Days Twenty-nine through Thirty-two

Tuesday

Work as normal, more or less. It was about this time that I started one of my workplace traditions: coffee with sweetened condensed milk. The NEX (pronounced like "necks" - Naval EXchange - the duty-free, tax-free American products/food store in the embassy) ran out of milk, and out of desperation for something to put in my coffee, I went with sweetened condensed milk. And it turned out to be excellent. With fresh coffee, fresh sweetened condensed milk and a dash of cinnamon, I had essentially created a cinnamon dulce latte but for a fraction of the price. Zahra was overjoyed by this discovery and has pleaded with me every day since to recreate it.

Wednesday

Wednesday is Spain's national holiday: a celebration of lots of things: Spanishness, being Spain, and oh yeah, discovering the new world. And let's be honest, everyone, if Spain has ever deserved credit for anything, it deserves several hundred years of credit for that. So, it being a holiday (and the American embassy getting off both US and Spanish holidays) I slept in and did nothing in particular until midday.

After that, though, the good stuff started: I went to Plaza de España:




Then headed to the palace:





Then finally met up with my roommate and some Erasmus friends and went to the Temple of Debod again to hang out and have a mini-picnic in the falling twilight.

Thursday

Nothing much happened today. I got home earlier than usual, and, as I always do, tried and failed to get to bed early.

Friday

All the interns decided to have a movie night tonight. After spending about thirty minutes trying to decide which movie to rent from the NEX, we settled on Limitless and finished out our workdays. My fellow interns Cassandra and Erin, who live together and work in the same section, got a gig house-sitting together for one of the State Department employees who was away for several days. Cassandra and Erin humbly offered up this house-sat apartment for our movie night, and I arrived to hear that the NEX guy hadn't put the movie in the case. But we had pizza and wine and generally had a good time, finally deciding to entertain ourselves with Taboo, which proved extremely fun. After playing that for several rounds we decided to go out and met up near a bar with some of Cassandra's Spanish friends (Cassandra had previously lived for 3 years in Salamanca and consequently had accrued several friends). We had a good time, got a couple of too-expensive beers, and I got home early and slept in. Very in.