Beer, Balls, and Boobtube

Wow, hard to believe two weeks have gone by already. Some quick observations on my time here thus far:

Booze is ridiculously cheap. Beer is only about 1.25 euros in restaurants. In fact, beer is sometimes cheaper than water. One of the other students told me that you can get decent box wine in the supermarket for less than a euro. Of course he also was telling me about drinking moonshine in Georgia so I don’t think I trust his definition of ‘decent’. On the flip side, I don’t understand why other common goods are so fricking expensive. That bottle of contact solution I bought was 8 beers and the packets of kleenex were about 3 beers (yes, I use bottles of beer as my conversion scale).

God, I love watching soccer here. It’s amusing to see little kids in the street kicking a ball around with far, far more skill that I have. Then again my soccer skills only rival my Spanish skills in terms of suck. From what I understand there is the 1st division with Real Madrid, FC Barcelona and the like, a 2nd division where the Tenerife team currently plays, and a separate minor league under that. Similar to other leagues, the bottom teams in the 1st division and the top teams in the 2nd division swap places at the end of the season.

Anyway, I was watching the FC Barca vs Espanyol match on television and was a teensy bit disturbed to see one group of fans throwing lit flares at a rival group of fans entering the stadium. There were also tons of police in full riot gear. Ah, good times. I can only imagine the madness that is Real Madrid vs FC Barca. It’s quite fun to watch games in a bar and hear the shouts of Falta! (Foul!) or Amarilla! (Yellow card!) from everybody watching. Of course, there’s more stuff being shouted but I don’t understand it yet. Also, I thought it was a bit funny that the Iron Chef theme music was used at the start of the Tenerife match I was watching.

Speaking on television, there are a ton of shows from the states televised here but they are about a season behind. My host mother’s boyfriend was asking me when they were going to escape in Prison Break and I had to break it to him that there were several more episodes before they finally get out. He then (I think) told me how much he disliked the way shows stretched things out and how commercials take up so much time. Some things are true everywhere I suppose.