PISO PARTY!

When I passed out so late on Friday night I wasn't too worried about not sleeping because the construction above my unit never occurs on the weekends. Well I was dead wrong. At 10am, like clockwork, I was woken up halfway between drunk and hungover with a pounding headache aided by the incessant, loud pounding of hammers from above. I was angrier than angry and I could not sleep for the life of me. So I decided to just screw it all, get up for the day, and then take a nap around siesta time--when they usually stop working for the day. I got up and went to the bathroom and felt so tired and half drunk/half hungover that I just needed to lie down. So I went back into my room and, despite all of the banging, fell right back asleep and slept until 1ish. Hehe. Woke up with a hangover so I ate 2 pieces of toast and drank a copious amount of water. You know, before passing out Friday night I drank 2 glasses of water, took a multi-vitamin, and ate a piece of bread...and yet despite my best efforts I still woke up with a hangover. I think that it was the sugary Tom Cruise shot that did me in. I take it as a sign from the pop culture gods...never go for the Tom Cruise, he's bad news. Maruja was at a wedding all day so she left food for Maria del Mar, Stacey, and I to make ourselves. Maria del Mar also had bought a six pack of her favorite beer--lemon flavored Cruzcampo--and shared them with us. I at first hesitated, but my hangover really was not a bad one and was fading so I said why not. It was actually pretty good; tastes like Mike's Hard Lemonade meets Cruzcampo. But I was not having the whole liquor thing, so I took small sips and later ended up pouring the rest of it down the sink in secret. Oopsy. Maruja left us the ingredients to make a Cuban rice dish which at first looked pretty lame (just white rice and tomato sauce) but in the end turned out to be delicious, easy, and something that I plan to recreate in the States. It's white rice, tomato sauce, sausage, and an egg fried in olive oil all mixed together. We also had a green salad and strawberry batido for dessert...a lot of batido since it was only the 3 of us. While eating we watched "The Simpsons"! Yay for watching what we want to watch! After lunch I was still tired and a bit hungover, but the sun was coming out and I needed to get out of the house and get myself back in the swing of life. So I walked down to the river to get some sun and do some reading. I finished "Barranca Abajo" for Teatro. Wooooooo. Oh yeah, I also brought my camera with me to the river so I got some great pictures of random, everyday things in Sevilla that are worth capturing for posterity. It was also a gorgeous sunset. I walked back home around 8:30, bummed around, showered and got ready for the night. We then ate dinner around 9ish--the three of us again--grilled ham n cheese sandwiches and a raisin/walnut/endive salad with homemade blue cheese dressing (literally skim milk and crumbled blue cheese). After dinner Stacey and I received a text message from Melissa about the night...we planned on just hitting up the bar strip on calle Betis. We then gave them a call and they told us that their Senora was out of town for the weekend, so we were more than welcome to come up to their apartment, chill out, pre-game, and actually see their piso (literally means "floor", but that's what they call apartments, basically). PISO PARTY! This was so exciting because one thing that I miss more than anything here is just being able to go to our friends' places, chill out and drink. It's frustrating that we can't do this especially since we all live so close to each other. Yayyy! So we got ready and walked the 5 mins over to their place, headed up the stairs and finally saw their piso! It's so crazy...it's so different than ours! I never realize how nice our apartment is until seeing theirs': it's a 3 bedroom 1 bath (while ours is 5 bedroom 2 bath). They don't have a porch like we do nor a dining room. Their living room is teeny and very cluttered, as is their kitchen. In fact, the whole apartment was pretty cluttered. It was also very colorful and more young looking. Honestly, it looks like a college apartment, I kid you not! Their Senora is younger, in her mid-30's and lives alone except for housing American students (Melissa and Katie have 2 other roommates who are Americans studying abroad in another program). So it was so cool to finally see where they live...and it really made me feel so happy about our living situation. Our bedroom is even bigger than theirs', and our closet is sooo much larger. Huh. We hung out there