Final Goodbyes

alright so I have officially been out of Spain for the past two weeks and I must admit that I do miss it. My final goodbyes to the kids I work with were very hard (they always are) and all of my coworkers told me that if I ever come back to Madrid then we have to get together. I, in turn, told them that if they happen to be in Michigan then they better stop by and see me. My boss gave me a picture in a frame of my kids from the pool and it was very sweet of her. I must admit that when people ask me what is my favorite part of Madrid I know it is my internship and those kids so saying goodbye was tough.

Saying goodbye to my host family wasn't any easier either. Don't get me wrong, there are some things that I will be very glad to be away from (the bed bugs I have slept with for the past 3 months, the 3 minute maximum showers I took, the nasty salad with buge globs of mayo on it) but there are some things I will miss terribly (the cat Felipe, my best best buddy in the house Eva, and her sister Cecilia). I left at midnight to take the metro to the airport and I figured I would leave alone since Ines and Eva always go to be at 10:30. However, Eva's sister Cecilia was over for the night and they all told me that they were going to stay up until I left. So we watched movies and ate soup and chit chatted until I had to go. Saying goodbye to Ines (my house mom) and Cecilia (Eva's sister) was no problem, but when it came to Eva (Ines' live in assistant)I really had to hold back the tears. We took the elevator down together and she held the doors open for me as I lugged my big suitcase outside. Once outside, she gave me the biggest hug and told me the sweetest things. I told her how amazing it was to have her in the house and we promised to keep in touch through email. She went back inside and once she was gone I finally started to tear up. I was almost to the end of the block when I heard her yell out my name and say goodbye one more time. It was very sweet of her.

Now I am with Kelli and Katie traveling around Europe. We have been in Italy for a week, London for 4 days, and just got into Ireland. I absolutely love everywhere that we have been and could not possibly even begin to write about my experiences. Fortunately, I will be home within a week so if you want to know how the traveling was then you can talk to me about it!

I must admit though that I do miss Spain. I miss the daily challenge of hearing a foreign language all around you. I miss taking the metro around town. I miss reading in the park. I miss walking around downtown window shopping. I miss Eva. And I miss my kids.

Part of me is ready to come home though. I am starting to get tired of living out of a suitcase and going from one hotel to the next every day.

So there are three parts of me, one that loves the European traveling, one that wants to stay in Spain, and one that wants to just come home to see my friends and family. There isn't one thing that is more dominant than the others, they all just exist together. It is kinda strange, but I am just trying to live for the moment and treasure the experiences I have today and not think about the past or the future.

Paris-A Weekend in the City of Lights

The weekend after Pamplona, Kelli and I went to Paris. It was an absolutely amazing experience and much much calmer than our Pamplona weekend. It was also a lot cleaner too so that was very appreciated!

We flew (a very nice difference from the bus) from Madrid to Paris and arrived there at night. We got really lucky when we were in the airport because we ran into some people who spoke english and they told us that we had to take a train to get into London cause we were about 45 minutes away from our hotel. By the time we reached the hotel at 11:30 though we were straving so there was a little convenience store downstairs that we raided and we had cookies and chips for dinner.
After our gourmet dinner, we hit the town walking and realized that we were about a 15 minute walk from the Eiffel Tower. It was amazing to see it lit up at night. Plus every hour on the hour it sparkles. It was hands down my favorite thing to see in Paris. Kelli and I were amazed by it and spent about 2 hours that night walking underneath it and just reveling in the fact that we were in Paris.
Here are Kelli and I with a sparkling Eiffel Tower in the background. So cool!
The next morning we got up bright and early to go see as much of the city as we could. First stop was the Louvre. This is it from the outside.

