heeeeey there....

i am absolutely horrible at keeping this thing up to date. Even though I have plenty of time to write everything down, somehow this just doesn't get done as often as it should. And now there's a lot to report so i'm probably not going to do it the justice it deserves. Since I last wrote, we've had two birthday celebrations, gone to Córdoba, had a wonderfully international Thanksgiving celebration, and experienced our first Spanish snowfall. See what I mean? A lot has happened.

We had two birthdays in November and as we need little excuse to celebrate and have a party, we planned some fun things to do for each birthday. Both Lucia and Ellen turned 23 here in Spain. For Lucia's birthday we checked out the nightlife in Baeza, staying out until 6 in the morning, presenting gifts, and having a great dinner at a nice restaurant that gave us free dessert (always a good thing) because we were with the birthday girl. Now the interesting part of the story. The night of Lucia's birthday there was a city-wide blackout in Baeza so we had to make preparations by the light of our computer screens and cell phones. Being newcomers to the country, we, of course, didn't have a single flashlight or candle. So when the batteries on our computers began to die, Ellen and I trekked across town through perilously dark winding streets in the pitch black to the only place in town that seemed to have power, the supermarket! There we loaded up on matches, candles, and birthday cake. The power outage didn't really put much of a hitch in our plans, just made the search for a restaurant that was actually open a bit tricky, but we prevailed and the festivities continued.

For Ellen's big day we decided to move the fun times to Córdoba, a city about three hours away by bus (much closer by car) that is famous for the Mesquita, an old Moorish temple that was converted to a Christian church when the Catholics drove the Muslims out of southern Spain in the late 1400's. We have some fellow auxiliares there teaching english that had some free floor space where we set up our air mattress and crashed for the weekend. We got there Friday night, went to a Mexican restaurant for dinner ( believe you me, good Mexican food is hard to find here) and then I went to my first movie in the theater in Spain! We saw Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond movie dubbed in Spanish. It was definitely an experience. I understood most of what was going on throughout the movie, but didn't catch those smart one liners Bond is always throwing around. Most of the group who went to the movies ended up taking a nap in the theater since it was all in Spanish, but I stuck it out, amazingly. The next day, we walked around the city, saw the Mesquita and toured the surrounding neighborhood. That night we had a family dinner of spaghetti and homemade birthday cake. Sunday morning we got up early and made our way to the Arab baths, one of the most relaxing experiences of my life. For an hour and a half, we wandered between the sauna, a warm pool, a cold pool, and a hot pool, followed by a massage (my first ever!) and by the end of the time I felt like a limp noodle. Then, we leisurely made our way to Bar Santo, a restaurant known for their potato tortilla (like a potato omelet) which is delicious. Then we walked down by the river and took a nap in the grass, enjoying the magnificent weather and getting stared at by all the passers-by. Eventually we mustered up enough energy to move, met some friends of friends, and then walked to the bus station to catch the last bus back to Baeza. It was the perfect weekend!

7 days later, it snowed for the first time since I got to Spain. One weekend I was walking around in a T-shirt and the next I was bundled up in my winter coat with gloves and a hat. Talk about a drastic change. It was good practice because Monday morning I woke up and discovered that during the night we had run out of gasoline to power our heating so it was freezing. Now it's Wednesday and we still don't have any heat because the gas man hasn't been able to come. Fingers crossed he comes today otherwise i'm going to freeze to death soon. I have a thermometer on my clock and it is currently 52 degrees inside our apartment and 41 outside! Ridiculous!