Friday, February 27th "Friday afternoon, night and Saturday morning; Losing your Spanish"

Every now and then we start a Friday early with Carlos and some friends. Generally a 3 or 4pm start time for a few beers at a cerveceria and then we see what happens from there. This time we started in el Arenal at a little bodeguita that's been around for a while. In fact some of the supports - which look as if they've been placed there to temporarily hold up the building - were painted the same color as the rest of the bar. Perhaps they decide to keep them there for good. We arrived around 4pm and stayed until about 9:30. Some of the conversation was about the coming Betis-Sevilla match on Saturday night and the rest about building web sites, programming and of course communication, which I'm getting better at. We also managed to meet a girl who had just moved to Sevilla from a small town in Galicia some 2 weeks ago. The city is great but it also seems to intimidate her a bit. We decided that in moving from Galicia and myself coming from the U.S. we had more in common than some the rest of the group in how we looked at Sevilla.

As I mentioned some of the conversation centered around working on web sites. Ruben and Jose Angel, two friends of Carlos and now two friends of mine, both like the idea of us trying to work on a project together. Through the many beers I hope they realize I, too, would like to do the same. Now to find a client/project where we can do that, but I'm sure something will come up.

As the night moved on we made our way to another El Tremendo. I get the feeling that they might have a little something to say to the folks in Santa Catalina who have a bar known as El Tremendo, too. I say this only because this "new" El Tremendo I went to has a little note under there sign saying the name is registered. I don't know, maybe they all come from the same family and the bars are related, but it seems this second one I went to feels protective of their name. And if you visit Sevilla you'll realize that for every bar with a name there's another with the same name somewhere else. Go ahead and try to count the number of Bar Manolo's there are out there.

But onto other things...we spent maybe an hour here for a few more beers and one needed very small montadito. Then on to Cafe Ole, a bar in what feels like was once a shoe store, where they make some of the best mixed drinks. Not only are they served in good portions, but they seem to have a technique (watch if your drink involves a lemon or lime) and they come out being quite tasty. It was maybe an hour into being there and a few minutes into a conversation with Ruben and Esther that I lost my ability to speak Spanish for maybe 5 minutes. Certainly the alcohol had taken it's toll, it was a combination of the language leaving me plus an inability to pronounce anything correctly. English pronunciation had taken over so every word that came out of my mouth sounded strange. Add that to lapse in vocabulary and I think anything I said might as well have been in Chinese. These moments happen and thankfully it was only for a few minutes. I remember agreeing to work with Ruben on this page - helping me sort out some issues so I could post content more frequently rather than working on the coding every time I want to post. I just hope he remembers that, too.