Thoughts on being a World away from Home

So by the end of week two I feel a whole lot more comfortable here in Spain. I can understand people when she speak to me in Spanish and I only have to ask them to repeat themselves a couple times now as opposed to half a billion. Plus, I've been reading the newspaper in Spanish everyday so that's helping, reading about the banking crisis in another language is really confusing, let me tell you.

I finally got my teaching schedule and I ended up having a four day weekend every week, so I'm planning on doing quite a bit of traveling this year if the finances hold up. Lucia and I already booked a flight to Milan for the end of the month to celebrate her birthday, so that should be a blast.

I also fell into another teaching job on monday-wednesday afternoons. Dan, one of my apartment-mates told me about the opportunity and said that if I was interested I could walk over to the place with him one evening to hear details. We got there, the woman in charge sat us down for about 10 minutes and then got up, took us to a classroom, and told us to get started! It was a little unexpected, but I only had one student to work with so I managed to bs my way through it pretty easily.

I really like teaching at the primary school here and the kids make it so much fun. True, they rarely listen and hardly ever behave when you want them to, but they are so excited about life. I assist with classes ranging from 2nd year all the way to 6th year so I have a broad spectrum of ages and ability. Right now, they're all fascinated with me, waving whenever I walk by them, saying hi and bye bye. In almost every class, they tend to ask questions about the piercing in my ear since it's not common over here. When I catch them staring at me in the middle of class, it's usually because I've tucked my hair behind my ear and they can see the bar in my ear. It's really funny to see their looks of shock.

I finally got some pictures of Baeza for you all to look at. I put them in a Facebook album since it takes forever to upload them on this blog. You should be able to see them at this link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2043968&l=40bce&id=11400089

and just so everyone knows, it's not warm here even though it's near the Mediterranean. It gets down to the 50s at night and tile floors really don't help keep the piso warm. This week we figured out how to turn on the warm water, so I had my first warm shower a couple days ago. It felt wonderful! If there's one thing I can't live without, it's a warm shower.