Day 18: Zzzzzzzzzz's & Chicken Marsala

After careful calculation it occurred to me that I'd been getting an average of 5 hours of sleep per day this week between midterms, extra classes in the afternoon, catching up on my blog and hanging out with L. SO I declared Thursday to be “zzzzzzzz” day. Or, at least, decided to take FULL advantage of my siesta and sleep for a good three and a half hours.

 One word: Glorious.

After waking up (I pressed snooze for an hour) I took a little walk over to the neighborhood grocery store and got ingredients for Chicken Marsala. Grocery shopping in a foreign country is always tricky because:

a) You don't not always know what the label says. Maybe you don't know the word. Maybe you don't know what to look for on the label. Maybe the label has no pictures on it. Maybe the label is misleading. The label is tricky shit.

b) You do not always find what you might find in an American grocery store. Spice aisle? That consists of salt, pepper and garlic powder. Tortillas? What are those? Individual potatoes and onions? How about a bag of twenty, instead? Sour cream? Well, no, but we DO have an ENTIRE aisle of assorted tiny yogurts. Asian foods? That's funny, you're in Spain, rice noodles and rice vinegar no longer make up your diet.

c) You have to get your veggies weighed by an official veggie weigher in the produce department. And this part is not a joke. I went to the front with my veggies in their bag and the lady looked at me like I was a nutcase and told me to please go to the back of the store in the produce department and get my veggies weighed and stickered. What is that?! Why can't the weigh them at the register? Oh, the mysterious of living abroad...

For all of the trickiness of my first solo grocery shopping expedition in Spain, good news is that wine happens to be REALLY cheap – and by really cheap I mean I saw maybe one or two bottles for anything over 5 euros. WTF! I even saw a few bottles for 50 euro cents. HAHA. SO. Awesome.

I ran for the bus and sprinted to the train and made it to L's town before she got too upset with me for being twenty minutes late (I'm SO not used to this people care if you're punctual thing... at all)... but then again, I was making her dinner to thank her for helping me study all week, so she couldn't be TOO upset.

It was nice to have a kitchen to myself, to be able to walk around in my Forever 21 shorts / top without feeling awkward and to make something I could guess the flavor of before blindly putting it in my mouth. Haha. It was also refreshing to drink wine out of the bottle – the way wine should be drank. Hee hee. It was also cute to have somebody so grateful for me cooking them dinner – even though it was just dece. I clearly need to go on a more thorough hunt for fajita ingredients and berry cobbler ingredients... yummmmmy.

*happy*

Anyway, it was JUST what I needed to conclude my busy and sleep-deprived midterms week. <3 While some of the other people from my group went out to the seven floor club in Madrid and others stayed home because their families told them it wasn't a "good idea" to go out the night before their "big journey" north, mine just giggled at me. ^_^ I <3 mi familia espanola.

XOXO
Jet-set Cupcake