finally more wifi! holla!

ok. a few things before i post the latest blog entries...
1. i have seriously spent the past 30 minutes trying to get the wifi to actually connect. dang wasted computer battery! but alas it is here! yeah! :)
2. i just saw a guy that looked SO MUCH like our friend Micah Kinnard that i seriously thought it was him for a split second and then realized that i was in spain. there's no way he's here, right?? yeah. anyways. plus this guy's hair was way too short to be micah. there's no way micah would cut his! haha
3. i'm sitting on a bench. same bench by the bus stopthat i was at a few days ago. it's my new fav. haha... anyways. there is definitely something moving around in the bushes behind me... some little critter. i'm going to assume it's a cute, sweet little bunny rabbit. or maybe a pigeon that's playing hide and seek with his friends :)
4. there is a guy that works for the city of madrid cleaning up the park area that i am at (raking the dirt. haha) but he keeps talking to me randomly. it is not a great conversation because my spanish sucks big time but we did talk about madrid (sol y moncloa), florida, and my awesome boyfriend :) so thats cool. haha
5. also i saw eduardo (remember the neighbor that is my age?)'s brother on the bus this morning! we sat next to each other and actually had a semi conversation, too! so that was really cool. i like being able to communicate. i cant wait for school to help with that! :)

ok. here are the posts :) i'll try to upload some pics too!

Madrid, Spain

La Casa de Santibanez

El 27 de Enero, 2008

6pm (11am Denton time)

Ok. Its been a couple of days.

Yesterday was SO much fun. Man. And I didn’t even leave the house except to meet the girls (Katie and Caitlin) at the bus stop by my house. Haha

The family is gone for the long weekend to their (CASTLE!!) country house about an hour and a half away from here, so the girls came over to keep me company/spend the night away from their kiddos for a night. We were going to go into Madrid in the evening, but we decided to just hang around the house and hang out with Ani! J it was so fun! (Ani is our maid, if you don’t remember). She’s exactly the same age as me, we found out! She turns 24 on March 6^th or something like that (my birthday is on the 24^th for those of you that didn’t know that). So that’s really cool. Ani was cooking in the kitchen for a while, so we went in to talk with her and she let us try this dish that she was making (I cant remember what it was called. Dang). It was made with these white beans, she boiled them till they were soft, then she mashed them (they looked like mashed potatoes then). On top of the lentils, she put some sort of mixture with maybe tomato sauce? (it was reddish) and cooked onions… it was really good!

THEN, after that, she started making these little donut type things! In Romania (that’s where she’s from. Isn’t that awesome? J) she said that in Romania they are called Gogosh (Guh- go- sh). They’re like homemade donuts except they don’t have holes J she basically deep fried the dough that she made from scratch (flour, egg, yeast… is that all? Maybe?). she cut them out of the dough using a drinking glass like a cookie cutter and placed them into hot olive oil on the stove (they use olive oil, and LOTS of it, for EVERYTHING, I’m noticing!) and they fried. Then she turned them over and when they were done, pulled them out and sprinkled vanilla on them! The vanilla was so cool. It wasn’t a liquid. It looked almost just like cinnamon and sugar! So weird! J

Anyways. she is so awesome. J we hung out with her for a few hours at least! It was just in the kitchen, the three of us trying to speak Spanish, and her helping us and being SO patient with our Spanglish. Haha. We found out she’s from Romania, and she only moved to spain a year and a half ago. When she moved here she knew no Spanish at all! Not even one word, she said! Now she is definitely fluent! Its cool. She was telling us about the family. Haha. She’s really funny. I’m glad she’s here. For sure.

So we hung with Ani for a while and then we just had dinner and watched a movie and the south Carolina presidential primary (Katie knows so much about the presidential race and it’s inspiring! It makes me want to know everything I could possibly know about the candidates! Unfortunately I don’t have the internet, so I’m not able to do that… that’s ok, though), and just talked forever. It was good.

Oh, speaking of the presidential election, does anyone know what we do/how we go about registering to vote while we’re out of the country? Do we go to the embassy or what? Just curious…

Anyways. yesterday was a good day. J

Today we woke up too early and went to El Rastro! That was one of the things that I had on my list to do here in spain. Probably the top thing, actually. Haha

It wasn’t as great as I was expecting, but it was still really cool. Its basically just a HUGE flea market set up in the streets. Caitlin has a bunch of pics from it, so I’ll have to jack them from her soon to update.

