Ah, Monday

Oh Monday -- a day of such misery for the general public, but Mondays for me in Spain are fantastic, because I'm not working. I'll be working on the stuff I'll need for tomorrow by the end of the day, but for now, I'm being lazy. Well, I already hung out a load of laundry to dry (dryers don't exist here) and threw in my sheets to wash, but other than that I've been pretty lazy.

Another fun weekend has come and passed. A bunch of guys came in to help us celebrate, so that was nice -- always good to get some testosterone in our group full of females. A guy from our program came from Baena on Becca's invite, 2 of Michelle's friends came from Seville, and Emily's boyfriend Antonio came from Granada.

We kicked off our weekend by going up to Via Verde (green path), which is a nature trail type thing that's directly behind my school. Since you have to walk up a ginormous hill in order to get to Via Verde -- the same one I go up to get to my school, which I mentioned in here -- it provides a nice view of Cabra. Cabra is small, but how many of you can say your town has a castle? That's right. Castle. A kind of weird dinky one that is more like a weird, huge rook chess piece, but whatever. Via Verde itself is dotted with olive/palm/fruit/other trees, bridges, some animals, and the view can't be overemphasized, it's awesome.




































We also hit up Fuente del Río (River Fountain), right next to it. It has a cute little bar next to some bridges over a little river thing. Me gusta mucho.






























The main event this weekend was Emily's b'day celebration. She's the skinny one with long blonde hair that I'm molesting in that picture. Her actual birthday is today, but we all put on our party hats on Saturday night. First we made food, and I experimented making some empanada, and it was delicioso. I've discovered my cooking skillz ain't half bad.




Apparently I didn't take a long enough siesta, though, because I couldn't bring myself to stay up past 2:30 a.m. and had to turn in before anyone even went out to the club. Woops. People don't show up to clubs until 3 a.m. and they don't leave until sunrise, it's insane. When I got back to my apartment, I had to go out on the balcony and ask a group of guys if they could move, so I could sleep. I find this amusing, especially because my bro put on his sassy pants when I contacted him at 1:30 a.m. one night (4:30 p.m. California time).

Also, the time changed this weekend, in Spain, so Emily was all excited that she'd have an extra hour to get some partying in, to which I responded time change or no, nothing would stop you from getting in an extra hour of partying.

Other stuff I fit in this weekend...I got a gym membership, started reading The Lovely Bones, which I love, so far, I ordered slippers online, because my 2 euro ones aren't workin out so well, I had a mini marathon of The Office with the roommates, I walked to the hospital (again) with Claire and Michelle...about that last thing: Claire was having stomach bug problems and had been feeling miserable, so we convinced her to go to get it checked out, since health care is basically free in Europe. The downside to this luxury is the fact that people milk it for all it's worth and will go in for virtually anything. Also, the health care providers sometimes act like they hate their jobs. Fortunately, Claire is feeling a lot better now, even though she couldn't go out with us to par-tay, which sucked. We are gearing up to go on our first run together some time in the near future ~ I don't usually jog faster than a 9-minute mile, so hopefully her tiny butt won't try to race ahead of me on Via Verde.

OK I'll leave everyone with some a video which I captured at Fuente del Río of a little boy feeding a duck. I love this: