Highlights pt. 3 (Final Post!)

As you may have inferred from the title this will be the last time I post in this blog.  It is a sad time but also a joyous time, as I know that my URL address will go on to a better place when I take it behind the interweb GUI interface, delicately put my hand over the delete key, tears in my eyes, and kill it in the face.  I am the creator and the destroyer in this virtual page, but perhaps I will leave the relics here just so others may know what a great rulers have come before them, my kingdom could be a museum.  I have earned the most blogosphere points out of any social networker in existence.  Note* there are no such thing as blogosphere points, I did that because now all the competitive hipsters are scrambling anxiously trying to figure out why they never earned any points for their ironic and non-conformist indie music blog.  I'm not fond of hipsters despite the similarities I share with them, the subtle difference being that I'm actually a sarcastic hippie, not a contentious prick. 

This last post will cover some of the people I met this year, not main characters, like my host family, or friends from school, or the Pamplona group, but rather the third-tier.  Characters that come up only every couple of episodes but brighten one's day nonetheless.  These people are more than acquaintances but just barely, they are going to serve as examples of how the world is always filled  with more people to meet.  And barely any of them are hipsters.  The three people I will mention here are surf lady, ganja man, and pastry woman, which all, incidentally, sound like awesome team of super heroes.  They would all work as a team, to enjoy extreme sports, get the munchies, and then satisfy those munchies.

I met surf shop lady in October and have known her by far the longest out of any of the three.  At the beginning of the year she helped me with choosing out a wet suit for classes, but as time went on I stopped taking classes and she helped me out more.  Once every two weeks or so I would return and rent a new board, trying out different styles and coming back with new and interesting injuries.  Sometimes she would ask me how I got cut up and sometimes I would successfully hide the wounds because everybody knows that men who feel physical pain are just covering up their vagina.  Sometimes I would accidentally scrap my feet on the fins and cut up my toes, other times I would use my gloves to wipe salt water from my face and end up getting abrasions all around my eyelids.  The value in surfing for me was a careful balance of how much time I spent riding waves and how much time I spent limping/bleeding for days afterwards.  Surf shop lady helped me out a lot this year but I now realize that I probably know more about surfing than she does.  At first I would ask her a question expecting an all-knowing sort of answer, now I ask her for advice and we sort of awkwardly stumble through a problem together with guesses and assumptions.  I have found that jobs are just a way for people to earn money, just as a McDonald's employee will probably not be able to help you with recommendations for your gastric track, a surf shop employee might not be an avid surfer.  Weird right?  I don't know if I will see surf shop lady again, but I will miss her smile and concerned eyes every time I came back with a new wound.

Ganja man is different, I have only met him twice.  Marijuana is legal to grow for personal use in Spain, thus there are a large number of seed and smoke shops around town.  For months I passed by this one store on the way to and from school everyday, always trying to peek in and see the magical pot world.  At the start of the year I was afraid to do more than just walk by the shop for fear that my host family or host club member would walk by and get the wrong idea.  But then I decided screw it, what are the chances that a member of my host family will walk by and I'm pretty sure that no one from Rotary even remembers I'm here, much less what I look like.  Health class always taught me that if I ever went near a pot smoker without calling my parents for emergency evacuation much like in a zombie apocalypse I would soon descend into the realm of shelling out sexual favors for hits of crack, that is just how drugs work in health class.  Just like how Health class showed studies that said if  two virgins ever had sex with a condom there was a 50% chance you would both get an STD and she would definitely be pregnant.  But in the end my reasoning was 'Screw it, I'm interested and the rest of the world can think what they want, but I'm going into that store.'  So I did, and nothing happened.  I had a talk about the environment, political and economic influences, and medicine.  I will say that even before going into the store I was well aware of the benefits of hemp and medical marijuana as well as the relative danger of alcohol or tobacco compared to weed.  The man must not get many customers because I made it clear I was not going to buy anything and he was still happy to talk to me for thirty minutes about this and that, mostly cannabis but some other subjects as well.  The times when I talked to this man were in December and January when my Spanish was still developing, and I have to say, that out of all the store owners who tried to speak English with me, Ganja man spoke the best.  Explain that Health Class.

Last but not least is Pastry woman.  I dropped by her store from time to time to try some Spanish desserts and recently I arranged a large order that I will take back to the U.S and give as gifts to family and friends.  After I started showing up more and more often to decide what I was going to buy to take across the ocean with me we got to know one another better.  She helped me with choosing travel safe goods that were still typical to Spain and gave me free samples.  My reaction to samples is usually somewhere around this.
Me: 'Well I've already had some at another store and I really don't need any more, after all I don't even know if I want to buy the gifts here.'
Seller: 'It's free.'
Me:'... You son of a bitch, and I was watching my figure too.'
She greets me with a smile and has started calling me 'maho,' which means sweetie, my name just seems to complicated for the Spanish people.  Her store closed for the summer one day after I bought the gifts for everyone back home, and again, I don't know if I'll ever see her, but it was nice meeting her.

This wraps up my blog from San Sebastian, Spain.  If you've been following and enjoyed it, or maybe just read a couple posts and thought it was funny, write a comment below or send me a message on Facebook.  I'll probably reply but I don't know if I'll write anything special for you, this is just kind of for my ego, after a year of writing I would kind of like compliments from someone other than my mother.  In summation, although this has not been the easiest or greatest year of my life I would recommend a year long exchange to anyone considering it.  The opportunity to learn and grow is fantastic and living with a different family can really make an impression on anyone.  Plus, when you study abroad, you are the person with the sexy foreign accent.  Think about it.