a little town called Alcaracejos about an hour north of Córdoba. It was pretty fun. We made little trips to see little convents, castles and towers. One castle was impressively obscured by fog. We walked up a little stony path through foggy groves of olive trees. The castle was falling apart (a shame that it´s not better preserved, but then some gentlemen prefer ruins.) and the moat had been reclaimed by the landscape. It was quite lovely. I walked back teaching Alex (the youngest of the group, newly 6, quite a cutie) words for things in English.
Other highlights: A little church tower. Every high building in the region had a huge stork´s nest on it. The stork was a sort of symbol of the region because of this and some churches had these big metal baskets on their roof to encourage the building of a nest. Anyways, in the tower were all these dead birds and crumbly droppings and groups of eggs. We also saw a precious stork-chick (storkling? storkette?).
It was a bit overwhelming at first language-wise. Complete and chaotic immersion. I think I did pretty well, though I wasn´t superlatively chatty by any means. I had a semi-dream in Spanish last night.
New Year´s Eve went late. I think we went to sleep at 4:45 am. We all had our 12 peeled grapes and ate one for each toll of the bell at midnight and then drank sparkling malvasia. We had a dance party afterwards. Harry, the poor thing, got what I had, minus the fever. His chest was pretty mucus-ridden. He went to sleep after dancing for awhile. There were lots of awesome, bad songs, like Shakira´s La Tortura and some euro-disco about grunting like a gorilla. At the 3am mark, Rafa (the DJ with the mirror tie to match the mirror ball) started playing slow-dances, like `Dust in the Wind´ by Kansas and he put on `Forever Young´ by Alphaville and it made me very sad in a good way. I hadn´t heard that song in years and the feeling was end of the night at a smoky disco. Total nostaligc cheese. The song has not aged gracefully, but it was fitting.
Where were these guys from? It´s like badly translated Japanese. Maybe German? :
Its so hard to get old without a cause
I dont want to perish like a fading horse
Youth is like diamonds in the sun
And diamonds are forever
PS: Definitely German (after some research)
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The stork bringing in BaBy New Year! More birds for us to see. I'm glad you explained this curiousity once. NY Eve was pleasant at the Cafe! Christian started it off with a bang...before service he had left a scripto lighter above the stove and it exploded into plastic shrapnel and with a bang. The proverbial "shit will hit the fan"? Maybe Holly's whisperer was right. But the night continued on fine. I had a private party of 16 Scandinavians who asked me at 12:30to call them four cabs. Hello? They did not leave until 2:15. Boo! Callie is now in Buenos Aires. Maybe you will hear from her on Bambi. More soon! Say hello to Harry!
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