The Adventures of Merrick: Benidorm

February 28th, 2013

Justice is served!

Whilst going out for more gofres con helado (waffles and ice cream) with some ladies, I received a call from the Alicante police. Unfortunately my Spanish is far from good enough to understand official police jargon over bad mobile connection, so I made a call to my director who informed me that I needed to meet her to go to the police station right away. As it turns out, they caught my attacker.

I went into the station to identify some clothes of the attacker, as well as confirm the goods that were stole from me. Looks like I'm getting my iPod and iPhone back after all! I don't know about the 20 euros though...oh well. The man had six other counts against him, and two other ladies were brought into the station to identify the evidence laid out on the table. The man had no criminal record prior, but plead guilty to all charges. The police gave an estimate of 30 years in jail, but the official trial will not be for about a year.

I get credit for the assist on this one. The man put in all of his personal information, including photos of himself, onto my phone. He tried to use my phone, which unbeknownst to him, was red-flagged by the police by that point. The police were able to localize the phone, and because I had given them a tracking number that every iPhone comes with, it was obvious upon confrontation that the phone was my stolen property. In short, my phone was the reason the guy was caught!

The only not-so-great news is that I couldn't take my phone and iPod back right there and then. It is evidence at the moment, so I need to wait around two weeks before I can pick my stuff up from the court.

Camera-less-ness continues...

March 3, 2013

Friday night, I made a glorious return to El Barrio. And by glorious, I merely mean I actually made it out to El Barrio for the first time since the accident.

It was actually quite nice. I met up with a group of kids from my program at a more central bar to start before we began meandering through the smaller bars off La Rambla. I learned that there are MANY different showy-shots in existence, and even got to try a few. There was one that they lit my alcohol-dipped finger on fire first, one that they light the shot on fire, cap it, and then it acts like a volcano, and even an absinthe shot. A big thank you to the people who bought me said shots, as my cheap-ass definitely would have hindered me from giving any of these a shot (no pun intended).

Stayed out until 5:30am, a new personal best for me!

The following day was an all-girls trip to Benidorm, a city about an hour or so north of Alicante. The seven of us stayed in a sweet hostel in the gay district. Much to our surprise, most of the people and places we encountered in Benidorm were British. We spent the afternoon in the sand and sun, followed by my first trip to a kebab place for dinner.

Kebabs are everything I dreamed they would be and more. I dug my own grave with this one, however, because now it will be that much harder to resist purchasing a kebab during my hunger-stricken walks home after school. And of course, more gofres to top off the dinner ^_^

The rest of the night was the epitome of a stereotypical girl's night in sleepover. We all crammed onto one bed and just laid there for hours talking (mostly about food). We tried to get out on the town, but ended up just ordering a pizza to go and crashing at the hostel. But honestly, I can't imagine a better way to have spend the night.

It's nice to take a weekend and not even worry about speaking Spanish. But the icing on that cake is returning to school on Monday to see that you received an A in the past month's Spanish class :) Success in two languages!

Barcelona next week. Be prepared for adventure!