Call my crazy…no really, I felt like I was going insane

So!  After my amazing trip to Belgium with my wonderful friend Camille I jumped back into normal life, which consisted of correcting tests, celebrating Thanksgiving, and getting ready for my Christmas trip.  But first….I moved!  haha yea…turns out me and Spaniards don’t get along so well.  Our customs are just too different and there were a myriad of differences between the four of us.  Just to name a few, the boys were dirty, they were rude, up too late and too loud, and oh yea, smoked cigarettes and marijuana in the apartment.  So, needless to say, I got the heck outta there before Christmas so I’d be comfortable before I left and didn’t have to worry about all this when I got back.  Anyways, after much arguing with the landlord and forking over far too much cash, I am in my new apartment with much more agreeable roommates.  I’m now living with 3 other people, 1 Turkish Erasmus boy, 1 Irish teacher like me, and 1 British teacher like me!  So we’re much happier, have schedules that are very similar and have much more in common.  Oh yea, and I can be out in the kitchen without smelly cigarettes, pot or seeing flies from dirty dishes. While I am glad for the experience I had living with Spaniards, I decided it was time to move on, and that I will learn Spanish another way.  I have managed to make plenty of Spanish friends here so far, so I’m not too concerned.  I know it was an experience I was meant to have, so I’m glad I had it, but am ready to move onto a better living situation.

ANYWAYS!  After that debacle I’m finally in my new cozy apartment in my slightly smaller apartment, but much more agreeably one, and preparing for my Christmas Vacation!  And this year, it literally is a vacation.  I’m traveling!  I received a wonderful invitation from my good Peruvian friend Jessica, to spend Christmas with her and her sister in Munich, Germany this year.  As you can see, I’ve met quite a lot of interesting people here.  Jessica is working on her Master’s here and her sister is married and lives in Germany.  So since she’s here she’s taking advantage of the close distance and spending Christmas with her sister, and upon hearing that I had no where to go a couple months back she invited me to go with her!  So I’ve been spending the rest of my time preparing my trip.  Since I know so many amazing people I decided on a very basic itinerary for Christmas (compared to some auxiliaries itineraries which consist of visiting at least 5 different cities).  So I will be spending Christmas in Munich, moving along to Salzburg afterwards to spend the New Year, and finishing in Vienna to see Sophie again and stay with her gracious family!  I will return to Spain a day before I need to return to work, which begins on Jan 8! and will be a very happy person.  I feel very fortunate to have received this invitation because Christmas is such a family affair that I am so happy Jessica is willing to share her family with me.  In addition, I am very fortunate to only be paying for a place to stay in one of the three locations that I’ll be going to. 

Also!  I had a few other fun things happen to me, all which included cracking my computer screen and dropping my keys down the elevator shaft (hey, at least it wasn’t my phone!).  But at the end of two pretty hellish weeks I moved in and went to a school fundraiser for my 4ESO students who are planning a senior trip to Madrid in March.  It was a fundraiser to help them raise money to pay for the trip.  One of the teachers I work with, Reyes, helped the kids organize it, and since I’ve talked to her about it before I thought I’d go and support the kids and all her hard work.  Also, it was the first night of my vacation, so I thought, why not!?  This was quite fun and interesting because for starters, Spanish schools don’t really do things like this.  The sense of community and school dances don’t really exist here so it was really interesting to see how they put on something like that. Overall, the night consisted of the students selling sandwhiches and soda (none of that crap snack food you see at school dances) and they had a stage set up for the girls to dance an Arabian dance that they’re been learning from Reyes.  Reyes is a dance teacher to these students and takes multiple dance classes, so they wanted to show off their skills.  Also, at the beginning of the night Reyes told me they were going to play Just Dance, so I thought how cool that they have Just Dance! haha, they don’t.  Apparently you can look up Just Dance dances on youtube with the dance moves.  So they set up a projector and put youtube videos on the wall for the students to look at and dance to.  Reyes and I got in there and did some dance too.  Over all, it was really fun, but freezing cold.  There’s no such thing as an indoor gym, they have an outdoor patio where they hold everything.  So by 8:30 I was a little frozen and headed out while the rest of the students and Reyes were learning how to Salsa. haha, Only in Spain will you learn to salsa at a school dance, and not encounter any grinding or dark corners for the boys and girls to hide in.

A video of my kids dancing

 
The students looking at the screen to dance to Just Dance outside!  I even joined in a bit, much to my students delight.  haha I decided to make a bit of a fool of myself.
 
All of these girls are my students, and they danced so well.

