FROGLEGS

Sorry non-euro buddies! This is a post about football (soccer). Arsenal’s latest young starlet is from Sevilla. Get ready guys, he is gonna make your head spin! He pretty much single-handedly beat the mighty Real Madrid (David Beckham included) 1st Team earlier this year 4-1. Barring injury, he is gonna make Cristiano Ronaldo look like the amateur that he is and look for Henry to score 25+ goals this year with all the service he will get from Reyes.

My only regret is that I won’t get to see that much of him. Wish he would’ve gone to Barça, would’ve been nice to have him racing down the right side of the Nou Camp… Oh well, touchè Wenger…

When was the lst time you went to McDonald’s? You might wanna think again after you read this. A quick factoid about the world’s favourite fast food chain: “Did you know that McDonald’s feeds more people around the world every day than the population of Spain?”

El Botellón is difficult to explain to someone that has never experienced it. Imagine a club/discotheque that has room for about 6,000 to 10,000 people. People stuffed in, sitting around, drinking, bobbing heads, doing drugs… whatever. Botellón is something like that. Take that club and plop it down in the middle of a Spanish city in some plaza. Take of the roof, the lights, the walls… Take away the stellar sound system and replace it with a hundred ill parked cars with their doors open and pumping out whatever it’s owner wants. No bar either, this is a bring your own booze party. Pop down to the nearest convenience store, get your bottles of coke, rum, whiskey, whatever, some plastic cups and some ice. Get your friends down to square around 12-1am and start having a good time. That is more or less “El Botellón”. Lots of people, lots of booze and lots of noise.

Mark and I went down to the closest botellón tonight at 2am. The question in our hearts was, “as followers of Christ, what should we be doing here, if anything?” We spent about 45 min. praying, walking, listening and struggling to understand why someone would go out in the early hours of the morning in the freezing cold to hang out with your friends. I can understand getting together at a café or pub with friends, but have a hard time understanding sitting on a semi-cold curb and knocking back cheap alcohol at 2am in the winter.

Can’t say we got any answers, but we’ll be back next week to pray more and try and get our heads around it all.

I’m working on the Preparatory Material for my University Course that begins on Feb. 14. The prep work gets you in a good mindset for the rest of the course. It has as it’s focus War Memorials. Am studying the work of Sir Stanley Spencer at the moment. It is moderately interesting.

I have realised something rather profound through looking at English war memorials though. As I looked at memorial after memorial in loads of small english villages (the internet is a marvelous thing and Google makes it useful), I began to realize that there is some sort of a common concept of what a war memorial is in England. I wrote down the top 5 things that you can expect to see in or around a war memorial based on what I had seen. I then asked Mark what the war memorial in his home town, Crowborough looked like. It looked exactly as I expected. It is stone, has a cross featured prominently, has red poppies adourning it a good portion of the year, has names of first world war casualties enscribed somewhere on the base and is located near a church. This may all sounds really obvious, but here is what I found really profound:

In the US, we don’t have a common culture like that. There are loads of War Memorials all over the place in my home country, but because we lack this same shared concept of what a war memorial looks like or must contain, a majority of them look vastly different. Anyone from England would be able to list out the things that I wrote above as being a good part of what a war memorial looks like. They all have one exactly like it in their home town! But an American would be at a loss to describe a war memorial or list more than 2 or 3 things about it because the examples of it are so varied. We really have an extremely limited common culture amongst us because we have such a varied background. As well, we are a relatively young nation who has not REALLY developed her own distinctive culture. We kind of just leech of everyone else.

I dunno, I thought that was an interesting contrast. I may be wrong, I may not.

Being sick in bed gives me a lot of time to read. I am working on preparatory materials for the University course I am taking that starts next month, but I am also reading plenty of articles on the ‘Net and elsewhere.

I particularly found this article interesting:“Understanding Poverty in America” by the Heritage Institute. For those of you that are followers of Christ and live in America, this is something to think about. As people that believe in Jesus and his example, we must take seriously what he says about not forgetting the poor and needy. Especially having just returned from Africa about a week ago, I found this article shocking. The poor in America (most of them) can hardly be classified as impoverished on the grander scale.

I wonder how long we will continue to navel gaze?

Started getting a really wretched sore throat yesterday morning. Unfortunately, the day was full of social engagements (I think being a faithful friend to people is my biggest job these days), none of which I felt comfortable with cancelling.

At 1pm, we had a barbecue at our friend Cecilio’s house with all the guys that we spend New Year’s with in Morocco. It was a great time, but I was worse for it. After that it was straight home and off to the movie club that we have been participating in called “La Peliqueria”. Everyone there was smoking up a storm in a little tine apartment… Needless to say, by the time I got home at 9.30, a cold had taken hold.

I am finally sick after more than a year of avoiding it. My legendary consitution has been brought down to earth.