squeeze the minutes out of the day.

I came to Spain to relax. To take it slow. To drink beer at lunch, and for that to be a socially acceptable choice, especially during the work week. Yet I find myself sprinting around Madrid like a some kind of electrified, self-propelled pinball. I use my Abono (metropass) like Paris Hilton uses her credit card. My days start at 9 and finish sometime around 9 or 10. What am I doing? Until 1 or 2, I work at a school, in Infantil. I teach preschool (Today, first thing, someone in my class vomitted. Not from being hungover). Then, I have some free time, followed by private classes, which leads to the sprint to the center of Madrid for language classes (French or Arabic, depending). I get home, and recently I started knitting. My roommates made me sit in the rocking chair, and wear my grandmother's sweater...because I'm an 80 year old woman. Back to the point. You can take the girl out of America, but you can't take America out of the girl. There has to be a reason for that cliché...a reason being the truth. Yes, I am in Spain, and I do take the time to slow down, but I still have some strange desire to run around in a tizzy for much of my day. Really, the downside is the unavailability of to-go coffee cups. Am I contributing less to global warming and trash heaps? Yes. Am I miming drinking coffee on the metro? Yes. Yes, I am.