Back in the groove

I played my first full weekend of football this past weekend, and I'm a bit rusty, but by the third game (yes, third), I was starting to find my touch again. I'm playing in three separate leagues at the moment, and the teammates of one of my Ecuadorian teams (Virgen de la Nube Juventus) are trying to get me to join a fourth ("Solo cuando descanses, no tienes que jugar todos los partidos!"). Sounds grueling, but to be honest, I live for these kinds of weekends. The girls are a ton of fun to be around on all the teams, I don't feel at all like an outsider, and for a few hours, I can just play football and be myself.

Finn, a Thai classmate of mine from Taiwan, came to visit me last week. She's going to be starting undergrad studies at UC-Berkeley in September, and she's taking an English class there over the summer, but she had a couple weeks between when she arrived in Berkeley and when classes started, so she hopped on a plane and came to visit. We spent a lot of time just hanging out and talking, which is what we so often did in Taiwan, but we also went over to the Mississippi River and took a boat cruise upriver and went to Lake Harriet to have ice cream and see a concert at the bandshell. Finn is from Bangkok, and she spent the past two years in Taipei. She was used to big-city lights and noise, so the suburban Midwest was a big change. I think she really enjoyed it though, and in any event it was just really good to get together again. Hopefully when Anna goes out there to start her graduate studies, she and Finn can share an apartment. Finn's relatives live right near campus and have a two-bedroom apartment that they're willing to rent out for a very reasonable price.

In other news, getting my Spanish visa looks like it's going to be the hardest part of this whole going-to-Spain deal. It's all paperwork and certificates and official seals, and the word is that the consulates are super strict about every little detail, so if you screw one thing up, you're out of luck. I guess after dealing with various other countries' government bureaucracies, though, I'm not overly stressed about whether things will work out. I nearly drove myself insane last summer with getting my Taiwanese visa and other things, but it all came together in the end and I had wasted a lot of energy stressing over nothing.