Dont Be Testi

Me and Mark hosted our first couch-surfer. She was a French 20 year old girl named Stephanie. She was fairly sweet, not too talkative, big eyes, yaddah yaddah. It was ultimately a positive experience. A new guest came last night. He's from Belgium and is looking to find a job in the field of architecture. He had smoker's breath, a big nose like me, and was really nice. He's scrambling around in his room now.
Me and Mark took a bus to Escorial. It's a little city planted on a hill. Cobblestone streets, sexy, confident cats like the one pictured here, and Valley of the Fallen, which is a cemetery established by Francisco Franco in memory of the Spanish Civil War victims. There were giant hills (moutains?) all along the city so we decided to climb it a bit. After packing some marzipan, sandwich stuff, water, and nuts, we began the hike. Mark was getting a little nervous about the great outdoors and cautioned me on emergency telephone numbers, snake bites, zig-zag climbing techniques, and bear attacks.

"Will you please stop every now and then to check to hear rattlesnakes?"

At one point I made a couple bear groans and Mark twitches around and says very sternly,

"SHUT UP. WAS THAT YOU??".

Haha. Best part was when we almost didn't climb to the top because of his fear of potential mountain lion habitats nearby. I convinced him to pursue the climb and it was beautiful reaching the top. On a side note, I just learned that most cougar attacks are on little children and are more likely when humans play dead. Hmm....also, you can get it to retreat by intensely staring at it. If only Mark knew how many years I have been playing the Staring Game with friends he maybe wouldn't have been so afraid. Oh Mark. I won't lie, though, there were some pretty beastly poop piles scattered throughout the hills, which made me, secretly, scan my surroundings a few times in a very Markesque way. In any case, we were exhausted afterwards. I was walking around like a drunk man, toppling on escalators from the exhaustion.

Mark got quite the sunburn. I, some intense muscle sores. But....we will hopefully return to this luscious place soon - to maybe defeat the mountain again and to check out Franco's memorial.