Spain is kind of gay, I think it's the sunflowers

I'm on my first train ride in Spain from Sevilla to Granada for the day. I love train travel, even in the states. It's fast, it's smooth, it's mostly stress free. (Yes, yes...jokesters: "that's what she said.") I did have my moment of stress this a.m. when I woke up at 6 instead of 530. Luckily I was showered and out the door in 20 mins, came upon a taxi stand, and made my train no problem. So now I'm looking out the window at field after field of sunflowers. I've seen corn fields (U.S.), I've seen flat grassy fields (Sweden), I've seen lava fields (Iceland) but this is new. In the middle of the rolling green and brown hills there is just yellow everywhere. Makes me wish I was getting to La Mancha to see the windmill fields (and sing a few songs about Don Quioxte (excuse my spelling) for my dad).
As you can see from my picture, even the train stops are beautiful. Pretty much Spain is just gorgeous.

Something weird happened to me today. I woke up and the words in my head were Spanish. As I type this I can feel my brain churning over and over and putting what it can into Spanish. Hopefully I'm going to start taking the words from my head and using them...fingers crossed.

I ate lunch by myself yesterday. I didn't panic, I didn't worry. I just sat on the sidewalk with my vino blanco, gazpacho (best I've ever had), and ensaladilla de atun y gambas. Perfecto :)

Dinner is still a challenge in my head so I made more friends last night. I saw 2 young women checking into my hostel and, after about 30 mins of debating whether it would be creepy to knock on their door, I went for it. Emily and Kana are from the Atlanta area and traveling Spain for a few weeks. They were nice enough to take pity on my lonely self and the 3 of us had dinner and stumbled across Sevilla's gay pride celebration.

I knew ahead of time that my stay in Madrid will be during its gay pride festival. Sevilla was a surprise. The drag queens ranged from "coulda fooled me" and immensely talented to "is that a dude with a full beard wearing a shiny purple dress?" So fabulous. Also fabulous was the jager shot via test tube out of a rather flamboyant man's mouth.

After stumbling into a summer solstice market, eating delicious tres chocolates cake and watching an incredible impromptu drum performance, we ended our night with €3 mojitos. Tonight...flamenco!