When we got there we saw all of these signs that said we could take pictures of all of the artwork excpet the Monna Lisa. So we decided to take a picture of the sign of the Monna Lisa to say we had been there. As we were taking this picture, though, a guard who was standing next to us told us that if we wanted to see the real Monna Lisa it was just in the next room. We couldn't help but laugh and thank him for the tip.
It turns out that when we got into the next room everyone was taking pictures and nobody seemed to care at all! So here are Kelli and I with the famous Monna Lisa. It was actually a whole lot smaller than I thought it was going to be. To be honest, it was kinda anticlimactic.
Here is the Venus de MiloWho is more ferocious-Kelli or the Lion, you decide!
I fell in love with these crown jewels. Just look at that tiara! Plus they are all emeralds which is my birthstone. i think that is a sign that they were made for me. So for those of you who are still looking for a belated birthday present for me, these are first on my list!

This is the funniest picture ever. These are two sister and the one on the right is pinching the others nipple. We burst out in giggles upon seeing this. I also think it is funny that my camera has somewhat censured the picture by having the flash go off covering the other woman's chest.

Now for all of you DaVinci code fans out there, this is where the two Louvre pyramids meet! It is really cool because when the sun shines, the floor is covered in rainbows from the inverted glass pyramid!
After the Louvre we walked over to the Notre Dame. It is an absolutely gorgeous building!
We were told by friends who had visited Paris that it was much more worthwhile to climb the tower in the Notre Dame than the Eiffel Tower so Kelli and I waited in a super long line for 2 hours to climb a kajillion stairs (yes that is an actual figure).

This is the famous gargoyle of the Notre Dame and right now his name escapes me, but he is still pretty cool. Although he isn't as scary as most gargoyles with that tongue of his sticking out!

Once we got to the top it was totally worth the wait and the hike! It was so great to see the city from an aerial view.
Which one is not like the other....

Kelli and I from the top of the Notre Dame with a great view of Paris behind us. After the Notre Dame, Kelli and I walked and found a great little park. There was even a cute fountain and all of these boats floating in the water.
We stuck our feet in because it was ridiculously hot and the water was so incredibly refreshing!
We then walked to the Arch de Triomphe (I just slaughtered that spelling). It is soooo massive!

Next on the list was the Moulin Rouge which I just had to see after watching the musical. The street it is located is literally full of sex shops and other "places of illrepute". It was so strange to see tourists walking by them and not even batting an eye.

This is a...a...oh dear, I forgot the name and am too lazy to look it up. But it is cool, and very big, and we could see it from our hotel even though it was like a 30 minute walk from there.

FAVORITE PART OF PARIS! So when we got to Paris on July 14 we had no idea that it was a special day at all, but we found out that it was actually the French Indepence Day. That meant that we got to go into museums for free, yay! Even more importantly, though, we got to watch fireworks go off behind the freaking Eiffel Tower. I can't even describe in words how amazing it was to experience this. It is funny though because just two weeks before this I thought I was going to have a summer without fireworks, but as it turned out I got to see fireworks in both Pamplona and Paris and it was awesome!
After watching the fireworks we decided that we had to eat a crepe since that is one of the famous French foods. This is the man who made our crepe for us and he was super friendly and funny. Sadly, he only spoke French though so communication was a bit difficult even though Kelli and I tried to use both English adn Spanish to talk to him-yay for the international language of hand gestures!

The crepe he made for us was freaking amazing and they are now my new favorite food, except Madrid doesn't have them, so I am now just crepe deprived. The next morning we had a few hours before we had to go to the airport so we went back to my favorite part of Paris-the Eiffel Tower.

It is really really big and not quite as pretty in the daytime as at night, but still one of the most gorgeous things I have ever seen.

We had an amazing weekend in Paris and I am so incredibly glad that we went!

One Crazy Night in Pamplona!

So first of all, so sorry for the long time between my last post and now. Time here has been a little hectic and for awhile my internet connection didn't exist so uploading photos was pretty much impossible. However now I am back and have a few posts I want to write before I leave Spain for good. On the 7th of July a big group of friends and I went to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. It was one of the craziest trips ever. We left Saturday at 2 in the afternoon, took a bus up to Pamplona and arrived there at 8. We then had until 8 in the morning to hang out in the city (we didn't plan on sleeping so we didn't rent a hotel room-plus they are unbelieveably expensive) and little did we know what the night had in store for us in Pamplona....

