Erick Taxiing Our BagsErick used his moped to take all of our luggage to his house. We are sure he got a lot of looks carrying a big purple bag with a teddy bear sticking out.
Today we woke up the exact opposite of refreshed. We slept poorly in our seats all night because we kept waking up to find a new less uncomfortable position. We have also grown cankles (calf-ankles) over night. We attribute this to the fact that we climbed a mountain yesterday which caused them to swell and also sleeping upright on the train all night so that the blood wasn't able to flow easily.
We were able to get our bags down with less trouble than we had anticipated. We left the train and went in search of a bus that would take us to the bus station. After Christine asked 4 people in Spanglish (a combination of both English and Spanish words), we finally found someone who could also speak Spanglish and could give us directions that made sense. We found the right bus and sat down to adjust our backpack loads. When we got to the right stop, we didn't even know it until a man started frantically gesturing and saying that we needed to get off, that this was our stop.
Once at the bus station, we needed to buy tickets to Almuñécar. To do this Christine had
Erick´s HouseOnly when in a house where 3 guys live, will a girl find her makeup bag in the bidee! Fortunately they claim to only use it on rare occations to clean their feet.
to speak with a very unfriendly tickets sales lady, who was not impressed with the fact that we are not fluent Spanish speakers. After that unpleasant experience, we then had to find the bus terminal and figure out what all of the numbers on our tickets meant. We asked a man at an information booth and he was very helpful. There was a 10 am bus and a 1pm bus. We really didn't want to wait 3 hours if it could be avoided. We were glad that our timing worked well enough to catch the early bus.
It took us about 1 hour and 20 minutes to get to Almuñécar. We waited for Erick, nervous that our paths wouldn't cross. Erick is a friend that Christine met during her freshman year of college through her friend Stefanie that attended Clarkson University. Erick is originally from Wisconsin and graduated from Clarkson last May. Christine has kept in close contact with him and even visited him in Wisconsin for a week last summer. He moved to Spain this past August when he was recruited to play basketball. He is staying in Spain until June and invited us to stay at his house during our long backpacking trip. Come to find out, he had written us a message on the computer that he wouldn't be there until 11:45. We had already left for the train station when that message came, so Christine walked around trying to prepare a plan B for if he were to not show within a decent amount of time. After asking the man at the information center how to use the phone (because they are so confusing here!), she started to call Erick. As she was leaving him a voicemail, he came busting into the bus station on his moped. She hung up the phone and ran out to make sure he didn't drive away.
Once Christine brought Erick up to where Kim was, he "taxied" us to his house. He took Christine's big bag first, then Kim's big bag, then Christine hopped on and went up to his house, then he came back and brought Kim up. There is a very big hill that we were glad that we didn't have to trek up. The first thing we did was shower. Then we taxied via moped to the supermarket and then to the butcher shop. In the afternoon Erick and his roommates went to run the basketball afterschool program at a local elementary school. We went through our bags with a fine toothed comb to weed out and send home (or throw out) anything that we didn't desperately need. We then had time to put our feet up (in an effort to diminish our cankles) and finish our recording our pictures (yay!). When Erick got back, he cooked us a home cooked dinner of homemade spaghetti sauce with spaghetti, bruscetta with goat cheese (which we both tried and liked even though Christine had had it before in Spain and did not like it), and dessert of chocolate filled croissants (yum!). We ate dinner and socialized with Erick's coach, Tom, who arranged for Erick to be able to live here. He is originally from the States and now lives next door to Erick here in Spain. After eating and talking, it was after 10pm - this is very common in Spain to have dinner at a late hour. We used the computer, watched an Irish movie called Turning Green (Christine fell asleep during it) and then went to bed with the hopes that our cankles would be gone in the morning.
Spain's Flag
Map of Spain