Sunday, March 19, 2006

Botellones in Spain

Spain has been on my mind lately since it was exactly a year ago that I was there last for Spring Break. I was pleasantly surprised when Yahoo! News posted this article on Friday about 25,000 people at a botellon in Granada to protest a new law aimed at stopping these drinking binges. I knew the date was around when I had my first botellon in Granada, but it wasn't until I looked at my journal that I saw that it was the exact same date, just one year later, so I thought that was an odd coincidence. The one I went to probably had less than 200 people at it, but it was a lot of fun to be hanging out in a mall parking lot drinking Tinto de Verano with a whole bunch of Spaniards. I was hoping to do one again the next time I go, so I hope this law doesn't put an end to them.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dave,

Hi. I just finished reading your blog. Congratulations on making things work so well. I started reading things backwards to forwardsa and got confused at whether or not you were with Kip. Sounds like things worked out for you!

Study hard; become a great doctor; and continue to find happiness.

(P.S. There are other Christian sects like the Episcopal Church that accept gays. Anyway, did you know that the reason why the Mormon Church finally let non-whites become ministers/priests was because the Church was afraid it would lose its tax-exempt status?

Up until the early 1970s, the Mormon Church considered non-whites basically sub-humans. This policy extended to whites who had distant non-white ancestors(in particular African ancestry, which would exclude Queen Elizabeth II and her children since their ancestor, Queen Charlotte, wife of mad King George, was biracial)--one drop rule and all.

At this same time, Bob Jones University lost a case for federal education funding because it had segregationist policies. The Church feared that this legal precedent would eventually affect it. So, using the expansion of the Church into Brazil, where American standards of race don't exist, as an excuse, the Elders decided that a revelation came to them: blacks and other people of color weren't so bad.)

-L- said...

noah, buddy. It makes me crazy when people write a big ol' laundry list of offensive things without any sort of reference or qualification. There's a lot of fact mixed in with interpretation mixed in with pejorative bullshit. I dunno, just thought you might want to know it was insensitive. Maybe you don't care.

Dave,
Botellones sounds like it was a good time. I always have to consciously tease out my Mormon biases about alcohol from my public health biases about alcohol. I'm pretty sure I still would be conservative on the topic even if I weren't mormon! But not SOOO conservative! :)

DCTwistedLife said...

Cute picture! I have to say it looks like you had a lot of fun in spain. Its a great country...especially the costa del sol and costa brava areas... A few years ago I traveled from Barcelona to Marbella and back. It was a fantastic trip. I'd love to go now that I am older and speak better spanish... though, I speak with an argentino accent and I find the "thapato" instead of "Zapato" thing very hard to deal with :-P ... lol... then again, I say things like "lluvia" with an english "J" or "sh" sound (thats the accent from Argentina / Uruguay)....lol, regardless spain is a great country and spanish is a beautiful language.