We went kinda stir crazy on the bus ride up north, but we were elated to finally arrive in Pamplona. This is Francisco, Dillon, Steve and Katie on the bus dressed in the San Firmin white. We heard that if you don't wear all white in san firmin people dump wine on you. It turns out that is half way true. There are people with huge tubs of wine that will dump it on you, but normally they don't just do it randomly.

Our other friends took a different bus up earlier in the day, but fortunately we met up with them at a bar. Here are Katie and Nik showing off their big muscles.

We hung out on the terrace of a bar for awhile while our other friends dropped off their bags at Cameron's flat. Here are Tamurlaine, Nik, Katie, and Trey screaming to see the bulls already. Too bad this was only at 10 at night and we still had a good 10 hours before we saw the bulls.

Here are Amber and Nik at the bar. It was Amber's 21st and I guarantee you that she will never forget turning 21 at the running of the bulls!

Crazy story 1:Here is the birthday girl again, but note a difference in this picture-check out her pants. That is right Amber peed her pants when she was waiting in the line to go to the bathroom. She said she was 3 people away from the stall when she just couldnt hold it anymore she she let it go. She came out of the bathroom laughing her butt off and we thought it was pretty funny too. Happy Birthday girl!

Crazy story 2: we were at the bar when we heard these great loud thud-like noises. After about two minutes later we realized that they had to be fireworks and we took down the street running. Now keep in mind that we were in Pamplona on July 7 and just 3 days earlier we had tried celebrating the 4th of July in madrid, but it didn't work very well. So this was our second chance to celebrate and we had freaking amazing fireworks. It was fantastic and couldn't have come at a better time!We found this huge lit up plaza that was packed with people. They were setting up for a concert so we hung out there for awhile.

Here are the boys and Kelli. Both Kelli and Cameron bought those butt ugly cow spotted cowboy hats and were so proud of them all night.

Crazy story 3 (the craziest in my opinion): this is Cameron Kelli dancing in Cameron and her brother Trey's flat. They were renting it for the weekend from a woman and it is just an extra room in this womans house. At around 2am some of us were beat so Cameron and Trey said we could go back to their flat and crash on the floor. It took awhile, but we finally found it and tried to get some sleep. But the rest of the group was out and was trying to find the flat too. So after another hour there were about 9 of us sleeping on the floor and Cameron and Trey sleeping in their beds. Two of the people in our group didnt want to sleep so they stayed outside of the room in the hallway. The woman of the house heard them talking, walked out into the hallway and flipped when she saw strangers there. She then opened the door and had a coronary seeing 9 of us asleep on the floor. She told us we had 6 minutes (yes that is a directly quoted figure) to get out of the house before she called the cops on us. This included Cameron and Trey packing up all of their stuff and getting out of their immediately. Well needless to say, the threat of having the cops come scared the crap out of us and most of the group fled withing 30 seconds. The woman calmed down a bit more, but still definietly kicked us all out. So at 4am after being kicked out of a hotel room and being threatened to have the cops called on us we went here...
This was the cleanest park that we could find. Yeah, during San Firmin Pamplona is a DIRTY city. Keep in mind this is just what it looks like, can you imagine the smell? It was pretty darn bad.

Here is our sad mottly crew-homeless. We also forgot that we were going up north were it is a whole lot colder than in Madrid. So we were freezing out butts off all night. Fortunately to pass the time we ran into crazy story 4: We met this guy who was dutch and knew a tiny tiny bit of spanish, no english, and dutch. He decided to become our new best friend and we tried to talk for about an hour using hand gestures and his broken spanish. It was obvious that communication with this man wasnt really working so we just started making up things about him until we put in more effort to understand him better. At one point in time we decided that he must be in the mafia, but when we mentioned that he freaked and said he wasn't ever in the mafia, suspicious behavior if you ask me....