Later that night I went to a pot luck Christmas party with all of my British coworkers and had a blast with them.  We were up till about 3 AM and then continued the party on Friday afternoon with a company lunch that went from about 2:30 to about 7.  We started off at the restaurant where we ate a ton of food, and drank a lot of wine and beer and then moved to the bar by about 7 and I ended my night by about 9:30 or so at night when I returned home.  It was a great day, full of really great fun memories and I feel really grateful and blessed to be able to work at Covent Garden because it has lead me to meet so many amazing, kind and fun young people just like me who love teaching and love Spain and learning Spanish.  So while I felt pretty under the weather for a week or so, this was a great way to wrap up my first full semester in Spain.  (Is it weird that I still think of my life in semesters? haha)


Till next time.  I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas if I can’t get to a computer while I’m gone! <3 <3 <3

The Land of Chocolate, Belgium

So last weekend I went to Belgium.  “Why?” you ask me, well….because it was cheap!  haha.  Me friend and I found a cheap flight to Belgium back in October for the weekend of Thanksgiving and we figured we’d go!  I had no idea what there was to see there, but little did I know that it was a hidden gold mine!  There’s actually a lot to see in Belgium and we spent almost all of our time out and about exploring all that Brussels, Brugge and Ghent had to offer.  Brussels is the capital of the European Union, so there’s a lot of international people there and pretty much everyone speaks English, which is really good because we don’t know Flemish, Dutch or German (all the languages they speak there).  On the plane we had an awesome person sitting with us though.  We met Pieterjan (PJ) on the plane and we spent the whole two hours talking with him about what we should see in Belgium, and talking about languages.  He even offered to show us around Brussels because he works there and had nothing to do that afternoon!  We were so excited that we’d have a local showing us around, but then we found out that we had different means of getting to the actual city and he could no longer come with us . :(  Camille and I flew into Charlatoi, which is an airport an hour outside of Brussels, but it’s much cheaper, so we had to take a shuttle bus into the city, and PJ was taking a train…traiter!…so we couldn’t meet up, but he did give us some great advice.  He told us to go to Gent, and Camille had never heard of it but I recently head about it so we said, okay! and worked it into our plans.  So we parted ways after the airport and headed into Brussels.  Unforunately, we couldn’t check into our hostel until almost 6:30, and since we arrived at 2:30, we had almost 4 hours to kill before we could go.  Luckily, Belgium is very organized and offers lockers in their train stations to store your things.  So we used a locker in the train station, locked away our backpack and suitcase and went out to explore Brussels!  We were actually able to see almost everything we wanted to see in Brussels in that afternoon, which is good because Saturday we planned on going to Brugge and Ghent all day. 

Me at the Grand Place (Main Square) in Brussels. 

 

We walked down this gallery where they sell some of the most expensive things in Brussels.  It has all the expensive chocolate stores, and clothing stores, it even had a postcard store!

 

And down the galleria we found this chocolate store.  Where apparently every piece of chocolate is good enough to have it’s own pedestal….

Then we decided to go find the Manneken Piss, the peeing boy!  Don’t ask me why there’s a statue of a boy peeing in Brussels, I’m pretty sure people don’t even know why he’s there, but he’s an anomoly and the locals take great pleasure in dressing up the peeing boy for the holidays and other occasions.  Unfortunately he was not dressed up for Christmas yet, although I’m pretty sure they do dress him up as Santa as it gets closer to Christmas.  Either way, we found our way to the peeing boy, and, I hate to say it, but I was quite underwhelmed.  It’s a very small statue, and it’s kind of just a regular statue.  It’s not made especially nicely, there’s no crazy architectual details that astonish me, he’s just a fountain of a boy made to look like he’s peeing into the pool of water that’s underneath the statue.  Maybe it’s just me, maybe I don’t appreciate the humor in it, or maybe he’s just that underwhelming.  

Either way, after that we wandered back to the Grand Place to see it all lit up and we found out that they have a winter light show that started later that evening, so we decided to collect our things and head back to the hostel.  Once we were settled and effectively offended the owner of the hostel by not using his wonderful crappy map, and asking if he has towels we headed out to eat dinner at one of his excellent outrageously priced recommended restaurants.  So we ended up at an Italian Restaurants and effectively offended them by asking about the price of water and then walked out.  So THEN we ended up at yet another overpriced but more accommodating Asian restaurant where I had my first real Thai food.  It wasn’t bad, but it certainly didn’t fill me.  After an evening full of frustrating at finding decently priced, good food in this city of overpriced things, we headed back to the city center to see the Grand Place light show!  Oh my goodness was it worth it!
It’s a light show was amazing and is a light and music show where it tells the history of Belgium through classical music and they light up all the buildings in city hall.  It’s amazing and certainly worth standing outside in the freezing cold.  It was so good that we actually went back the following night to watch it two more times because Friday night we spent it taking photos and videos, so we wanted to enjoy it better.  Then we ended up eating our waffles the whole time, so we sat and waited another 15 min or so to see it again.  It was playing from 5:30 to 10:30 all night long every 30 min but lasted 15 min so it essentially was playing every 15 minutes. haha.  We felt very lucky because if we weren’t in Brussels during the Christmas season I’m not sure if they would actually have this show, I’m pretty sure it’s only a seasonal thing, so we felt very fortunate. 

