Plaza Mayor, Pork Rinds, and other things ...

I'm so tired of being sick ... I just got over another bout of sickness today.  I've been working hard at school, but have seemed to reach a real valley.  Hopefully, my progress will pick up again soon.  The weather has been quite warm of late, and Chris and I have been going to the Plaza Mayor to sit in the sun and do our homework.  It's amazing how fluent (and funny) we are after a couple of drinks! 

While we were out this week, we noted a few more differences between the U.S. and Spain.  We went to an Italian restaurant and realized how familiar Americans are with Italian dishes when we looked at the menu and it had photos of the different types of pasta to explain what the dishes are!  This is tortellini, and this is fusilli, and this linguine ....

Bread that we call Wonder bread is called Bimbo bread here and the natives that I've spoken to don't understand why that's funny ... guess some humor just doesn't translate.  And Héctor has a bottle of dish soap on the counter whose name wouldn't have made it past the first cut with an American marketing company ...

Yesterday in class the teacher wrote a word on the board and asked if anyone knew what it meant.  No one did, and so she said in English: "redneck".  90% of the class speaks English, but I'm the only native English speaker and I think that I may be the only who really got it.  When Chris and I were in the pissy bar with the four over-sized sconces on the wall, they served us a bowl of deep fried pork rinds.      S-o-o-e-y!   How apropos that the teacher told us just the following week how to say "redneck".

And lastly, I haven't seen spray painted Jesus in a couple of weeks.  I've worked up a whole story in my mind about him, being on vacation on the beaches of Málaga, but I decided that nothing could be more bizzare than the actual photos that I have posted of him.  So while our latter day saint takes his respite, I'm posting a new arrival to the Puerta del Sol:  a tree.  Was this a left over costume at the wardrobe department or something?  I mean, what is that about?