Around 6am we left to find a place to watch the running of the bulls. The streets where the bulls run are narrow and it is very difficult to see them. After a half hour though, we found a pretty good spot and settled there for the next hour and a half. Here are Kelli and I trying to look alive and awake.

Crazy story 5 (another involving the cops, there is kinda a theme here...):earlier in the night Nik had broken off from the rest of the group to be with Katie. We finally found him though when we were waiting on the side of the street for the running of the bulls. Nik showed up with this squeaky toy mallet that whenever it hit something made this shrill squeak. He was absolutely in love with this thing and thought hitting everything and anything was hilarious. About 30 minutes before the bull run, all of a sudden cops started yelling at everyone where we were waiting. We were standing right behind the big wooden fence that blocked off the side streets from the main bull run road, but it turns out there was another fence about 30 feet behind us that we were supposed to be behind. The area where we were was a safety area for the runers. So although we had staked out our spots for an hour and a half, we got kicked out 30 minutes before the bull run. The cops were NOT kind nor gentle about kicking us our either. They litereally herded us to the side of the gate and PUSHED us through, yelling the entire time. Nik though was not one to be messed with and so when the cops pushed him through he turned around and hit him on the arm with his squeaky mallet and yelled in spanish, "dont touch me!" I am sure the squeaky mallet really taught the cop a good lesson about respecting physical space. Regardless Nik was proud of himself.

The problem with seeing the bulls run is that you are on the street with them and hence at the same lateral viewing angle as them. The best/only place to actually see the bulls is if you rent a balcony. Unfortunatly the balconies are 40 Euros a person which was a bit steep for us. I think they need stadium seating to see the running of the bulls, and it should be free to sit there.

Here is the crowd of people behind me trying to see the bulls. It was absolutely packed.

Here I am in the middle of the crowd. Bring on the bulls, I want to see them run!

The guy standing right behind me had actually run with the bulls the day before so he gave me a play by play of what was happening. First they let all of the people go who changed their minds and don't actually want to run with the bulls.

Then a firecracker sounds and that means the first bull is out of the pen. A second one sounds shortly after meaning that the last bull is out of the pen. Then you just see a bunch of people running in the road.

I think there is a bull here in the picture, you just cant see it. The thing is that when the bull runs down the road, people rush over to the side of the streets to get out of the way. So when there are lots of people on the side of the road like that it means that there is a bull in the middle of the street that they are avoiding.

The run ends with another firecracker sounding to say that all of the bulls have made it into the bull pen at the end of the run. In total the run lasts about 8 minutes. If you watch from the street it takes about 5 minutes. Overall there were 2 people gored by the bulls and 5 injured in that days run.

They do replay the run though in the main plaza next to where the running of the bulls is. So we did get to see the whole thing from an aerial view which made it much more worth it. We had a crazy time in Pamplona, but now I can live to say that I have seen the running of the bulls!

Vacation and the Pool

So I have to admit that the amount of time I put into my internship is absolutely pitiful. For the first month of work I started at 5 and ended at 6:30, only 1.5 hours of work and I got all Fridays off. I actually spent as much time taking the metro ride to the school as I did working. It was pathetic. Then after working for 3 weeks, I got a vacation. I thought it was ironic that out of all of my friends with all of their long hours, I am the one with the vacation, but no complaints here. Plus I had something to look forward to after my vacation-double the hours at work, that's right a whole 3 hours working!

It just so turns out that there was a student from GV that was in Madrid for 4 days while I was on my vacation. My spanish professor told me about her and said that she had a son and was wondering if I could show her around Madrid and help her out with her son while she was here. She would be leaving to go to Bilbao in the North by the end of the week to study there for a month. She was only in Madrid for orientation with a bunch of other GV students. I had never met her before, but she was really nice and her 4 year old Jordan was a sweetie. I played tour guide for the first day that she was here and on the second day I helped her get acquainted with Spanish life.

