I will not eat your green eggs, just your ham.

Let's just get this out there: I HATE HARDBOILED EGGS. I would gladly send them by mail to any child in Africa willing to take them off my plate. They would smell exactly the same after two weeks in the mail and three weeks on a bus to a random village to a random kid as they do when they are sitting on my plate, hidden under some delicious sauce pretending to be something yummy. But the SURPRISE that is hard boiled egg.

Here is the issue with eggs and bananas: when I eat them, I can taste them in my nose. You might as well just end it right there. Any food that you can TASTE in your nose is unacceptable. Kind of like how you can taste skunk. Ew.

So anyways this is supposed to be a blog all about my great adventures over here. To be honest, life is kind of school, and then random fights on buses and trips. But then again, this IS my life, so even on "boring days" like today, I'm going to just write and we'll see what happens.

I started off today trying to explain my madre how to get on your bike when the seat is too high. You know, the whole use the peddle to lift yourself as you start moving forward trick. So we are in the kitchen with her new red bike that has midget wheels and is just ridiculous all around, and I'm trying to shower her but am also five minutes late for school, so am doing a really poor job. Instead of just trying to halfway understand my Spanish. she decided it was easier to just try to do it. IN the kitchen. So there I am, holding up the bike while she literally is sitting on it trying to bike in the kitchen.

Apparently, if you want to learn to ride a bike, don't ask me to teach you in a kitchen. Becuase I came back from school and she's in the kitchen with her daughter, with her pants covered in blood. Learning to ride a really tall bike in a white sweat suit was really just teasing fate: betcha I can learn to ride a bike in white pants. HA. I could have called that one right off. Whenever I wear white, it is just a bad story. Or even really any light color for that matter. Once, at my cousin's babyshower, with all my female relatives on my mom's side, I somehow managed to sit on a Hersey's Kiss for about an hour in my silver silk shorts. You get the idea.

White shorts, biking, and blood really don't make an attractive mix. She just walked around the kitchen saying "Michelle you have an old crazy bike riding Spanish mom.... poor girl."

More like "Mom, you have an explanation challenged child."

Back to the eggs. I just can't get over it. The first night she gave them to us, I was like ohhhh my dad used to eat them before every swim meet (maybe I told this story? I am so repetitive I can't remember so am going to go check so I can save you some time.) Okay so I check and I don't think I told this story. I tried explaining how EVERY DAMN MORNING my dad would eat hardboiled eggs at swim meets. Every. Single. Time. In a tiny hotel room in Strangely, in Ann's house, out of a cooler, he would just always have them. Who knows where they came from (Mom.) but I will never get over the smell. Swimming after smelling HBE's is probably the worst feeling ever. Gross. Tonight, Madre goes "I know you don't like eggs hard, but this time you will. They are so good." Yes, THIS time, I will suddenly fall in love with hardboiled eggs, and if not, maybe in 17 more times I will.

Never again. Never.

Let's jump to a random new topic called I want it to be Christmas. I want to go Christmas shopping (so that I have a legit reason to buy things instead of my excuse today which was "I deserve this because I had to do so much homework and because I went to almost all my classes this week. Please don't mind that it was a four day week and I skipped one day, that was just a mental health day. Other than that I have worked soooooo hard.) and I also want to be able to sing Christmas songs without people looking at me like, uhmm excuse me, not yet. Although I think here, they start la Navidad much earlier than in the States... actually possibly on the 8th of November. I need to check that stat. I also want to be able to quote Elf daily, instead of just weekly, and I want to be able to put up Christmas lights in my room. I'm going to have to go to a Chino store to find them. I thought people were totally racist calling stores Chino stores (stores of Chinese people) but it's just their name here.

A story about Tiendas de Chinos:

Mary, Rachael and I went on an adventure up the hill by school looking for a tienda de Chinos to buy clothes hangers at. So we can't find it and finally give up and decide to go into a random store to ask directions. Only we happen to pick the chino store to ask. This clicks ASAP for Rachael and I, cause there are literally Asians all over the place, but apperantly Mary missed the memo because she walked right up to the guy at the register and goes "Donde estan los chinos?" "Where are the Chinese?"

He just looked at her. What do you say to that? "Oh, we are right here with our cheap stuff and our Asian eyes."

Also, when shopping today for all those things I "deserve" I tried on some boots in a Tienda de Chinos and let me just tell you, Spanish in a Chinese accent is a fail. Don't even go there with me. I thought she was speaking straight up Mandarine to me. And I kept saying "Lo siento solo hablo ingles y espanol." "I'm sorry, I only speak English and Spanish."

After about six "Yo tambien." "Me too." I got that ohhhh ps. that was Spanish not Chinese. The amount of people I am shocking with my supreme intelligence is just crazy. They probably think they met the world's smartest person after being graced by speaking with me.

Am now feeling totally humiliated because I just realized that I can indent paragraphs on here... for some reason I thought it was like e-mail and that you couldn't. I am grammatically embarrassed right now.

Let me introduce you to my latest crush now: Santander. I don't know how I've managed to make it like 12 blogs without gushing like a little girl in love about my city. I literally feel possessive of it. It is mine. End of story. Everyone else is just here visiting :)

Santander is pretty small compared to Madrid/Barcelona/etc. There are 220,000 ish people, which I feel like is huge since Steamboat is about nothing compared to that. But what is awesome is that the people and the city feel so small town. I live two minutes from the beach and there's this path at the end of the beach that goes out to the point of the coast on the bay, and then loops around to a light house and runs along the coast. I am going to get in shape (ha) and run the whole thing by spring. For now, I should probably start with walking the whole thing. That might be my plan for Sunday. Anyway, my building has a bar, Pizza Hut, and a place I can get fries. It also has the bus stop for all the lines literally down the steps, and is ten minutes from my school. I have a terrace that I can sit on and look at the beach and read, and am kind of just spoiled like no other. I keep waiting to wake up from some dream, but really don't want too.

Now, because I am a really old woman and slight nerd, I am going to spend my Friday night in the bath with a book, and then in bed, so I can get up and go to the fish market in the morning and then to a town called Somo, that's a 30 minute ferry ride away and has a stellar beach. Just promise me that you won't have hardboiled eggs for breakfast, because they are a dinner food, didn't you know?