New!

Alright so I finally have a minute to write a real post about Cádiz, time is scarce around here so it’s hard to find time to sit down and write something for the blog. Let’s see, first of all, my family. My mom, Carmen, is a little bit crazy but she is really cool. She is super outspoken and nosy and come into my room every day and cleans it and rearranges things and you all know I am a super clean person but she puts me to shame... she is the biggest neat freak that I have ever encountered. She refuses to leave the house even to go to the store without full makeup and she does yoga with two of her sisters and she is super proud of it. She is one of ten siblings and we live in the house that they all grew up in, pretty cool, right? My dad, Santi, doesn’t say much. Both of my parents are retired so they just kind of hang out all day and my dad watches tv all the time. He loves these super cheesy spanish game shows and soap operas, it’s pretty hilarious. He’s a big guy and sits around all day with his shirt off and we wear a gold chain around his neck. Haha. He hates vegetables and picks them all out of his food and my mom and sisters tell him about how he is going to get even fatter.... pretty funny dinner table talk. My two sisters are both married and live outside of the hose but they are around all the time. My sister Ali is super cool, she has a five month old baby named Leirei and I have never heard a baby laugh as hard as this baby laughs, it’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard, I get so excited when they come over. My other sister Sylvia is alright, she’s kind of uptight and does not say much, but she’s nice enough. She has two boys, Hugo and Mauro, who are cute but they older one Hugo is one of the snottiest little kids I have ever met. Mauro is super cute, he just turned two and he’s hilarious. Two weeks ago he fell while he was playing and knocked out two of his teeth and it is the only thing my family has talked about since.

My girlfriend from the program, Katherine, is my host cousin (our mom’s are sisters) and her family is on vacation for the week so we have her house to ourselves which is so nice... it’s awesome to be able to cook our own meals and sit around in our underwear if we want to. It’s so weird to go from living on your own for so long to living in a house with a family who makes your food and who you have to call if you are not coming home to eat or if you’re going to stay the night somewhere else.

School is going well, linguistics in spanish is unbelievably hard, but my professor is super sweet, she is one of the nicest women I have ever met and she is a great teacher.

We were in Granada and Cordoba this past weekend with our whole program and it was so much fun. We went to the mosque in Cordoba and walked around town for the day then spent the other two days in Granada. We stayed in a super ghetto hotel and two of our rooms had water pouring out of the ceiling from the showers on the floor above... it was definitely interesting. We had a great time though and spent all day Sunday at the Alhambra which was INCREDIBLE, it was so beautiful and it’s so big, there is so much to explore!

This weekend we are thinking of going to this little beach town called Tarifa for a girls weekend and to celebrate Halloween which should be fun, if all goes according to plan we should have 11 girls going.

Oh and I got a job! I am teaching this man named Guillermo english two times a week and he is HILARIOUS! He’s in his late 60’s and he is super opinionated and super funny, he’s great and it’s a super easy job. We sit for an hour and a half two times a week and talk and I answer his questions about grammar and correct him when we are having a conversation and he makes a mistake. Tonight was my first night working with him, but I can tell I am really going to like it and that it will be the easiest job ever. The job in Jerez didn’t end up working out which is a bummer, it would have been mine but my class schedule was in the way. I suppose it all worked out for the best though cause Guillermo is great.

Anyway, the girls and I are going to go make a big dinner and then go to this bar Woodstock where our friend Miguel works... I’ll write more soon.

Xxx

My literature and other arts professor....

is HORRIBLE!

UGHHHHHHHHHH.

He gives us absolutely ridiculous amounts of work to do over the weekends.

This weekend has been my first weekend in Cádiz for four weeks cause my friends and I have been traveling everywhere and it's good to just relax for the weekend. The girls and I went out Friday night to some bars and then dancing and spent Saturday doing homework on the beach, it's still in the 80s here everyday, it's so beautiful. This Friday we have a trip with our entire program to Granada and Cordoba which should be alright, except they load all 35 of us on a bus and it will not be a short drive to Granada.... yuck.

I'm trying to think of what else there is to report, things have fallen into more of a routine now which is nice. Aside from my literature and other arts professor being a psycho everything is great. Still homesick for sure, but it's getting easier as I get into a routine. There is a chance for a really amazing job opportunity in a city called Jerez which is an hour away by bus. I applied for the job, and I will find out in the next two or three days if it works out, I am crossing my fingers!

