I'll be home for Christmas...if only in my dreams

Two weeks ago, we had another puente(long weekend) here, which means a day off of school.  Lucia and I used it to go skiing in the Sierra Nevadas right outside Granada.  It was so much fun, and incredibly challenging.  I haven't been skiing in 4 years and even then I've only really been skiing at Swiss Valley in southern Michigan, which is great and all, but I don't think the terrain there qualifies as mountainous by a long shot.  It's the first time I've ever had to pop my ears multiple times while skiing down a slope.  We spent a wonderful day and a half riding ski lifts up the mountain and flying down the crystal white powder (and in some cases ice).  It was a great time.  I talked to a Spaniard on the bus up the mountain and he said that they'd never had as much snow as they did that weekend but that they ski year round in the Sierra Nevadas.  In the summer, they walk up the mountain to the very top and ski in shorts!  Crazy, eh?

Well, school is finished for the year here and for the next two weeks I have absolutely no responsibilities (job-wise) so there are endless possibilities for travel and general enjoyment of Spain.  I'm looking forward to the next couple weeks.  I leave tomorrow on the afternoon bus to Madrid to pick up my brother, Steve.  He's going to be here for 1 week and I get to show him around!  So I get a taste of home for Christmas which is nice otherwise I'm sure I'd get a bit homesick next week.  It'll be great to see him and spend some time with him before he takes off for Australia this coming semester.  This is also the first time that everyone in Baeza has split up since we got here in October.  We're all going different places with different people, although our paths will cross in the next few weeks as we explore on our own.  After Steve leaves, I'm meeting up with Ellen, my apartment- mate and we're going to Seville with her brother for New Year's Eve where we will partake of the traditional Spanish celebration which includes eating 12 grapes at midnight.  Apparently you have to eat all 12 grapes by the time the clock is finished striking midnight, and if you are successful you are rewarded with 12 months of prosperity and good luck.  If not....well, you get the picture...

This week was a lot of fun at school with all the activities and the festive air.  Papa Noel (Santa Claus) came to visit the classes and brought candy for everyone.  We sang Christmas carols in English.  I taught my kids "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" and they were all very excited about learning the song.  

A plate of holiday treats mysteriously appeared in the teacher's lounge at school and refilled every night.  I admit, I ate more than my fair share of cookies and chocolates.  Los tres reyes magos (the three kings) came to visit, bringing everyone gifts and scaring the youngest of the children so bad that they cried.  They brought me a beautiful bound agenda, which would be extremely useful if I had anything I had to write down, but since life is pretty simple here, I'm not sure how much use I'll get out of it.  Baeza is also looking pretty festive.  There are Christmas lights up all over town, a Christmas tree in the middle of the roundabout downtown, and a nativity scene you can visit.  All this is made better by the fact that the weather has been gorgeous and in the 40's all week.  

Well next time I update my blog, it's going to be 2009.  It's weird to think that a year has gone by again and that this time last year, I was finishing up exams at Hope and now I'm hanging out in Spain.  I'm trying to decide if I'm going to bother with the whole New Year's resolutions thing.  Most of the time I just ignore the whole tradition because I can never stick to my resolutions and I don't kid myself about being able to. Either that, or I can't really come up with any good ones that seem worth my time and effort.  However, I've recently decided to revisit the whole thing so I might come up with a resolution in the next couple of weeks.  Who knows...new country...I might be inspired.  Anyway, until next time everyone!  Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year!  Celebrate with style and enjoy time with the ones you love!

We FINALLY have HEAT!

after a week and a half without heating, someone finally showed up last night to fill our gasoline tank! Now I can walk around the apartment without wearing every last article of clothing i own.

Thanksgiving as an expat

Thanksgiving is weird in Spain because, unlike Halloween or Christmas, the people here have no idea what the holiday is about. So there are no festivities and no holiday spirit bursting out of people. I spent Thanksgiving day teaching all my little kidlins about the Pilgrims and how important Thanksgiving dinner is. The concept of Black Friday astounded them no end, not surprising since I think it's all pretty crazy and I've grown up with the event.

We managed to score a turkey for our dinner, which we held on Saturday. Dan, my apartment-mate has been tutoring for a pretty well-off family and he happened to ask where we could find a turkey in the fine country of Spain since they aren't all that common. Turns out the family has a farm, and offered to kill, butcher, and defeather a turkey just for us! So we had a very fresh bird for our dinner. So Saturday morning I woke up, stuck the turkey in the oven to slowly roast throughout the day, and made some brownies for dessert.

Then I went to the bus station to pick up my friend Baxter, who came over from Granada to visit for a bit. I took him downtown to the medieval festival that was going on. There were lots of craft booths, homemade food booths, and a couple restaurant stands where we grabbed some drinks. A medieval festival in Spain has overtones of the Arabic culture though since the country was occupied by Muslims from 700 AD to almost the end of the 1400s. So there were musicians playing Arabic music walking the streets. I was going to give Baxter the big tour of Baeza, but it was freezing and then it started to rain so we headed back to the apartment to hang out.

Later that evening we gathered up all our food and headed over to our friends' apartment where the celebration was to take place. It was an international Thanksgiving and I think all the Europeans involved began to understand why we enjoy the holiday so much. I mean, who wouldn't be excited about a holiday dedicated to eating lots of great food. We had turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, apple cobbler, mashed potatos, pasta, corn, and green beans. We stuffed ourselves silly and went back for more. All in all, there were 16 of us there for Thanksgiving, 10 of which were from somewhere in Europe and 6 of us from the United States so we were way outnumbered. My new family had a blast though and we rounded out the night by watching Love Actually, ringing in the Christmas season.

On a somewhat related topic, but not continuing the above story: we got our Christmas tree yesterday! We had to order it and were a bit worried that it would turn out to be an olive tree (the only tree that you see when you ride the bus anywhere around here), but it's a genuine pine tree that smells exactly like Christmas! yay!

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!