9/21/10

A pretty uneventful day.  The weather was really crummy.  I had class until 11:30, but I stayed at the University until 1 to wait for Emily to get out of class.  After class, we booked plane tickets to Rome.  We will be going October 7 after class and coming home on Sunday, October 10^th.  We will either being staying in a hostel or with some of Emily’s family’s friends when we go.  I took the metro back for lunch and had to sprint 4 blocks in the pouring rain, ducking under ledges and trying to stay as dry as possible.

            For lunch, Pepita’s daughter was also there.  They had already eaten, because her daughter had to go back to work.  I had pasta and chicken.  After lunch I took a nap and woke up to go to my economics class at the other university.  It was my second time attending the International Economic Organizations class and it wasn’t as good as the first class.  I sat near the front, but I still couldn’t understand the professor between his mumbling and random tangents.  He rarely wrote notes on the board and it was hard to focus for two hours.  I think I have decided that I will probably audit that class.

            I returned home for dinner and tonight Pepita talked my ear off.  Sometimes she just doesn’t stop. After we finished eating dinner, she talked to me for about an hour all about immigration in Spain.  I learned that she had lived in this apartment building for more than 40 years.  She used to live on the 8^th floor, but then she moved to the top floor.  Then in the middle of our conversation, her Russian maid called and they set up a time for her to come.  I then asked if there are a lot of Russian immigrants here.  She said that in recent years there have been a lot of immigrants from China and India.  In her neighborhood, there never used to be any stores owned by Asians, but now they have all sorts of stores.  She said that she doesn’t like to shop in them though and that she shops to get her fruit, meat and groceries all at Spanish owned stores.  She also talked about the growing number of Muslim immigrants, and I was surprised about how openly against them she was.  She talked about how she can tolerate the Chinese immigrants, but avoids all interactions with Muslim immigrants.  She said that they didn’t adapt to the Spanish culture when they came and that they were just dirty people in general.  I wonder if this antipathy stems from the Spanish history with the Muslims (the Moros occupied Spain from about siglo VIII until 1492- when the last Muslim king was expelled from Grenada) or if her hatred came from more recent world events and terrorist attacks.  After cleaning up, I played some Minesweeper and went to bed.