Disco Dancin'

So, we went to the disco this weekend, for the first time! Exciting, right? Except, well, it wasn't...at all...well, maybe the tiniest bit. The name of it is White Elephant, and I guess it just opened a little bit ago. So maybe they're still getting the hang of things.

We got there at about 9:30, I think, and when we did we found out that dancing doesn't start until midnight. Okay...that's a long time to hang out, but whatever. Except that we were getting picked up at 11:30. Great. However, we were assured that our parents would be called and the retrieval time adjusted. Now we had two and a half hours to kill. After paying 12 euro at the door, I was expecting [hoping, praying] to have a damn good time. After all, that is a lot of money when your budget for the week is 50 euro! And you have 5euro left for that week! [Keep in mind this was Saturday night]. After paying, we went upstairs into this little lounge area, where there were these plates of chips on the tables. I was getting a little excited, because we had passed a sign that said something about food, I thought. After eating our way through two plates of chips, we asked, and found out that you had to buy sandwiches downstairs. We were like, "okay, sandwiches...this is classy..." So we went downstairs, to the actual disco part thing. I don't know if they charged a billion euros for everything to seem fancy, or to pay for the HUGE murals on the walls. They were, like, black and white tiger stripes with eyes. Atrocious. We had just settled into a spacious booth and were looking over the sandwich choices when we were told to move by a girl with a walkietalkie, because our table was "reserved"...that's another thing. Pretty much everyone who worked there was wearing a walkie talkie and a wire in their ear. Another thing the insane prices had to cover.

So we moved to the "non-special" section, which was pretty much tables and chairs, nothing too interesting. We were now sitting below/behind the big projection screen, so we got to watch the music video television they were showing flipped. Woohoo. Our sandwiches came [with paper placemats that said "Buon appetite"...they were really working the nice aspect. So we ate our sandwiches [which tasted really crappy...for some reason they put about a litre of tabasco sauce on them, so we had to tear off the bottom half of the roll because it was too spicy] and drank our pop, and contemplated paying 7euro for another too small strawberry margarita in a plastic cup. It was reeeeeeeeally exciting.

We did end up leaving later than 11:30...I think we drove out at about 11:45. When all the people who were planning on dancing started showing up. I buttoned up my h&m shirt all the way up the collar, just for kicks, and put on my dark red lipstick [without a mirror...I did pretty alright] that they had made me change earlier, just to be a badass. Some guy was checking out my lipstick but I just put on my Jackie-O sunglasses and pretended not to notice.

As we drove away I noticed a group of guys in the adjoining parking lot...if they ended up going to White Suckaphant after we left that is lame...'cause some of 'em were pretty darned cute!!

By the time we got home I was pretty p.o.'ed...one thing I hate about here is not knowing what is going on all the time, even if I ask, and because our plans had changed so often that day [disco, piazza, disco, piazza, discopiazzadiscopiazzadiazza disco], I was annoyed about that. I was also upset about being told that every piece of clothing I owned was wrongwrongwrong. And then paying so much to go to the disco and not even getting to dance. I got dressed up for a 15euro gross sandwich and cup of pop. Greeeat.

Luckily Alex was spending the night [Yesssss!] so we put on our PJs and sat out on my balcony, talking about SerbiaFashionCaliforniaItalyFrustrationsGuysFriendsThe Universe and Everything. Then we watched the Breakfast Club [or at least started it...I fell asleep during it 'cause I'm a jerk...then Alex started getting tired] and went to bed. Of course, by now, unless I'm REALLY exhausted I can't go to sleep without my lullabyes and so I had to sneak my eyepod on.

In the morning we lounged around and watched Troy in Italian and ate plum cakes until it was time to take Alex home. After dropping her off at the apartment we [my mom, dad, and Dani] started driving to my mom's hometown. It was, no joke, like, an hour away. When we got there Dani and I sat on the couch and watched "Ritorno al Futuro" 2 and 3, with a break for previously frozen gnocchi and cold, fried, rice balls. That makes the food sound really horrible, and it wasn't, but at that point I was tired, not hungry, and in desperate need of a shower. All sensations that were to increase throughout the day.

We left in the middle of Back to the Future 3 to go to the cemetery and visit all their dead relatives. Wow, cemeteries here are so not even like the ones in the U.S. No grassy mounds scattered with faded flowers here, oh no. This was, like, an apartment complex for the dead. You know, when they have those tall marble locker/drawers? And they all had pictures of the occupant on the front. Even the people that weren't in drawers, that were buried in the ground, were in stone and cement boxes and under slabs. Whatever dirt there was was purely cosmetic. At first I was mostly just creeped out, standing there, surrounded by corpses in stone towers. Then my thoughts kind of turned morbid...all the slots were kind of short looking, and I started to wonder what would happen if you were too tall? Would you get laid diagonally? Bent and the knees? Cut up and reassembled into a more appropriately dimensioned form? Or would you just be rejected all together? When I started feeling bad about thinking that in such a place I started thinking more about death and dying and people I've know who have died, and what will happen when people I love die...at that point I could feel tears pricking the back of my eyeballs so I slid on my sunglasses and did my best to maintain a look of serene detachment. I don't know if it worked but I think everyone was thinking about other things and not the expression on the American girl's face.

After the cemetery we drove to the town where my [host]mom was born, and I sat in her cousin's house watching "Reality Circus" on television and drinking black coffee, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone except Dani because I wasn't in the mood for chit chat. When I finally thought we were going to go home we went to mass, which, though I didn't go last week and thus was anxious to, wasn't nearly so enjoyable as it is here in Santa Maria. I must admit my mind wandered during the sermon and I spent most of the time thinking about how to be Snow White for Halloween. There was a cross stamped on the back of the communion wafers, off center. That distracted me for the rest of the mass.

After church we went back to the cousin's house, at that point Dani was grouchy about something and I was ready to join her, being really physically tired, tired of not knowing what was happening, really in desperate need of a shower, and also worried because the plan was to go to pizza at the Irish Pub with the other exchange students at 8:00...It was past that and we were still 1 hour away.

The minute the car stopped outside our gate Dani and I ran inside and called Carmen [Alex's host sister] and found out that pizza got cancelled, and to see them at the Piazza. I put on eyeliner and earrings, but couldn't be bothered to change my shirt to the new one...I didn't even really want to go out but I wanted to see Alex, and I didn't want to miss a chance to scout cute boys.

I ended up getting pizza that night, though the fact that it wasn't in an Irish Pub made it slightly less exciting. And the fact that people kept putting in HUGE orders so I had to wait for 3 pizzas to be made and baked and sold before getting my 2 pieces. One thing that was nice was a cute boy came in to get pizza whilst I was waiting...I was checkin' him out [I think he caught me a few times...oops...] until he left, but I didn't say anything to him [a] because I didn't want to miss my chance to get my pizza and [b] because I assumed I'd probably see him on the piazza. Well, I got my pizza, but CB, like all the other ones, having given me my one sighting, disappeared into thin air. Dang it!!

So I spent the evening eating pizza [I love that you can get 3 pieces of premium pizza for 2,40 euro...] and watching Alex not flirt with the fellow [Peanut Butter] that she likes. It was very productive.

Trying to be interesting,
Bee Electric