My first REAL night out in Spain

So, I went with roomie to Calle Betis last night, which is the street where all the American students go (unfortunately). It was definitely interesting. While I don't really click with any of the girls in the program who I went out with (they don't talk about anything really interesting. I'm not actually sure what they talk about really. Guys? Drinking? And they drink way more than I do, too, which is awkward when they do stupid things but more on that later).

So the good thing about last night was that, by dent of being an American female, I didn't have to pay for drinks. At all. One bar, we had to pay, and I was no longer interested in drinking by that point so I didn't lol. And I guess it was good to go out and better relations with roomie. But by the end of the night, there was a story. There's always a story. Roomie and roomie's friend Marg. go out to Calle Betis a lot so they know a lot of the bar tenders there and three of those guys we ran into in the last bar we went to. They were uninteresting, mostly because they are around thirty and work in a bar (and not a cool Sevillan bar, a bar that's specifically designed to attract young female Americans). To make a long story short, some girl started dancing on the bar and so some guys got up there with her and started stripping. Needless to say, awkward. One of the guys was one of roomie's friends. Roomie's friend was so drunk (and just kinda lacking all sorts of common sense anyways) that even though this guy was half naked, pants unzipped, on a bar with this girl dancing in very unnecessary ways, she still wanted to say bye to him, and proceeded to do so. And then didn't understand why that was maybe a slightly awkward thing to have done.

Needless to say I'm not a huge fan of this sort of party environment. I'm not a child to think that that's fun. I am becoming increasingly more aware that I may have been born forty years old. And that some fifty year olds with never reach forty years old.

On the other hand, I did get free drinks, which was nice. Free is always nice, especially since you don't feel obligated to finish anything you don't want. As well, I've learned something interesting about people/myself:

People are not interesting because they're interesting.

Here's how that works. People are more or less predictable. They fall into the same basic categories and have many of the same basic motivations. Most of what you need to function around someone is learned merely by observing that person. You don't have to ask them about the depths of their lives to know that a black person has probably at some point experienced an incident of racism, that a woman with pearls and eyeliner on likes to look cute and probably knows how useful that is. You can interact with them accordingly. Most people do. They make assumptions based on appearance, and sometimes they ask about these assumptions to perpetuate conversation if they find it advantageous to get to know someone. The only difference between myself and someone who would choose to chat with you in a bar is that I won't chat with you to try to get free drinks. You will get no false flattery from me. I'm bad at it. If you aren't different, if there isn't some piece of you that is incongruous or outrageous or amusing....I'll walk away. And be completely comfortable doing it.

Everyone is interesting to someone. And everyone is worth observing in passing. But the truly special people, the ones that have some sort of spark or quirk or oddity, those people you keep with you forever. And while you can find that in a bar, it's probably not as likely as finding that person on a street corner in a UNICEF vest, or in a book store reading looking for the same book, or in a class that happens to interest you both. Them's just facts.