By the third day she had an orientation meeting with the other GV students and she asked if I could watch Jordan for the day. I took him to a park and the funniest thing happened there. We were playing on a play set and there was another boy there with his grandmother. Jordan looked over at the grandma and said in english, "there is a spider on your face." The grandma didn't speak english so she didn't understand at all and I was just about to translate what Jordan said when I looked over at the woman and saw the biggest hairiest mole on her face I have ever seen in my life. It really did look like a spider! I tried so hard to not laugh, but failed miserably at it and was just sooo grateful that the woman didn't speak english. Needless to say it made for a very funny day.

The rest of my vacation was nice, but I was excited to start working again. There are public pools that are open in the summer and so the Valderperales Association doesn't meet at schools in the summer, but rather at one of the public pools. We do activities with the kids for the first hour and then after that they go swimming for 2 hours. Basically it is day care for the day, but it still gives me the opportunity to work with the kids so I like it.

I am working with a different group of kids at the pool and I am kinda sad about it. On the first day there, my 2nd and 3rd graders ran over to me and asked if I would still be their teacher. I cant even describe how happy it made me to know that they still wanted me to be their teacher. Sadly though, Bea told me that I was working with a new group. I am now working with another girl, Arrancha, with the 3, 4, and 5 year olds. It is a whole new ball game now. The amount of patience you need to work with this age range is ridiculous and some days are really hard for me. Plus finding activities for them to do for the first hour is difficult. We are working at picnic tables outside and have no supplies other than what the kids bring. Needless to say, we do a lot of coloring and duck, duck, goose, simon says, and red light green light.

I have come to find out that kids at this age also cry, a lot. Today we had 3 criers within the first 15 minutes of working, it was nuts. They are really cute though and they love to snuggle and hold your hand, so although I come much closer to loosing my patience with them than I do with the older kids, they still have somehow wrapped me around their little fingers.

About half of them play in the kiddie pool and I am in charge of monitoring them there. Inevitably someone will get cold and climb into my lap soaking wet. We snuggle for awhile and after tickling them they normal go back to play after 15 minutes. However, every day I am left with a wet lap and it makes it look like I peed my pants every time! I guess it is worth it though, because they are really cute.

Plus as an added bonus-my 2nd and 3rd graders want me to play with them as much as I can. When they see me in the morning, they always say, "hello katie" in english with these big smiles and I gush over them calling them my little english students and saying that when they talk to me in english it is like I am back in the United States. It's cute and I'm just glad to have made an impression on the kids. They are so adorable!

So morale of the story-I still love my internship even if I am not working with my favorite age range of kids. I am just thankful to get to work with kids at all-english or spanish.

Cordoba-the famous Mosque and the infamous Shemale

The next day we took the bus to Cordoba. It was only a 2 hour ride so we didn't mind being stuck on a hot bus for the morning. Once we got there we grabbed a map from the information office and decided we would wander into the center of Cordoba to see the famouos Mosque. Katie took off and she decided to go in the general direction of where the mosque was, but didn't bother to look at the map. After about 5 minutes we realized that we were lost, but thought it would be kinda fun to wander around Cordoba. Besides, we thought that we were going in the general direction of the Mosque, so we should be all set. Well after about 20 minutes we knew we were definitly lost and finally conceeded to checking out the map. We couldnt find any idea on the map of where we were so I had to ask a store clerk where we are. Unfortunatly the accent in Cordoba and southern spain in general is pretty much unintelligible. So after a lot of nodding of my head and pretending like I understood, she pointed on the map wher we were and gave us some sort of directions to the Mosque. So after an hour we finally were getting somewhere close to the most famous part of Cordoba

The first thing we ran into was this very bold looking gate on the south side of the city. It is meant to mimic the arches of the Mosque, and we laughed to think that this was the gaudy amusement park style version of the mosque.
We were able to see the mosque perfectly from a bridge we found outside of the city.

This is one of the old gates of Cordoba used to enter the city in the past.

An outside door to the Mosque. The details were incredible.

There was a plaza that seperated the mosque from the cathedral. It was beautiful.

These are the famous arches that are inside of the mosque. They are everywhere and are gorgeous.

Kelli and I in front of a cool archway

Check out those details!

