Approaching Descent

At first, I thought it was going to be a bad use of my week in Spain to spend my afternoons writing about being in Spain.  We are nothing if not meta.  It has amused me, truly, to be this far from home and still so highly connected.  Actually, it has disturbed me to sit around the kitchen table talking about the downfalls of Twitter’s database organization or IM’ing people who are sitting in the living room on whether or not they want another glass of wine.

I believe it was Rob¹ who thought one of the things missing from this adventure was a “Valle Wag”.  The fact that we all got the joke and laughed at the joke is proof that you can take the geeks out of the city², but you can’t take the city out of the geeks.  At any given moment, one of us is twittering, checking email, making blog posts, sending text messages, creating start-ups, talking about start-ups and having discussions of other various tech-related topics.

None of this behavior seems out of place.

On one hand, these things have become so ingrained into our lives that they are as much a part of our daily habits as showering.  And yet, is that true or is that just an excuse to enable behavior more addictive than it is essential?  That’s what I’ve come to terms with³.  This is part of what I am and what I’ve always been⁴.

Of course, this isn’t to say that all of Valle de Abdalajis is spread out before me and I’ve done nothing but sit in front of my laptop.  I managed to make the best sangria ever and cook dinner last night (Hour 88 and Hour 89).

And so, this hour brings us to another day trip into the Valle.  I learned that the village actually closes between the afternoon hours of 2pm to 5pm and then opens again in the evening.  The moment you cross the river and enter the village, all of time seems to slow down.  The streets are narrow, the markets are small and the locals have perfected the art of the evening promenade.

Our plan was to get bread at the local bakery, which also has on display local pastries.  Somehow the guys have been going to the bakery for nearly a month now and never considered partaking of the pastries.  I suggested that we buy a cake.

“We can’t take a cake back to the house.”

“Why not?”

“It’ll get eaten.”

“Exactly.”

After some back and forth, cake or no cake, to have cake and eat cake, we decided to share a small pastry and wander around the Valle enjoying it.  It was, as you can only imagine, completely delicious.

So, we returned to the villa with just bread and Paul then began the task of cooking dinner.

1. nope, it was Paul. He even said, “see” and pointed me to the source of the joke. [↩]
2. San Francisco for me, London for them [↩]
3. Of course, being unplugged from connectivity and being unplugged from work are two different things.  As my phone and my VPN aren’t working, I am forcibly unplugged from work.  It turns out, that is exactly what I need [↩]
4. And this trip is an experiment in trying to determine what I am and what I should be doing with myself [↩]