Hello, it's been a while. Today was my last day of school. The year turned out really well overall.

On Monday I used the microwave in the coffee bar area to make rice krispie treats (so easy!). They were a huge hit/I swear I saw some sugar induced eye dilation in my students. This was my activity for 'unhealthy food day'.

<-giant beetle

and a skink ->

With my youngest students I've been working on 2 different plays for a couple of weeks. Their goal was to memorize their lines and then they'd perform while I recorded it on my camera. Today we watched it. I had already seen them at home by myself and I thought they were really funny but when we watched them today and I saw the students and teacher all dying with laughter, they became so much better. At 1:18 it gets very funny.

World Talent

and 

In The Wild

Spring Break!

The following pictures summarize my trip with Erin Melwing to Prague, Budapest, Krakow, and Warsaw!

 Prague, Budapest, Krakow, and Warsaw you say? But why? Well good question, I barely planned the thing! So you'd better talk to Mastermind Melwing for some reasoning other than the fact that all of the cities we went to were really great and Central Europe is crazy cheap! Erin organized everything and I read the maps and got us lost, a regular dynamic duo.

1. AWESOME FOOD! This is venison goulash with bacon dumplings. Bacon dizzumplings?! Yes, this was my first reaction, followed by "holyshitthisissogood" with my mouth full. It was our goal to only find local food things while on the trip and I think we accomplished this goal about 80% of the time (our failuress: one day we had thai food in Prague and a Chipotle knockoff in Budapest). When we got to Prague we asked the hostel for the Czechiest Czech stuff around and they told us to go to Zlata somethingsomething I forget the rest of the name, but usually when you walk into a restaurant in a seemingly international city (Prague) and the waiters have a hard time communicating, you know you're in the right place! This was our standard practice for the rest of the trip. We would get to a new hostel and be like "umm can you please point us in the direction of a restaurant with no english menus and a barely bilingual staff? great, thanks!"

Other food highlights of the trip included Langos (above), a kind of fried doughy thing with sour cream and cheese on it. I also had a piping hot glass of hot wine with this, as was my almost daily *COUGHhourlyCOUGH* practice (I'm my mother's son, c'mon), pierogi (very Polish, very good), potato pancake with creamy mushroom sauce, baked chicken (with blue cheese, pineapple, and spicy peppers), and  freshly cooked turkey breast full of strong cheese. I am so down with Central European food.

2. Churches, Churches! I have never seen so many churches in my life (other than my trip through Europe last year). I think Poland had the best churches for the sheer fact that the outsides looked very bricky and one might blasphemously proclaim "boring" (said person being me), but then you go inside and they turn out to be outrageously ornate and beautiful. We probably averaged about 2.74 basilicas a day, rough estimate.

3. Long Distances. Notice the towerlike structure on the left side of this picture. Now look at what I've circled in the middle of the next picture. Erin and I made that walk in only about thirty or forty minutes. The second picture is taken from atop that tiny little spec on the left on the hill in the first picture. This is a pretty good representation of a NORMAL day for us, as we estimated walking between 3-6 hours each day. Our first full day in Prague we woke up and left the hostel by 8:30, only to get home sometime around 7pm. This happened a lot because Erin and I discovered that we had the ability to conquer the huge distances of a city in only one day. We'd wake up the second day in a city thinking "uhh did we just do everything we set out to do, only in one day!?", of course not...but in a way, yeah. We didn't utilize public transportation for site seeing purposes after we left Prague. Budapest, Krakow (other than going to Auschwitz), and Warsaw were pretty much done by foot.

This picture was taken from a bridge in Warsaw. That day it was my turn to lead us and I decided that we'd go to all of the far away places the first day (7 hours of walking) so that we didn't have to do as much on our last day there. Our hostel was located near that pointy building on the left. That's how far away we were haha, high five to ME.

Other random sidenotes about the trip:

-everyone should be mandated to visit a concentration camp sometime in their lives. It's educationally heartbreaking, horrifying, emotionally draining, and only happened 60+ years ago.

-we saw bears in what seemed like a zoo exhibit, on the side of the road in Warsaw. BEARS!
-1 euro equals 23 koruna (czech crowns), 260 forint, and about 4 zloty. Converting currency for each country really sucked!

Overall I had a really great trip and I would definitely return to Budapest, Prague, or Warsaw. Krakow is so small that it doesn't warrant another visit.

I have a little under two months left in school but have I mentioned that I plan to live in Spain another year and hopefully work at the same exact school, plus another academy? Well that is the plan and I'll find out in a few weeks if that's what's going to happen. Take care, ciao.

Last weekend a few friends and I went to Marseilles, France. It is a huge, very cool port city on the Mediterranean coast. My friend Claire has lived there since high school, so the six of us were able to forgo hostels and somehow fit into her parent's small apartment that comfortably fits 4.

Marseilles had a lot of cool stuff going for it: good cheese, good wine, awesome food (Claire's brother is in French Culinary School :O!), a good "summery" city feel, and a sweet Cathedral at the highest point of the city that gives you a 360 degree view of the everything! Also one night we went to a charity function and met some of Claire's friends, Digna and Fred. It's fun to make friends with someone who doesn't speak your first language haha.

