back after a long derilection of duty.

Here I am in a hostel in Madrid at 2 a.m. and I realized I haven´t updated this bad boy in a long time (relatively speaking). My bad.

Madrid has been awesome, I´ve met a bunch of new people, too. Turns out all those British conversation assistants are swarming about Madrid, since I met a ton of them. Today I also got the chance to travel outside of Madrid and hit up a little city of 55K people in the Castilla y León region called Ávila with a group of Brits. It´s also a province and the capital of its own province. It is most famous for its enormous medieval fortress and it´s been preserved since it was built in 900 AD. Impressive, right? It´s a mile long and pretty tall, too, and offers a great view of the town and the mountains in the distance. The weather was pretty crappy and cold, but oh well.

One of the best parts about going to Ávila was getting to travel with the Brits I met at my hostel the other night. I was downstairs in the hostel bar and we struck up a conversation with a group of Brits, an Aussie and an Irish guy. Yesterday I met up with a bigger group of them and we went out for drinks and tapas -- the best part of that was the fact that the tapas were free with the cheap drinks. The catch to that was the fact that the bar was loud and extremely crowded. Also smoky, but that goes without saying in Spain. I really hate it when my clothes and hair reek of smoke after being in a bar here, but what can ya do.

Other things I´ve seen since I´ve been here...I hit up the Museo Reina Sofia with Carole and her sister and saw the Guernica by Picasso. It depicts the Spanish civil war and if it weren´t for the cubistic surrealism, it would pack a bit more punch, IMO. It was pretty impressive, not to mention huge. We all had to stand pretty far away from it. Luckily, I spent 3€ in order to have a headset, so that increased my appreciation for the painting. That would probably be the highlight of the Reina Sofia. Tomorrow my goal is to hit up the Prado Museum before I leave Madrid at 2 pm...the bus ride back to my pueblo is 6 hours and change, since I have to change buses in Córdoba on the way.

Speaking of Córdoba, next week or the week after I´ll have to pick up my foreigners card thing, which is essentially Spain´s equivalent of the green card. It´s been really obnoxious getting around without it, at times, but I just show my passport with my Spanish visa and usually that´s good enough. But it´s been a huge pain getting into the health clinic without it.

That brings me to something else - this past week I was getting over strep which I caught from Carole in Scotland. I came down hard with a massive headache right when I got back from Scotland, and then another the night of Thanksgiving. The morning after, my throat looked like a red and white golf ball and I was sweating profusely. So I went with Emily to the health clinic and managed to sputter out a few horribly grammatically incorrect sentences about how I felt miserable and achy and I ended up with Paracetamol and Erythromycin. I went back in 3 days and ended up getting stronger antibiotics (500 mg of zithromax) and another kind of painkiller and chloroseptic spray. The chloroseptic spray nearly made me yak, but it was also a lifesaver. Anyway, enough of that grossness.

I don´t have any pic´s for this post, my bad. I´ll have pic´s in the near future when I swipe them from Luke and the Brits who I was with. It turns out I left my camera in Cabra, oh well. I realized this as I was on the way to the Cabra bus station, but I didn´t think I´d have time to turn around and get it and still make it. Sucks, but oh well.

Next week I´m going to have to get ready to teach the Spanish kids about American Christmas traditions, so I´m going to teach them about how we put Christmas lights on our houses and have turkey dinners and whatnot...it took me awhile to think of some American things that they don´t do in Spain, too. We also have songs that they´re not familiar with, so I´m going to play those for them. I plan on playing the ¨Feliz Navidad¨ song (I wanna wish you a merry xmas from the bottom of my heart) since I teach kids who are in their first year of English and those dozenish words will be enough for them to digest, no doubt. Maybe I´ll do Feliz Navidad and one other song. I just really need to get my kids to SPEAK more, since they freeze up and don´t want to say anything in English to me or will just say ¨¿eso qué es?¨ or related BS when I ask a question. Drives me crazy.

Anyway, I´m thinking I should get off this computer so I don´t get told to get the eff out of this room like I was last night while I was reading. I´m so happy that tonight I´m in a room of only 8 people -- so nice. You may think ¨wtf¨ to that, but the first night I was in a room of 16, at least 3 of which were snoring. Absolutely obnoxious.
All right, I´m off. Hasta pronto