Goodbye Caribbean, Hello Mediterranean

That title's misleading, I said goodbye to the Caribbean a long time ago. It’s been nearly a year and a half, but I’m back to re-experiment with this whole personal blog thing. In about a week I’ll be moving to Spain – temporarily – to work for a law firm for the summer. Why bring back another blog? Probably because everything’s funnier when it happens in a foreign language.

So here I am, preparing for another extended stay, this time in a first world Spanish-speaking country (the eponymous one? I just wanted to use that word). I suspect the only real difference will be that there will be a subway, everything will be more expensive, and I won’t have mud all over my sandals after every time it rains. I'm trading in the Dominican Republic, where the ability to hit a baseball four hundred feet is the single most important individual attribute, for a place where adventure and chivalry is best demonstrated by fighting windmills.

For anyone who’s nostalgic, you can re-visit my Dominican blog over at bmtdoyle.blogspot.com, even though it’s missing some great stories that happened after I stopped updating it (like the time I was “detained” by the Dominican military near the Haitian border, or the time the Dominican guy who lives in Revere and knew three words in English invited me to come clubbing with him on my flight home). I’ll do my best to not repeat any stories; no apartment floods, no gruesome pictures of my hands, and one can only hope no farm animals outside my third floor window at 4 a.m.

I figure that, at a minimum, I’ll have some sweet riot video by the end of the summer with the World Cup going on and all. Maybe Spain will win it all (they won’t, they never do), but either way I’m sure I’ll have celebratory tire fires or angry “they choked again” tire fires. Depending on how the group stage goes, I may just start my own NBA Finals tire fire. I’m really hoping for tire fires, I’m pretty hung up on it happening one way or another. I wonder how they’d take a Pau Gasol effigy fire? Anyone have a Big Bird stuffed animal I can bring with me?

So, for those of you who have been largely tuned out over the last year or so, I've made a guest appearance over at deadspin.com, inexplicably gotten published, and I've finished my first year of law school. I'm not sure that I'm any smarter, but I've certainly learned how to make arguments for things I believe are absolutely and unmistakably wrong. I leave Boston next Monday and get to Valencia Tuesday afternoon. That means this week will consist of daunting tasks like finding plug adapters (and converters, 220 volts? How do more things not blow up over there?), finding matching shirts and ties, and surfing the internet for 17 hours a day out of sheer boredom (no, I don't want to do any chores for you, figure out better time management skills on your own). Oh and I need to watch Telemundo to refresh my Spanish. Between Dominicanisms (which is basically ebonics) and my overall lack of use, my first week over there is going to be a communications disaster.

In other Spanish news, Generalísimo Francisco Franco is still dead (yes, that's an acute diacritical mark over the i right there). Catch you all on the other side of the ocean.