The Matt Faus Blog

The Internet is finally back on. At least I can back-date my posts with WordPress.

In my spare time (without the Internet), I got to study Spanish, go for a run, play Fable, and watch several movies.

Well, since the Internet in the dorms has been down for the weekend, I have been going a little crazy. Imagine a day without the Internet – it’s just a basic commodity, like water. So, anyway, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and figured I should share some of my observations from European cultures.

• All the rooms in the dorm have a urinal as well as a toilet. However, it’s situated on the ground, so I didn’t really understand what it was until I found someone I was comfortable to ask. I kind of thought it was a urinal, but why would they put them in ALL the rooms if 50% of the people that live here are female and they can’t use them? It still doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I guess it helps conserve water (no flushing).
• Restaurants are only open during eating times, which are 10am, 2pm, and 10pm. If you want to eat, you can generally only eat at those times. Except for fast food places, which are open all day, but who wants to eat fast food all the time?
• Wine, and well, alcohol in general, is cheap. Johnny Walker Red Label is $30 in the States and 10 Euros here, or $15. Half price, always.
• Trains go everywhere, but they are neither super-cheap nor super-fast. It’s a toss up between flying. I had always heard how awesome and cheap it was to travel by train, but it’s really not.
• Spaniards eat horses. I don’t know, maybe they’re low on deer?
• Four-wheelers (ATVs) are allowed to drive on the street.
• Chicks at the beach really do sunbathe topless. However, it’s not all of them – I’d say maybe 10%, and some really ugly ones do it too, so it’s not all fun and games.
• Spanish college students can put up with not having the Internet for a weekend. I mean, at UTD, we would be rioting in the streets if the Internet was out for this long.
• No one drinks tap water. At restaurants, you either buy bottled water, or drink wine (which is similarly priced).
• Cell phone service is incredibly expensive. The pay-as-you-go plans are very popular here, and they charge $0.271/min. One hour = $16.26.
• Coastal cities are the best places on Earth to live. This doesn’t have anything to do with Europe, but I lived in Seattle last summer and now Valencia and I can’t get enough of it!

The thing about Valencian Sunrises, is that you can only see them if you stay up all night partying. So, I tried that out last night and it was pretty cool. It’s crazy to meet so many people from so many different places. Everyone that I was hanging out with was studying Spanish at one of the several schools around here. I met people that were from England, Holland, Korea, Japan, Italy, France, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico. So, needless to say, it was incredibly interesting hearing about everyone’s different cultures and lifestyles. I spoke a lot of English with several people, but had some good Spanish conversations as well. We wound up in a place that is really very far away from where I live, so the walk home was rather laborious, but I made it back before 7am.

Instead of heading to Milan, Italy all by her lonesome, Ashley decided to come visit me in Valencia before she started her study abroad program. So, she came in on Sunday and then left Thursday morning. It was a little hectic for me since I had just barely gotten settled in and “down to business” with work and studies, and then she comes and distracts the daylights out of me.  However, it was a great time and we were able to see quite a bit of the city while she was here.

Sunday was a long day because she missed the train that would have brought here at 3:30pm, and didn’t make it until 5:30pm. I had gone downtown early anyway to look around and stuff, so after waiting from 11am that morning, I was ready to get out and do something. We went down to the beach and ate at a place called Comeida Verde – The Green Fairy. At least, that’s what I think it’s called. Afterwards, we just strolled along the beach for a little bit.

Monday was rather uneventful – I tried to work and went to class since we had made a transition to a new group. We went out to eat that night, but it wasn’t too memorable. Ashley was still stumbling quite a bit with her Spanish, so the communication barrier posed some problems.

Tuesday night was fun because we went to a salsa dancing lesson with several people with from my class, and then hung out and talked until 2:30am afterwards. I’m definitely glad I went to that as I made quite a few friends that I will probably be spending a good amount of time with as the summer progresses.

I kind of took the day off from work on Wednesday and we went downtown to walk around and take pictures. I’ve uploaded them to my gallery, so take a look. We ate dinner at a pizzeria where a drunken homeless guy was walking around acting goofy. The restaurant owner kicked him off twice, but he kept coming back. He wasn’t really causing much harm, so I thought it was pretty funny. Dinner and a show! Another weird thing that happened was when we went to get some ice cream after dinner we stopped in a convenience store and the people who owned the store were Asian (Korean, maybe?), and we conversed in Spanish. It was just a little weird hearing Asians speak Spanish.

I have posted the first round of pictures here!