OH…. Aaron… I’m just going to say that I totally got you the ultimate gift from Spain that you could ever get. Haha. I’m so proud of it! J hahaha it’s actually kinda silly but its so freakin awesome and I think you’ll really actually like it. I hope! J

OH another thing that we accomplished from my list to do in Spain: we had churros y chocolate at this corner café place that we found when we got lost just exploring the streets of Madrid after El Rastro! J so awesome! Man. It’s basically hot chocolate with these long, skinny pastries that you dip in the chocolate. Only the hot chocolate is SO THICK you wouldn’t believe it. I tried to take a picture of it dripping off the spoon, but I’m not sure it makes it clear enough. It’s basically like a melted chocolate bar! Almost that thick! So good though. Haha. And for 2 euros (each), they gave us each enough to serve two or three people. Haha. Its so rich that you can’t even try to eat all of it, and they give you an entire coffee cup full of the chocolate with 4 of the churros! No way. I don’t know if any of us even ate half of our stuff! We were all sick from eating too much sweet/chocolate by the time we left. Haha J

We took a nap when we got home this afternoon and I think I could have slept straight through the whole night. Oh man. Now I have one of those “I slept during the day and now I feel like I have a sinus headache” headaches J haha.

But I learned how to make espresso and Caitlin had about 3 café con leches last night I think (that’s like taking SIX shots of espresso. Hahahaha!). She was basically cracked out on espresso. It was interesting because she had not gone to bed until 4am the night before and was up at 8am! Hahaha. Silly nina! J haha

I love those girls. So fun. I’m so glad they’re here. For sure J

Food has been interesting this weekend since the family’s gone. She (paloma) showed me where they had put several partially prepaired foods in the fridge for me to eat while they were gone, so I’ve just been mixing it up every night. Haha. Last night I made us some spaghetti with chopped up turkey in it and toast and butter. For breakfast yesterday I had some of the leftover Spanish omelet J yum. For dinner/lunch just now I had pretty much a baked potato with a hardboiled egg and more chopped up turkey and butter with salt and pepper… kind of interesting, I know… but I’m using what I’ve got! Just call me the Iron Chef. HA! Oh man. No way.

Anyways. I think that’s all for today. The girls left about an hour ago, so I think I’ll probably just chill at home again tonight. Tomorrow is the saint’s holiday that I mentioned before. It’s the reason the ninos don’t have school. So I think I’ll probably just take the bus into Moncloa, and take my computer to that little park by the bus stop and do some catching up there. I know I say this stuff a lot, but it really is just so strange to not have internet available whenever I want it. Even weirder that I don’t get on the internet every day.

I can’t wait to upload some pictures tomorrow! I’m going to go out until my computer runs out of juice. Maybe I’ll recharge and go back again. Who knows! Haha I think my computer might even get about 2 hours worth of charge on one go! That’s kinda cool. Hopefully!

Ok. Te amo muchisimo!

Jdenisie

P.s. OH MY GOSH I almost forgot to mention… hahaha…ok, so we definitely have been doing a TON of walking every single day (not even including all of the millions of stairs I have to climb any time I go to another room in the house, here! J), so it is a normal thing to expect any time we go out. Not a big deal. Ok… so on the way to El Rastro today, we are headed out of the metro and we are just following the crowd to get to the market. We get to the escalators to get out, and they are absolutely packed. So… duh… take the stairs, right?

HA! Wow. We step out of the line for the escalator (there is NO turning back nowJ) and look up to see how many stairs we will be climbing. HOLY CRAP. I think terrible words that should not be uttered from our lips were flying through each of our heads at that moment… oh man. I think that staircase was at least 150 steps high… oh man. Our quads were BURNING and we were SO out of breath by the time we reached the top. Hahahahaha it was ridiculous J and great.

Oh also. Not interesting at all, but I think it’s kinda funny. We stopped at the little convenience store/pharmacy/shop that is right inside the gated entrance to the place I live (like townhouses kind of?) I need to take pictures of the outside of home.

Wow… bill Clinton looks so old!!! I just saw him on CNN for a second. Good lord…

Ok. Sorry. Anyways. back to the story. Stopped at the shop to get milk because we drank so much of it last night with our coffees and I was worried we would have none left after we made some today, so we got some more milk… later after the girls left (we didn’t even drink the milk…) I found where they keep the rest of the juices and milks that aren’t open! Dang. Haha. So we spent money unnecessarily. Dang. Oh well. J

That’s all… J

Later (9:30pm …2:30pm denton time):

Just a thought: I’m super excited about Spanish courses beginning on Friday. For once, studying sounds really good. I’m glad that there will be something to take up time. It’s a great time when I’m gallivanting about the city, but after studying with the kids on the weekends there’s a lot of down time with not much to do since I can’t get online. Oh well. J either way, I’m excited for school to start. I’m positive that when I’m actually in the middle of the course, I’ll be sick of studying and my brain will want to explode, but for now… I’m pretty ready J haha.

We go to sign up and pay for the course on Tuesday.