"We're going into Bananaland!" - Upon entering a banana grove, Bethany utters the quote she will NEVER live down.

	Prologue - Written March 1, 2002    I'll be quite honest... this trip is not really exciting me all that much. I should be thrilled, going to an exotic locale for cheap, staying at some incredible resort... but instead, I'm just pissed I can't take my PS2 because of region coding.    Stupid laws.    Over a week on the Spanish possession of Tenerife, with possible forays into who knows where. I've made it a point to know as little about the trip as possible, to keep expectations low. Remember, if your hopes are low, you're never disappointed. There's six of us, staying here, hopefully not getting typhoid.    It will undoubtably be fun, but it's more fun to bitch. Epilogue - Written March 10, 2002    Well, I was right a little bit. It was fun, and not to be skipped.    Even though I spent much of the days prior complaining about going, complaining about not having the money to go, I did have an incredible time of it. In the same way my 1998 trip to Scotland provided an exhilarating cap to my high school years, Tenerife will for college.    I would be remiss if I didn't thank Jon Rea right off the top. Even though he is often the whipping boy for my rants, if it wasn't for his grasp on Spanish, my good time would have been much less.    As great a trip as it was, I'm sticking to my guns. There's two places I'll live in this world - the United States or the United Kingdom. Please note the Canaries are constituent parts to neither, even if they are gorgeous. If You're Scoring At Home...    • The Canaries sit roughly 200 miles off the coast of Morocco, but are possessions of Spain. The technical term for what they are is a "Spanish Autonomous Region," though that could easily be defined as "bitches" or "like Puerto Rico, but without all the welfare money."    On our drive up to 'El Teide,' the highest point in Spain, I saw graffiti suggesting there was a movement to free the Canaries from Spanish rule. Considering this never came up anywhere else, and that this kid's penmanship was horrible, I'm going to guess he's on his own.    • We spent our entire week on the Canaries' most populated island, Tenerife, and in its second largest city, Puerto de la Cruz. PDLC sits on the center of the island's north coast, and has a population about that of Agawam. Course, it also has skyrise hotels and a budding tourism industry, while Agawam has an amusement park and a library under renevation.    From our suite at the Aptos. Casablanca, we could see to El Teide's peak in the morning from our porch. We could walk five minutes to the ocean, ten minutes to the casino, or one minute down the street to either the Fisa, the Super Ving or the Texaco for snack food - only about halfway through the trip did we start finding the real supermarkets, which made eating a whole lot easier.    Portions of the group touched all but the west coast of the island at one point or another, but since I'm running the border of saying too much, I think we can get on with the recap. Next... The Journey Begins, With The Day That Never Ends

joncooch@bu.edu AOL IM: JonCoochBU