On Thursday I had a birthday party at a friend's house and I thought that was my real birthday party...but it turns out I was wrong because that was just a decoy birthday party to distract me from the real Surprise birthday party that I had last night in the cave! All week my friends were like "Hey you guys wanna watch a movie on Friday?" blah blah blah, making all of these fake plans to fool me into thinking there would be a movie and then actually have all of our friends waiting for me in the cave. It was highly successful because I just walked in like "huuhhh???" hahah. It was a great party and my friend Liz and I reigned supreme in beer pong all night (this is a picture of one of our opponents trying to throw the ball behind her back).

Roosters live in a park near Claire's house...?

This is a whisk.

My parents sent me 11 lbs of candy this week for my birthday. I don't really like candy that much (I've pawned off a lot of it off to my friends already) but in Spain, on your birthday you give to everyone. I know the teachers at my school love random American candy so I had my mom send a mixture of popular and obscure candies from America that you would never find in Spain (I'm taking it in on Monday):

Marshmallows
Reese's Peanut butter cups (I brought this to the kids I teach in my private lesson. They had never had one in their entire lives...)
Skittles
Candy Hearts with things on them like Be Mine and Hold Hands
Everlasting Gobstoppers
Nerds (I'm not sharing these, sorry)
ILUVU shaped Peeps
Swedish Fish
Jolly Ranchers
Sweet Tarts
Hot Tomales

etc etc etc

My birthday turned out really well this year.

While playing ping pong with two students a couple of Wednesdays ago:

Carla: We have a science test tomorrow.
Me: On what?
Guillermo: Rock and Minerals.
Me: Limestone and stuff like that?
Guillermo: Gypsum, coal-
Carla: Diamonds! *deadpan* Just like me. Guillermo, you're coal.
Guillermo: Carla, you are metamorphic rock.

Happy Birthday Shannon Lieberman!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM! FELIZ CUMPLEANOS!

We played hockey last Thursday, I was goalie. Nobody scored on me mwuahahaha, poor lil spanish kids.

Don't leave champagne in the freezer for more than an hour...Although it does become nice, alcohol flavored shaved ice: glass particles included at no extra cost!

 hello phone????

Someone etched this on a window.

I ate that in Valladolid (see:previous post). Lubina = Sea Bass! The music teacher and his wife laughed at me because they gave me a whole fish and I just said "uhhh, how do I eat this?!"

 The Chinese Store is always good for a laugh. She irresistible! This is a huge table cloth pattern.

There is an elevated parking lot over the bus station in Cuellar. This is an adjacent building.

My roommate Daniel and I adopted a 10 month old cat. She is not photogenic. Her name is Xoya (Zoya in English) and she's extremely friendly.

Every Spanish woman dyes her hair maroon red (not really, but a lot of them).

Valladolid

On Thursday we threw Javelins in gym class: 

After class I went with the music teacher Jose Luis to the city about 45mins north of Cuellar called Valladolid. It has a little over 300,000 residents and is incredibly spread out. We had lunch at his house then he had to take his daughter to get a vaccination/set up instruments at the bar that his cover band ACROSS was going to play at, so he pawned me off to the movie theater where I saw Los Descendientes (The Descendants) with George Clooney, directed by the guy who also made Sideways, Alexander Payne. The spanish dub of the film wasn't that bad, plus its a good movie, it was dramatic (while being minorly melodramatic in a few moments) and very funny. George Clooney gave a very George Clooney performance.

This is my music teacher's band ACROSS. He's in the background (back right) playing on the keyboard. They had a list of songs on the wall and all you had to do was call out the name of the song and they'd be ready to play it on the spot. Their singer was excellent also! A few on the list were: Starman (David Bowie), Suzy Q, I Put A Spell On You, Time (Pink Floyd), a lot of Creedence Clearwater Revival (they started with Bad Moon a Risin'), etc. Definitely an American Audience-centric band.

Here's a little sample:

In the giant Eroski grocery center 15 minutes by bus from my flat there are large painted snails all similar to Cincy's painted pigs that are found downtown. I thought this was the coolest of them.

Every other Wednesday in the library we have some kind of poetry related event. One time students rapped bulgarian a capella communist revolutionary rap (teachers were a little 'meh :\' to the idea), another time they showed pictures of a teacher who walked El Camino de Santiago, a 780km walk!

This is an image that I see everyday on my way home from Cuellar. I always think to myself "Oh look it's Gondor". Gondor (edit* Minas Tirith!) is of course one of the cities of men from Lord of the Rings, see: 

They're obviously very similar

Quick Picture Update!

Hello! I'm back in Spain and it's really cold! It's making Ohio's rainy weather look pretty pleasant right about now. There is heavy fog most mornings, my house is so cold that you can't walk around in bare feet, and my job remains extremely easy, mwuahaha. Just kidding, but not really.

I miss American whole milk...OH and my family whoops forgot to mention that!

One of the girls in my class had the Three Kings on her nails hahah. When the Three Kings come Jan. 6th is when Spanish people open their Christmas gifts.

One of the bus drivers that takes me to Cuellar has an EPIC mullet and I am going to get very Investigative Journalist on his ass until I get a clear picture. He's got mullet like black women got booty. Truth.

Today in my very trying gym class the kids all lined up and had to make a huge bridge and then my teacher and I rolled weight balls underneath them. This is my favorite set of students. They're very talkative and funny.