back from my weekend trip

Random observation of the day: whenever I see people speaking foreign languages to animals, I want to say "no, no! They don't understand ___, what are you doing?!" Reminds me of Anchorman when Ron Burgundy tells his dog to speak in English...

So I'm back from Málaga. We had a helluva time trying to get the whole getting-back-to-Cabra thing figured out, too. We ended up missing our train by literally 30 seconds -- we watched it pulling away from the terminal (?) and some colorful phrases were spouted by yours truly as it happened. Whattaya gonna do, I guess? So we walked over in an attempt to exchange or return it, but there would be a 20% markup on the ticket price to exchange it and the next train we could catch would be 5 hours later. Eek. We ended up walking across the street to the bus station, even though I'm pretty sure Claire and Becca didn't really want to walk over there, but I basically decided whatever, what do we have to lose in the potentially 5 hours we would be waiting? We walked over and eventually found out that a bus was going to be leaving in half an hour and it would be direct to Cabra -- well, there were a few stops, but we wouldn't have to change buses. Sweeeeet. We barely made it on THAT bus, too, because we found out about it 5 minutes before it departed. We were a bit annoyed about losing the money on the train ticket and having to shell out money for a bus on top of it, but w/e, it worked out.

Anyway...woops on that tangent, but I needed to vent. The weekend was awesome. In fact, I couldn't figure out why I was all bummed out, a little while ago, but I think it's just because all the exciting stuff came to an end and reality set in about how I have so much junk to do, still. So many papers to file, STILL, not to mention stuff to get together for my jay oh bee (job). Also, I feel like I've expended more mental - and sometimes physical -energy since I've been in Spain that I have in a long time. The language alone can be taxing and sometimes I just freeze and can't speak a single sentence in Spanish if I'm too stressed. Overall, though, I've felt really pleased with how well I feel I'm doing understanding and speaking Spanish, here.

Back to the trip ~ our reason for going, which I said in the last post, was to get our residency cards, in Córdoba. We had to drop off our información on Friday morning. This is actually just the first step to getting our residency cards -- we will have to go BACK to Córdoba to pick them up and pay 10 euro for them. Blech. I don't even know what we need them for, I guess the Spanish gov't just wants the info on us and the money or whatever. All the stuff I turned in was basically already submitted to the Spanish consulate before we got here, to get our visas - the only new thing was providing them with our Spanish address and contact numbers. By the way, to get these residency cards (and visas, but we already have those), we turned in our applications, certificates from the Junta de Andalucía (they employ us here), copies of our passport, visa, criminal record, medical clearance letter...I think that's it. Talk about a pain in the @(#.
After that, we hung out in Córdoba and met up with our friend Pat. We stayed at his apartment for the night before we left for Málaga to meet up with more people and just chill for a couple days.

When we got to Málaga, we relaxed at Jessica and Alan's apartment -- they were our fabulous hosts for the weekend. Seriously, best hosts ever. That's them on the left of the photo. I'm standing between Luke and Pat. They gave us great food/coffee/wine and made sure we had enough pillows/blankets and knew where we were going -- also, they are just really down to earth and fun.
We all went to the Picasso museum after we chilled at their place. I enjoyed it, I just wished they gave us a guided tour rather than a little pamphlet that didn't even describe all the pieces, because I'm pretty ignorant about art. I took an Renaissance art history course when I studied abroad in Florence, but that's probably the extent of my art knowledge other than what I learned back in elementary school and junior high. When we left the museum, we went back to Jessica and Alan's apartment with groceries we bought to make dinner ourselves. We made salad and noodles and drank tinto verano. Tinto verano is just red wine mixed with fanta and it's fantastic.

By the time midnight came around, we left for botellón. My least favorite part of Málaga, you may ask? Going to the botellón. Botellón is a popular Spanish party, it happens all over Spain. Basically, it's an outdoor party which happens in the street and is BYOB. People just stand around and drink, smoke, and urinate publicly. Not that I'm opposed to some of those things, but bleh (well, not the public relieving of oneself -- gross). I think I would be content to skip botellón the next time my friends here decide to go. Also, we didn't leave for the party until midnight and we stayed until 2:30, and I was feeling spent after a long day traveling.

The most enjoyable thing for me, by far, was spending a day at the beach. It was fantastic. I swam in the Mediterranean, relaxed in the sun + palm trees, drank sangría, and hung out with fun people.















I feel pretty blessed to have met such a chill group of people, I was completely worried about not finding people I would mesh with. The girls in the pic, from right to left: Carole, me, Becca (roommate of mine), Jessica, Claire (another roommate), Lauren...and I don't know the other two girls! Woops. They're roommates of a girl I only just met. OK I'm gonna go to bed. Definitely exhausted. Night night!