for a good hour and a half having our PISO PARTY! Hehe, it really wasn't that exciting, but yet it was. We chatted and drank. I actually got pretty good and drunk there. Melissa is a poet and just got accepted into the UofM creative writing sub-concentration of the English Dept. (very competitive, so proud!). But I had never read her stuff, so we had a little poetry reading. Hehe. It sounds kind of corny, but it was so fun. Her poetry is amazing--very post-modern and creative. That girl is seriously going places, no joke. Her poetry reminds me a lot of Fiona Apple and Ani DiFranco lyrics...ya know, making the mundane into lyrical beauty. Excellent. At around 1am we ended the piso party and headed over to Betis. We first hit up the Long Island bar which is the American bar on Betis. It's so funny in there: they have Big Ten penants, team mascots, etc. etc. So silly. They have a huge shot menu, 50 shots for each of the 50 states. They're also cheap. What does that say about America? Haha, juuuust kidding. The liquor combos in each shot really don't make too much sense for each state. For example, the Michigan shot is just straight Jim Bean. We all wanted to do a Michigan shot, but Stacey and I were not feeling the whiskey...however Melissa and Katie were. Stacey and I just looked for a combo we liked not caring about what state it represented. I got a Rhode Island shot which I find really funny in retrospect since Rhode Island is pretty frickin random of a state. It had Bacardi and Malibu, which doesn't seem like it should go with Rhode Island but rather Hawaii. Oh well. Stacey randomly chose Colorado...I think it was vodka and Grenadine or something, I don't know. Well, we all took our U.S. shots, and did not enjoy them. Yep, they were doozies. To wash it back we all ordered Cruzcampos to sip on. After awhile we had had it with Long Island and headed over to our Betis standby, Big Ben (the British bar). Big Ben, although we frequent it, was crowded and smokey as usual. Boys were being creepy and strange. Ugh. We took some tequila shots there and then left. We drunkenly stumbled over to some random bar whose name I cannot recall which was full of Spanish people who stared at us. We were too drunk to care. We ordered beers and just chilled out next to the bar. They were playing such good music. I remember them playing Britney Spears and me freaking out...I mean, this was a novelty...this was old school Britney, so hearing it at a trendy bar was pretty awesome. I think that I went to town and sang really loudly and obnoxiously. I don't know if everyone else sang with me...I can't remember...knowing me, it's very possible that I sang all alone. Then some Spanish dude struck up a convo with me. He was actually pretty cute, not gonna lie. He kept asking for a kiss and I kept hesitating. Well, I'll throw it right out there, somehow we end up making out in the bar. Sorry to anyone who finds that shocking (parents, grandparents) but that's just my generation, I guess. The end. He actually was not a bad kisser, he redeemed the bad kisser image I had maintained after Marcos. Hehe. After that I knocked my beer off the bar. It didn't break at all which seemed like a miracle. I took it, however, as a sign to leave. So I pulled everyone out of the bar and we were spent. We walked with Melissa and Katie back to their apartment and went back up to their piso to raid their fridge. It IS like being back at college...late night drunken munchies in the friends' apt.! Oh I had missed those random occurrences. It's so crazy because Maruja never has snack food, and she doesn't have food that we can prepare on her own. Her fridge is usually pretty empty except for what she uses to prepare meals...so we have to buy our own munchies. At Melissa's and Katie's, however, the fridge was theirs' for the raiding. We ate some french bread, potato chips, and they even heated up a whole Spanish tortilla de patatas and we ate the whole thing. OMG, Spanish late night munchies, haha. I never thought that I'd be eating a Spanish tortilla drunkenly at 4am here. Hahaha. Somehow, also, I ended up juggling (or attempting to juggle) manderinas (tangerines) because we got on the topic of my circus past which everyone finds quite humorous. Juggling when intoxicated, however, does not really work and is honestly kind of frustrating. Finally at around 4:30 we called it a night and left our second piso party of the night. Hehe. It made me miss Ann Arbor because it was like being back in college! Pregaming, going out, then returning for drunken munchies. I miss the old routines. Gotta love the PISO PARTY!