been busy

Sorry for not posting in a few days, I was all fired up to write a great synopsis of the last few days, but something happened and now I don't feel that excited about it. Still, it'll be good for me to write a bit.

Thursday dawned with me throwing together our PowerPoint for the Armed Conflict presentation (the group members whose work I didn't yet have didn't send it until after I'd fallen asleep waiting the night before). Class rolled around, and after technicaly difficulties and the first group typically going overtime, it was our turn. But not only were we pressed for time, we didn't get to present to the professor because he was absent for unknown reasons. So we got the TA, who had no frame of reference for what's a reasonable length for these presentations. Every single one has gone at least 40 minutes, which the professor obviously knew, but they're only supposed to be a half hour, which is all the TA knew. So when ours went to 45 (and past the end of class, which is also common), she cut us off, and because we'd started late to begin with, we had to RACE through. I don't think we did as well as we should have or could have. Oh well, at least the essay part can make up for it somewhat (due this Thursday). That night, I went out with Jesse, a Wisconsin kid who was in my group, and some Michigan peeps to Budapest, a microbrewery on Bilbao. We cut up and laughed about how badly the presentation was gone and riffed on Borat and had a good time. Friday I spent reading and internetsing, before heading over to some other Michigan kids' (Sarah and Laurie) apartment for the Sam Tai-organized vegan dinner/party. Which was delicious/a lot of fun. I got very drunk and ended up sleeping over at Vale's.

Woke up Saturday morning and Vale and I had a very nice, very lazy and relaxing day, watching "Lost" season two on DVD (we finished and now basically HAVE to move on to season three because season two ended, well, awesomely. I spent the night again last night and this morning went home while she went to church with Lindsay. I read a bunch more (John Goldthorpe on divergent capitalisms in Western Europe in the mid-to-late 80s...dated and dense; give me the EU, already). Pilar and Pili and Kiko and Gabriel were cooking up a great lunch and invited Vale over to eat with us. So she got there in perfect time, around 3, with a delicious wine the name of which I forget. We ate and talked and laughed and it was, I shall uncreatively repeat, a great lunch. Afterwards, she got a call from Viviana, the director of COPA Viña, saying that a boy from there was missing in Santiago and could Vale go look for him. So I went to Starbucks to work on my part of the Nigeria essay and she went running off to the various bus stations. Unsuccessful there, she joined me at Starbucks and we spent the better part of the afternoon and evening calling every hospital and clinic possible and talking to Viviana and Isabel and Rodrigo (Katty's boyfriend the ex-detective). It was very stressful, especially for Vale. We finally left because there was nothing else to be done (no more numbers left to call OR to look up online...thank goodness for my computer and Starbucks wi-fi, and went to go find dinner somewhere. After a long walk and a relieving call from Viviana saying that she had found him, totally zonked out, in the airport waiting for his flight back to the states (I forgot to mention, there's something very wrong with him--the word breakdown got tossed around but it seemed worse than that), we ended up in Patio Bellavista, where we got a very nice dinner and ate outside in the cold. Too much noise inside, plus there were ostensibly space heaters outside. Anyhow, now I'm about to go to bed, but I'm feeling kind of down, so I'm going to leave you all with another video, this of one of my favorite songs of all time, which fits perfectly every mood I have, in very different ways: "This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody)" by the Talking Heads.