I'm sitting in the cathedral plaza waiting for a girlfriend and we're going to go back to my house and do homework for the rest of the day. My family is in el campo for the day and I couldn't go because of all this damn homework...ughhhh. My sister Ali is visiting with her 5 month old daughter Leirei and I am so happy! She is definitely my favorite sister, she is really cool and Leirei is the sweetest, happiest little baby.

Oh! Last week I was in Barcelona for five days with two of my girlfriends and we had a BLAST! Our hostel was right on las ramblas so there was lots to do and we got to see some of the cool tourist stuff too. We went to the picasso museum, the chocolate museum, the sagrada familia and some other Gaudi architecture which was really cool. And then on our last day we took a train out to Montserrat and hiked all over and took a cablecar to the top of the mountain, it was incredible, definitely my favorite part of Barcelona. Hopefully we will go again in December, we found roundtrip tickets for a four day weekend in December for only 20 euro, that's not an opportunity we can pass up!

Our trip out to Barcelona was pretty funny too, our flight left the Sevilla airport at 9 in the morning so we had to take the last train out of Cádiz the night before and spend the night in the Sevilla airport because no trains left early enough in the morning to get us there on time. The catch is, when we got to the airport in Sevilla, the airport was closed from midnight to five in the morning, who knew airports closed?!

Sooooo we ended up spending the night on the sidewalk in front of the airport, me and five girlfriends, it was pretty hilarious, and needless to say, when we finally got to barcelona, we were absolutely exhausted.

I keep trying to add pictures but the internet is being funny, I'll post them later tonight or tomorrow.

All my love!

Lagos, Portugal

I'm waaaaaaay behind on posting blogs, but here is a video and some photos from Portugal. It is easily one of the most beautiful places I have ever been, I was sad to leave. Watch the video at the bottom of this post, it's pretty funny, it's from our boat tour in this sketchy little boat with an old man who didn't speak any english.

We had a crazy good time, we took a boat tour around the cliffs, went on a wine boat tour, explored the town, did some shopping, ate some awesome food, and went to some really cool bars. We didn't meet a single portugese person though, crazy, right? Everyone in Lagos was Australian. We stayed at a super fun hostel and Mamma who runs it makes all you can eat crepes every morning and the first day we helped her make them, it was really fun. Since Portugal my friends and I have spent a weekend in Tangier, Morrocco and then a weekend in Sevilla, and tomorrow two of my girlfriends and I are off to Barcelona for five day cause we have a break from school. I'll try to get better about uploading posts, all my love!

The past few weeks here have been CRAZY!

My friends and I have been having a blast. This coming weekend we have a three day weekend and four of my friends and I rented a car and we're going to Lagos, Portugal to stay in a hostel on the beach and hang out. Then the following weekend we booked a trip to Tangier, Morrocco for three days... needles to say the next few weeks are going to be amazing. We started our classes at the University of Cádiz yesterday, we have not done much yet but the professors seem pretty cool. This semester is going to be pretty intense for me though, I am taking a class on Spanish linguistics, a literature class, a "literture and other arts" class, my language class (level 3 of 4), and an art history class.... mind you these are all in Spanish.

Regardless, we have so much fun out here. We have found most of the good clubs and bars in the city, and we have so much fun going out together. I really could not have asked for a better group on this trip, we are all super different but we have a blast together. There was a pretty cool airplane show at the playa victoria on sunday and all of my friends and I went. We layed on the beach for like eight hours and drank daquiri's, it was really fun. They kept making announcements about jellyfish in the water so none of actually got in, especially considering the incident with me getting stung by a jellyfish in the middle of the night on our fifth night here. For those of you who don't know about that already, we were hanging out on the beach before we went out to the bars and I was in the water out to my mid thigh and got stung on the leg by a jellyfish, it was not fun at all.

My family is turning out to be really cool, my host mom is super funny and my host dad just doesn't say much. I definitely miss the food at home though, everything here is drenched in oil or fried... they eat more carbohydrates here than I ever thought possible. My friend Jourdan and I found a Ben and Jerry's though, we were super excited.

I miss you all and hope all is well at home, all my love!

Hola todos.

Sorry I have not been able to post much, it's been insane trying to get everything in motion here. I don't have internet at my hosue either, so to email and do homework and blog I go and sit in one of the zillions of plazas and use the computer becuase the city has free wifi in all the plazas- it's awesome.

