Laudi's cumpleaños...

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Hola a todos! I realize that I haven't written anything substantial in awhile, so I am going to try to cover the last week in this entry.

I can not believe that I have already almost been in Spain for a month, the time is seeming to fly by! Everything here is good, Molly is moved in and settled with our family here, and it is so much fun in the household, Laudi is hilarious and we all have a good time together. I am really REALLY glad that I decided to live with a host family, I already feel like it is going to be hard to say goodbye to them, and I can't wait for mom to meet Laudi, she seems all quiet and reserved but she has a rowdy streak in her. On thursday night she is going to come to salsa dancing lessons with us...should be a riot. She is always dancing around the house, and laughs at me and Molly because we make up songs in spanish about everything, mainly her food because it is amazing.

Last night after dinner we were all sitting around just talking, well actually they were all smoking and I was just sitting, but that is beside the point. The language barrier came up when i meant to tell her that I was embarassed, but in spanish the word is not what you would think. Embarassed is "embarazosa" not "embarazada"which is the word that i used. In my defense, it is easy to see that the words are very similar, but the word that i said means pregnant....who would have thought. So me and molly had to spend a good 15 minutes trying to explain to her what it is that I meant, the whole time laughing hysterically...this is not my only mishap with the language deal either but i will explain the other later in the entry.

But as for this week, the weather was a little cold, but then it is always cold to me, but all in all it was a good week. I absolutely love my classes, and i think that I enjoy the culture one the most. We take field trips around the city, and learn a lot about the working of Spain and such. My family here is great to talk to about Spanish history, and me and Molly just got a lesson on the reign of Franco at lunch today. I feel like I need to google him because it seems that his tyranny had a severe impact on the lives of all spaniards, much like Hitler and it was not very long ago. If there is one thing that I have learned here is that the USA does not teach us enough about everywhere else. They all can name all of our presidents and tell me our history, probably better than I can...and I know very little about theirs or Europe in general for that fact. In my comp class this week, we had a fiesta aptly named Fiesta USA. The plan was for us to put on a typical college party in our class, and we did. We played beer pong and flip up, taught her some american dances like the electric slide and soldier boy, and listened to music...pretty sure our teacher got pretty tipsy in class it was hilarious. They are crazy here, nothing like that would fly in the US, but when the class next door heard our music and the teacher came in to see what was going on, he let his class out too so they could join in. So fun!

On Friday Molly and I ventured to the mall to see what that was all about. There I realized there really is a god when I spotted a Subway. Don't get me wrong, I love the food here and everything but I have eaten more seafood and ham in the last 3 weeks than in my whole life up unto this point. So the Subway was heavenly. The mall is pretty similar to malls in the US and it was easy to forget where we were and just shop for a few hours. I find that I often forget that I am in Spain, lol. I will just be walking along and it will hit me that I am in a foreign country, half way around the world from everything I know. It is def an overwhelming feeling but I am getting used to it. I guess I just expected it to be extremely different here, and it is, but at the same time it isn't...does that make sense? Another scary but cool thing is that I have gotten used to hearing and speaking Spanish all of the time. When I hear English it feels wrong lol...last night at dinner Laudi told me that my speaking and comprehending have both improved a ton since the first few days, so that is exciting. And for anyone who has had to take Spanish classes ( Becky, brace yourself) I have some bad news....even though we are forced to learn about 12 different tenses ranging from the present to in-the-past-when-you-just-had-an-idea-but-you-can't-remember-the-specific-time-because-if-you-could-it-would-be-a-completely-different-word tense, they only use the 3 basic tenses. And actually you could get by fine with just 2, the past and the present. It makes it a lot easier to speak, but is infuriating that we learned a whole lot for nothing! ugh.

but anyways on the way home from the mall we ran into a union riot/march. I have seen probably about 4 marches since I have arrived here and they are kind of scary. People are very passionate and everyone is yelling...I took some pics and will post them.

And lastly today is Laudi's 56 birthday. Molly, Lara, and I bought her a huge card last week, and she told us that we would be having a great seafood dinner tonight so we have been excited all week. This morning, Lara snuck out early and bought a cake, and everything was set. When we gave Laudi her card, we had all written in it, and at the end of my message i had put "xoxo". When she read this she laughed so hard she was crying, and showed it to Lara and she was rolling on the floor too. Me and Molly didn't get it, but then they explained that "chocho" which is spelled "xoxo"in Valenciano, is the spanish equivalent of calling someone a "pussy". Dang i am on a roll lately with the spanish words....but anyways we sat down to lunch and Laudi gave us all glasses of champagne (she is so cute) and we got our first course, which looked kind of like greyish noodles. We tried them, and they were excellent so we ate them all up...but wait...anyways Laudi was telling us that they were angulas, a word that is necessary to point out that neither of us knew in Spanish. What we got from her description was that they were noodles made out of seafood, which we thought was a little weird, but ok whatev....but we were wrong. I asked her what kind of seafood it was in the noodles and she got a really confused look and said she didn't know, maybe fish. So we just let that go, ate our heaping portions of angulas because in Spain they are very very expensive, for us 4 to eat them it was about 60 bucks a plate! Crazy. After we had some shrimp, normal, and some bread with this amazing ensalada that she made out of avocados, onions, lemon, oline oil, tuna, and salt. Salt is in everything, and oil I would just like to point out. It was a great dinner, and after we ate the cake, and sang happy birthday. She also made us take shots of peach liquor, because after all, it is her birthday...she said they would help with our siestas...crazy woman. But the real point of the story is me and Molly loved the angulas so we wanted to google them so that we could make them when we got back to the States...so we went in my room and layed on the bed and got to googling...little did we know, angulas turned out to be BABY EELS. yup we had both just eaten a huge plateful of baby eels...at one point Lara was picking through hers, and we thought it was to get the garlic pieces out but no. It was to look for the EYES!!!! ahh i am shivering just thinking about it...it was so good, but it was a plateful of baby eels. eels. I guess it is a delicacy of the Basque country, where Laudi is from...but it is a good thing that we didn't know before hand because I couldn't have done it. Makes me wonder what else she feeds us....

Ok well that is all I have to say for now, but I hope all is well with everyone and hope to hear from you all soon!

xoxo
b

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Photos

Plaza de la Virgen
at night...sorry no flash

Old Central Market
i dont know if i already put these up...

Comida
bocadillos from a famous restaurante

Central Mercado!
outside the main entrance

Central Mercado!
inside

Central Mercado!
the meat...

Fiesta USA
the lady with the glasses is my teacher Vicky

Riot
in Plaza de la Reina..my favorite plaza

Angulas
don't be fooled, they are NOT noodles!