Tengo ganas de...

lo que sea. I'm pretty much up for anything. Today, I was in the dehesa with my school playing Capture the flag with a buttload of team spirit, swinging on swings that threatened to injure my hips, and going for a ride on a zipline that looked like a medieval device. As I said, tengo ganas de... lo que sea. Thankfully, so do many of the people around me.

Everyone has their strong and weak points, but decidedly something I will miss about being here is the people I've met. Who are, more likely than not, up for just about anything. Whether it's the energy of being a foreigner in Spain or in any new place, the spirit of being an auxiliar with demasiado tiempo libre, or just the charismatic quality that accompanies the people who've applied for this program, I'm not sure.

All this is not to say that no one ever flakes on a plan, or that everything I've done here has been beyond my wildest dreams. (Although, I never really thought I'd be living in Spain, so in a way, it's all sort of a dream-like sequence.) A lot of what I do here, I would do in the States, but I might have a smaller group of people to choose from to accompany me on hitch-hiking journeys, hanging out with viejos, or going on midnight trips to towns with dirt roads. Maybe it's the proximity of the beach, the warm(er) weather, the accumulation of free time... Whatever it is, when I go home, I will miss the carefreeness of this experience.

That's what it is, carefree. (soory, you'll have to turn your head to look at Ricardo until I fgure out how to orient the picture properly...) For a while, I thought that my whole perspective on life was changing. In fact, I think I was just becoming more easy-going. If it happens, it happens, and if not me dara igual. When people ask if I've gone to San Sebastian, Carnaval, Semana Santa and if I'm going to the upcoming El Rocio, I tell them yes, porque "tengo que aprovechar de todo." To suffice, whatever it might be, I'm usually up for it. Saying yes opens you up to see and do things you might have otherwise closed yourself off to by saying no. Ok, that was really profound. But seriously, it's kind of like the movie Yes-Man. At some point, I may learn to say "no" again, but I'll be happy to have had nine months of saying yes. Vale, pues no para TODO; hay que tener limites aun para mi, pero me entiendes.