I can not even explain how much fun this place is. I only sleep about four hours a night because we are always out doing stuff, but it's great. We have like a review class this week and next week from nine thirty in the morning till one, and after that we are free to go. We all hang out and shop around town and stuff untill about two and we go home for lunch with our families. Lunch is the big meal here, not dinner. So at three after we eat lunch me and all my friends from my program go to the beach and these little bars on the beaches chiringuitos and tan (everyone here topless tans, me and most of the other girls aer stoked, no tan lines!) and swim and take naps. Then at around nine we go home do some homework eat dinner around ten with our families and then around midnight we all meet up and hang out will 2 or 3 or whenever we finally decide to go home. It's SO much fun. The first two nights here I went swimming with a friend of mine from like midnight 3 or 4 in the morning, and the beach is so beautiful at night.

I am at the plaza now with some friends finishing homework then we're going to this bar called woodstock for some drink then probably to the beach. Tomorrow the real fun starts, this city is a blast on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.

I still can't really believe I'm here.

My host mom is turning out to be a little uptight, none of the women in my family drink at all and she's a little intense, but hopefully it will get better. More about that later.

I got a phone yesterday, a Spainish one! 662 067181 In case anyone for any reason had an emergency and needed to contact me, here is the number. I don't know how my voicemail works, but I could probably figure it out. I am 8 hours ahead of New Mexico and 9 ahead of Seattle, just for the record.

I'll write more later, there is so much to tell!

¡Hasta pronto, besitos!

Día Uno

¡Hola todos!

I'm finally here!!!! I don't have pictures to post yet because I am exhausted, but it has been an awesome first day. I flew from Albuquerque to Dallas and luckily ran into a girlfriend that is in my program who was on my same flight to Madrid. We didn't end up getting to sit together, but it was nice to have someone to stumble around with one we got to Madrid. THe Madrid airport is huge and it was pretty hilarious watching us try to find our way around, but we found our connecting flight to Jerez and there were 11 or 12 kids from our program on the flight which was awesome. Once we got to Jerez we got our bags, excpet for this poor guy named Ed whose bags they lost, and got on the bus to Cádiz.

You should have seen the looks on our faces when we drove into the city. None of us could even believe it was real, it was so amazing. Strangely enough there is actually a guy on this trip from Albuquerque, weird coincidence.

Anyway, we got to the plaza and it was total chaos, all the moms were looking for their kids and vice versa, and my mom found me and gave me a huge hug and a kiss and was like let's get out of here it's too hot. She is hilarious and so awesome. I completely lucked out with my family. My host parents have two daughters who are both married with kids, one lives in Cádiz and one doesn't. The one who does live here is at the house hanging out every day and her two boys who are almost 2 and almost four love me.

So we came home and ate an amazing meal and I took a nap for a few hours. Then we met up with my host mom's two sisters who also have host students in my program and we all went for a walk and got churritos y cafe which is absolutely amazing but sooooo bad for you. It's like fried bread with sugar on it and you dip it in your coffee.

So we walked around town more and it's so cool there are historical sites underneath a bunch of the buildings here and you walk down the stairs and there are these exhibits about the ruins the the floor is plexiglass so you can see through to them. It's crazy.

I just unpacked and I'm getting ready to go eat some fruit and watch some tv with my host mom. She is so cute, she calls me beautiful all the time and she shows me where the boys hang out in town and says t be careful because they will fall in love with me. Haha!

I miss and love everyone and have been thinking about you tons, tomorrow my host family is having a huge family get together en el campo so I will be gone all day. It's going to be an awesome party, I think it's someone's birthday, actually. A few other girls from my program will be there too cause their host mom's are related to my host mom.

Hasta luego, abrazos y besos de Cádiz, ¡la ciudad que sonríe!

More pictures... This city is so beautiful.

27 Days until I move to Spain!

I got my visa in the mail and my house assignment, all I need to do now is get on the plane!

My host mom is Carmen Bernal, and my cousin Morgan and I got on google earth and found out that my house is suuuuuper close to the beach, but sadly not super close to the University which will mean a good walk to classes and home for siesta with my family. The picture shows how the city is set up, I am living on the right side of the city kind of where the little point juts out, If I find better pictures of where I'm living I'll post them.

43 days until I move to Cádiz!

I decided it would probably be much easier to make a blog so I can post pictures and updates while I am gone rather than trying to email everyone one by one. All the final plans are in place for the trip, every day I get a little more nervous, but it will be the experience of a lifetime. I will find out in the next few days who my host family is too, cross your fingers that they are awesome.

I'm still not one hundred percent sure that I am doing this blog thing right so bear with me....