Last night, as I lay in bed alternately studying class notes and reading the second Harry Potter novel in Spanish (for me, far better than the movie), a couple of now familiar sounds started up -- those of (a) a generator and (b) spraying water, indicating that a city crew had shown up to clear the posters off the wall across the street, despite the heavy rainfall. They appear in a pumping truck, park it on la Calle de Pelayo, toss a few bright orange cones around the vehicle to make it look official – which means local traffic is bollocksed for the duration of the job, as the streets are barely wide enough for one vehicle – get out a spraying unit, hook it up to the truck's tank, and begin directing pressurized water at the yards of posters. The noise lasted an hour or so, maybe a bit more. When I left for class this morning, the wall stood free of commercial messages. The paint that's underlain the posters has, over time, with the steady cycle of posters/spraying&scraping, grown a bit faint, so that the wall itself is becoming more visible with each workover. It's a strange wall – a combo of bricks, plaster and large concrete blocks. Kind of an ad hoc affair as far as building materials, though it's solid enough.
I confess I'm glad it doesn't remain in its quasi-virginal state very long, though as of this evening no poster-pasters have been around to start the next leg of the cycle. Probably due to the rain, which commenced again after a few dry hours this morning and a brief, flirtatious appearance by the sun just before midday.
Spanish classes have become an unpredictable, sometimes hilarious affair with the current crop of young woman sitting around the classroom table, specifically the four German women, whose ongoing free-form patter/conversation flows from Spanish to German and back to Spanish again as they feel like it, and they've taken to giving the instructor for the class's second half-- a bright, interesting, good-humored 30-something woman named Raquel -- as much shit as they can, most of it in the spirit of provoking comedy. Which Raquel, to her credit, generally flows with, often handing out as good as she gets. And as might be anticipated in a room full of young women, there is at times a fair amount of complaining/joking about men, along with the occasional bout of out and out male bashing, especially from the youngest of the lot, a 17-year-old who makes a point of directing some of it at me, the lone representative of the other gender.
For the record, I am not a warrior in the imaginary conflict between the sexes that some folks get into. We're all in this together, and I'm not going to buy into the scapegoating of males (or get worked up about someone getting off on male-bashing) any more than I'm going to engage in the scapegoating of females. Life's too short.
Know what I mean?
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To get an eyeful of some recent spectacular entries from the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive, go here, here and here.