Random Thoughts

I was in Spain about four years ago; it was my first trip abroad and it was amazing and exhilarating and mind-boggling. It was also filled with bad sangria. I haven't had much sangria since moving here, so I still don't really know whether it's normal to make it with fruit cocktail here or if we were just so obviously tourists that we kept being served the crappy tourist sangria. I do know now that it gets worse than fruit cocktail sangria: They sell boxed sangria here. There were some high school kids drinking it on the metro last night.

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There's a lot more mixing of ages at bars here than in the US. Last night I was at this neighborhood/meat market bar (my friend just finished a drawn-out breakup of a psuedo-relationship and needed to be hit on, even if it was by sketchy guys) and while it was mostly people in their 20's and 30's, there were some people there who were probably in their 50's. I like that.

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The grocery stores here are never crowded, at least not in my neighborhood. At first I thought maybe I was just going at odd times, but I've been on Saturday mornings, Saturday afternoons, weekday evenings, the occasional weekday afternoon, and they're always nearly empty. It's nice, but I don't understand it. Could be because there are tons of grocery stores in my neighborhood, but why are there tons of grocery stores if they're all empty? It's one of many things that I'm inclined to attribute to the fact that the economy here is more socialist: Stores can stay open without making much profit because there's more government protection. But I have no idea if that's really the case.