Kelli and I with the arches behind us

A beautiful painted glass window near the entrance

This was from one of the chapels. It is very catholic looking and is funny to see the difference s between the islamic decorations and the catholic desgins all within the same building.

Our boys looking far handsomer than the patron saint of Cordoba.

After we visited the Mosque we wandered around for a bit, picked up some lunch and bought our bus ticket to go back home. We had a few hours to kill though before our bus left and there was a park next to the bus station. We figured we would grab some sun and maybe a siesta before we got on the bus. We sat down and were soon joined by a homeless man who was obviously drunk and was carrying a container of wine with him. He started talking to Tyler first, but Tyler played dumb and said his spanish was very bad and he couldnt talk to the man. So he turned to Nik instead and Nik started talking to him. About 5 mintues into the conversation this man told Nik that he was not a man, but a woman. I guess we might have been able to pick up on this since there was a dirty scrunchie in his hair. Nik however, didnt quite understand him and kept asking him to repeat himself. I tried not to laugh as he kept on telling Nik again and again that he was a girl. Once Nik understood what he said he told Nik that the most beautiful girl in all of Spain was looking at him right now. Nik got really excited and looked around the park trying to find this beautiful woman looking at hime. By now it was almost impossible for me to not laugh, and the man then informed Nik that he was the "woman" looking at him. He then asked Nik if he wanted to go with him and Nik told him that he really didnt do that sort of thing and he was a religious man. Well this set off this homeless guy/girl and he started yelling at Nik about how hypocritical religious people are. Nik was getting frustrated so he just stopped talking to the guys and laid back down.

Seeing that he had lost his attention the guy (which we have since named the "shemale") went back to Tyler and decided to give him a spanish lesson. He pointed to the grass and said cesped, He pointed to the wine and said vino. He pointed to me and said mujer. He expected Tyler to repeat everything that he said and hence learn better spanish. Tyler, though, quickly got tired of this and when the shemale decided to start a vocab lesson on the parts of the body and explained that he had both male and female parts, we all were getting red up. Nik turned around at this point and told him, "hey man come on, there are ladies present." The shemale just shrugged and said, "so what, I am a lady too!" I could tell that everyone was getting frustrated so I finally spoke up and said, "senor, im sorry but could you please just leave us alone?" Well apparently this is the wrong thing to say because he then stood up and walked over to me and I could tell that he was very upset with me. I have to admit that my mind just started to panic. I was sitting down against a tree reading a book and this drunk shemale was walking over to me and starting to yell, and I was the one who made him mad. yikes. Fortunately, as he was approaching me Nik jumped straight up to protect me in case anything were to happen (this is why I absolutely adore having Nik in our group-he is our bodyguard) and the shemale saw him and walked back over to him and asked if he wanted to fight. Nik insisted that he didnt want to fight, but was just stretching, that was all. Things cooled down from there and the shemale finally walked away from our group. Unfortunately for someone else, as we left that park about an hour later we saw him hitting on another guy who was just trying to relax in the grass.

We all couldnt help but laugh once the shemale left. They boys had both thought that he was going to hit on the girls when he came over to the group, but little did they know that he had his eyes set on them instead. The girls thought it particularly funny because we have been hit on by many many drunk guys here and the boys dont seem to understand how we feel, but now they have experienced it too. Ironically the last time I was in Cordoba, we were chased by a gypsy into a McDonalds bathroom and our teacher had to yell at her to leave us alone. I guess I am sensing a pattern with Cordoba and unwelcomed visitors...

Here are the girls that should have been hit on, but apparently they weren't nearly as good looking as our boys. Lol, just kidding, I love my girls and their funny faces!

When we were leaving the city we looked over and found a huge farm of sunflowers. All of the yellow specks in this picture is a sunflower. This wasnt the only hill of them either. We passed through sunflower land for at least 8 minutes on the bus. I have never seen so many sunflowers in my life!

As incredible as the Sevilla and Cordoba weekend was, I am much more excited for next weekend when we go to Pamplona to see the running of the bulls!