My first weekend in Valencia is here, so last night I went out to eat at a restaurant down the street. The food was not too bad, but I need to remember to tell them that I want the steak cooked less next time. It was the first steak I have had with zero pink in a long time. It was also rather thin, which might have been why it was cooked so thoroughly, but I am a Texan, so I doubt anyone in Europe will be able to satisfy my standards for red meat.  Another interesting note, was that the house wine was listed at 1.5 Euros/glass while water (there’s no such thing as free “tap” water – it’s all bottled) was 1 Euro. Anyway, the meal consisted of a steak, French fries, a slice of tomato with lettuce, and a bowl of sliced baguette bread. It was pretty good, but for all that it was 14 Euros, which is $19 – not exactly cheap. I can go to Chili’s and get a similar meal for more like $12.

When I finished eat at 11:30pm (which is really quite normal), I walked around my part of the town for a little while before heading back home to play some video games. Man, I’m so glad I have my computer. I was planning to go walk around downtown today, but my throat and sinuses are killing me, so I will probably just stay in and take it easy.

The funny thing about celebrating your 21st birthday in Spain, is that it doesn’t really signify anything special here. I guess I don’t know if they get breaks on their insurance, but the drinking age is 16. Sixteen. So, celebrating that particular birthday here is rather anticlimactic. Regardless, I had a pretty good one. It was a pretty normal day, and then I went down to the beach that night after stopping by a cervecería just to show the world that I was a “grown up” now and played around in the sand and ocean breeze. I got home just in time to accept a call from Ashley in Germany, who is staying with one of the students that her family hosted as an exchange student a couple of years ago.

Right now, I’m sitting on the terrace of the coffee shop on the base floor of the dorm I’m living in. Surprisingly enough, they have a pretty solid wireless internet connection, even out here. It’s even completely free. However, I haven’t seen any other laptops in all the times I’ve eaten here, so maybe it’s not terribly popular. Either way, I’m really enjoying it.

Ashley is scheduled to arrive in Valencia on Sunday for a few days before her study abroad program begins, and it will be nice to see her and romp around the city.

After traveling 5000 miles in 30 hours with 180 pounds of luggage, I finally made it to Valencia, Spain. I’ll be here for three months living in the dorms at the University of Valencia, and studying Spanish with Don Quijote Spanish School. So far, everything has been going pretty good, except for the differences in electrical connections. I bought a power converter, but it turns out that I got the wrong one, as it is a 1600 watt converter meant for hair dryers, toasters, and other high-wattage electronics. So I will ordered some 50W power converters off of Ebay and paid for air shipping, so hopefully they will be here before too long. I got a EU power cord for my desktop since the power supply on that beast will accept anything from 100 to 240VAC, so anything in the world.

The trip over wasn’t too bad, except for the stint in Barcelona. I flew into Barcelona’s international airport (Valencia doesn’t have one) and then took the train from there to Valencia. So, I had to carry my desktop along with clothes and a carry-on from the arrival gate to the train station at the airport (up and down a few escalators), and then off the train, onto another train 3 hours later, and off the train again. At least the case I got for my computer is awesome - it’s like a case you would put your gun or bow in when going on distant huntring trip, except that it’s big enough for my computer. It has wheels and several handles, so that makes it easier, but it’s still 100 pounds.

I’ll be taking and uploading some pictures before too long, but adios until then!

Well, this semester is finally over. I really didn’t enjoy this semester as much as I have previous semesters. All of my classes were for my Software Engineering major, and that meant that it was basically all reading and writing stuff. We didn’t even do design, it was basically just how to manage a team of programmer’s to make software.

I did take Geology, however, and it was really pretty cool. I needed another lab science to complete my degree, and so I decided to take Geology thinking it would be a blow-off class. It was pretty easy, but I actually studied for it harder than a few of my other classes. I really enjoyed learning about the Earth and how incredibly complex it is. There is just so much to know about everything that surrounds us, it’s simply awe-inspiring. It’s also pretty cool at parties and stuff to be able to identify rocks used in decorations and those that you find on the ground while camping. Definitely picks up the ladies.

My grades came out pretty good GPA-wise, but it’s really lame to get 4 A-s. I mean, COME ON! It doesn’t really affect my GPA much, but an A- is just an itch that you’ve got to scratch but you can’t. Oh well, I’ve still got a 3.838. I figured that it’s mathematically impossible for me to get Summa Cum Laude (which is 3.89) with the number of classes left, and it should be really easy to get Magna Cum Laude (which is 3.69), so no big deal.

Only 18 hours left until I graduate with a Bachelor of Science with a double major in Computer Science and Software Engineering!