Got to start posting on this thing more often. I get caught playing catch-up all the time, filling-in the blanks of my ongoing personal narrative to make sure it makes sense later on, instead of just posting what´s up at the moment. Hey, Check out the eucalyptus trees!
Whatever. I´m in Toronto for a month (until Sept. 21). I decided to come home before classes start up again in Valencia, seemed like as good a time as any. The weather´s perfect, not too hot, not too cold. Wasn´t doing much back in Spain, anyway. I finished working at Pendueles English camp back on Aug. 22. All sorts of stuff happened to me there—I nearly didn´t get out alive. I could´ve gone with Amanda to Sweden (she´s spending 4 weeks there learning Swedish), but I didn´t really feel like spending another month at somebody else´s house, tip-toeing around and pretending like I´m not doing nothing. Also, she wants to practice her Swedish. Enough said. Actually, if we´d already had our own place in Valencia, I probably would have just headed home to catch up on sleep and chill out in Valencia till October.Turns out I´m really glad I came back to Toronto. It´s been nice to spend some time with my mom and have some beers my dad, to see my friends, though, I haven´t been able to see as many people as much as I would have liked, or even at all (sorry Andrew, Chris).
My foot´s feeling a lot fucking better than when I started physio in May). Actually, looking back on my scant posts over the last few months, I realize that I haven´t even said anything about my stupid bum foot. Here goes: shortly after arriving in Gran Canaria at the beginning of April, it started to really hurt (this isn´t really new, I injured my post tib tendon playing lacrosse in my last year of university and it´s never really healed). So, after getting X-Rays and seeing the doctor in Las Palmas, I spent the next 2 months going to physiotherapy, which meant getting up every day, 5 days a week at 6:30am to catch the bus down to Las Palmas, where I received treatment for an hour and a half (massage (painful), electrolysis (weird), magnetic therapy (also weird, kind of buzzy feeling...), ultrasound, anti-inflammatories: the works). The therapists were super cool, especially Dany, who took full advantage of me to practice his English. After all that, I´m more or less back to how I felt before injuring my foot, which is to say it hurts, but not that much. I could go into further details but I can´t be bothered and it´s probably really boring.
My 3 months in Gran Canaria certainly weren´t all bad, though. I headed to the beach everyday afterwards to work on my tan and do aqua aerobics with the old ladies. But it slipped-by a little too routinely, and instead of doing stuff like heading over to check out Tenerife (12€ boat ride), I sat around nursing my foot and drinking gin and tonics. It was nice to experience living in Gran Canaria for an extended period, isolated out there in the middle of the Atlantic and, all in all, I´d say I had a pretty good time.
a window fell on me. I´m still not very comfortable admitting this. I feel a bit like a first time AA member struggling to declare that he´s an alcoholic. And I didn´t even do anything.
Long story short: a window pane from the second story of the house we were living in during July and August at English camp, fell on my shin. The house this gorgeous, kind of glassed-in balcony, which covered the ground floor front entrance (in Canadian, we call it a ¨porch¨). I was sitting on the stairs with a bunch of 11 year old kids making kites out of wool thread and kebab sticks, when an 11´ by 8´ slab of glass landed on my shin. I can still remember it perfectly and I keep having these intrusiones mentales of the moment when the glass hit my leg. There was an instant of shock as the kids around me began screaming and I focused on the seemingly frozen and intact pane of class crashing on my shin, the little trickle of purply black blood seeping out of the gash, my skin, white, then, my brain, working faster than my nerves, I thought, oh shit, hope my leg isn´t cut off. I must have said something along the lines of "Aaaaghh, fucking shit!" as the pain shot up my leg, and immediately realized that I was basically O.K., and confirmed that there were no dead kids lying on the stairs, then I hoofed it up the stairs to get some first aid and some chocolate. It´s the first time I´ve ever seen stars (in my head). It´s not a nice experience, but it´s interesting to note that what I saw were rows upon rows of neatly arrayed stars. They weren´t moving, or lifelike or anything, and seeing through them to the people in the room whose voices sounded another room away made me want to swoon and vomit. Looks like Ireland, but it´s Asturias.
As it turns out, I only needed 2 stitches, but had the pane of glass fallen at a slightly different angle, or hit a different part of my body, or a kid, it would have been much, much worse.The day after the incident, the director of Cursos Internacionales, Dan, arrives. Asks me how I am, asks to see the window, scratches his head and tells me, as I stare him unbelievingly in the eyes, that we have to "agree on a story", that "this can´t go out like this." So, he heads across the street to Concha, the bulging matron in charge of everything physical at the Casona, including its upkeep and bringing the unending parade of kids and monitors to the medical centre, and doesn´t come back until 2 hours later. Tells me he´s just had coffee with Concha´s son, whatever his name is, who saw the whole thing. ¨Apparently¨, there were towels hanging—and, by the way, you know you really shouldn´t let the kids do that—in the windows, and a gust of wind blew the towel, and that´s what broke the glass. End of story. Pay more attention to your job. Towels´ll get you every time.
No fucking kidding. I really didn´t know what to say. Still don´t. But I´m going to put the incident ¨in writing¨ and make sure that next year when a window or a ceiling or a brick kills somebody, my experience is on record.
I´m pretty sure that if this had happened in Canada, they would have cordoned off the area and had some sort of official inspection. But, Dan just told us to try and keep the kids away from the area, which just happened to be the main entrance to the building. Then, after buying us a crate of cider, he headed off home to Salamanca, apparently content and unconcerned.
The next week, however, while we were out on a trek, dutifully avoiding the Casona, a whole chunk of the ceiling in the girls bathroom above the showers collapsed, nearly wiping out one of the cleaning ladies in the process. I couldn´t help but laugh somewhat hysterically and snap some pictures in case they try to deny it happened. After that, I spent the rest of the camp, cringing whenever the chandelier´s shook and eying the damp spots on the ceiling of the dining room (right below the showers) and half-expecting another swath of ceiling to come crashing down on some kid´s head. See crime scene photo below.
Back in Toronto, I decided to go see Hamlet with my mother at the Stratford Festival, and I can´t stop raving (internally) about how awesome an experience it was. I can believe I´ve never gone to Stratford before. Must be my parents fault. I suddenly feel let down, like they beat me or didn´t give me brand name peanut butter as a child or something. The actor who played Hamlet, Ben Carlson, was awesome. It was a strange decision to set the play in the 19th century, though. I guess they´ll do anything to draw a crowd, but it´s kinda hard to create that dark, grim, cold, brooding atmosphere that only the nighttime ramparts of a medieval castle in Denmark suggest. Cocktails and shirttails just don´t quite cut it. But hey, it was probably more interesting than seeing the same production of Hamlet for the umpteenth time would have been.Stratford itself really surprised me too. It´s very, very nice. We saw ducks, swans, geese, lots of white people and pretty houses. We even ate really nice, overpriced Indian (i.e. Pakistani) food.
Just finished:
A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy (should be mandatory reading for any english speaker along with Funk and White´s style guide),
Ian Rankin, Exit Wounds (Rebus´swan song - is that what that means? - typical Rankin, I digged it).
Posts