But then that was pretty much all the time we spent in Brussels.  Sunday before we left we went to see the Atomium, a giant atom magnified like 650 billion times, that was created in the 1958 for a conference that was held in Belgium.  When the guy built it he believed that atomic research was going to save the world and make great advances, and it did, but it certainly hasn’t been the saving grace that I think he hoped for.  So that was really cool to see, but we didn’t go inside it like we wanted to because we were more interested in seeing the world’s largest collection of instruments at the Music Museum they have there.  The Music Museum was also really cool and totally worth our Sunday morning before we headed back to Huelva.

  Some cool instruments from Africa I think

This one is the instrument of the month!

Really pretty harmonica from Italy

On Saturday we spent the day outside of Brussels, much to our hostel owners dismay, exploring the beautiful cities of Brugge and Ghent at the recommendation of our friend PJ from the plane.  I’m so happy we did because it was 100% worth being outside of Brussels away from the metropolitan feeling.  The next blog post will be what we did in Brugge and Ghent!

Me at the beautiful light show

Malaga, I love you

So even thought I went to Málaga a long time ago I should at least write about the basics of my trip.  Basically, so far it was one of my favorite trips, although every trip is fantastic in a different way! This trip was fantastic because I got to spend time with my favorite Spainards!  Maria and Manolo, my two good friends from Granada when I studied abroad there.  :)  They allowed me to show up late on Thursday evening so we should have plenty of time on Friday and Saturday to explore the city and do many things.  I’m so grateful to them for hosting me and letting me sleep on their sofa-cama (futon) for the weekend and for showing me all the great places in Malaga to see and to eat.  I ate wonderful seafood, and other yummy foods, and they showed me all the greatest views in Malaga.  :)

Thursday night I arrived, we ate some dinner at the mall, and then met some of their British friends for their intercambio.  It was fun and nice to see that they are able to keep up with their English, even thought their English is better than my Spanish will ever be.  They are truely inspirational people for me, because if they can learn English as well as they did, and watch t.v and listen to the radio all in English most of the time, then I should be able to do the same, and I should certainly try harder.  Then Friday, they went to work and I stayed home and slept in and after they came home from work we went downtown to check out the downtown Malaga.  The city center is absolutely gorgeous, and so much bigger than the center in Huelva!  Although that doesn’t surprise me at all, haha.  I think most city centers are going to be bigger than Huelva’s, except for many the pueblo’s city centers, haha.  Anyways, it was gorgeous, and we got some dinnfer at a nice restaurante downtown, and they showed me around.  We saw the beautiful Cathedral by night, we saw the old roman forum but night and the Alcazaba as well. 

 

 

 

 

 

Cathedral

 

We even found a giant pair of 3D sunglasses in Plaza de la Merced.  It was a promotion for discounts at movies in Malaga at certain theatres, but the giant red sunglasses were pretty cool!  Oh yea!  And I went to Pimpi’s, a famous British bar in Malaga, and there’s been all sorts of famous people who have visited the restaurant.  It’s actually really cool, and it’s huge on the inside with old posters advertising for bull fights, movies, flamenco shows, and then pictures of all the famous people who have visited the restaurant.  I’m really not even sure why it’s famous, I just know that it is.  It was cool though!

Saturday we took advantage the nice weather and Maria and Manolo took me to climb alongside the Alcazaba to see a great view of Malaga.  I actually don’t know anything about the Alcazaba, why it’s there or when it got there, because I didn’t do anything touristy, while I was in Malaga.  If I return I def am going to go to the Picasso Museum and enter the Alcazba so I can see the old Roman Forum better.  But what we did was also really cool (both as in it was awesome and it was chilly!  It started to get cold in Malaga when I went!)

 

The old Roman Forum in front of the Alcazaba

 

At the top of the view, and yes, that’s the beautiful ocean in the background.  It was amazing

Maria, Manolo and Me at the top.  My two favorite Spainards!

And of course I entered the Cathedral in Malaga, what Cathedral don’t I enter!  It was really pretty inside, and had probably one of the most beautiful tabernacles that I’ve ever seen. 

Sunday we went down to the beach and walked along the shore for a bit, and I even saw some people sun bathing!  And that’s pretty much everything I did.  It was a really relaxing weekend with them.  We drove around in the car ( :D I miss driving around in a car) and ate really amazing food, and drank a lot of wine. It was an incredible weekend and I’m so grateful that my friends showed me around their beautiful new home.  Hey, maybe next year I’ll live in Malaga, that’d be cool.  :D