goodbye Isabel

Friday night I went out on the town with Isabel and Felipe, we just had some drinks and ate tapas, and met up with a couple of Isabel´s friends. Isabel told me that Saturday night she was having more friends over for dinner and then to go out dancing, since she is leaving for Ireland today. Isabel and her younger sister Lucia, who is 22 also, picked me up at 9 last night. We went to her house and had a very Spanish dinner. There were about 15 plates full of different types of food all over the table, but none of us had our own plate (there were like 13 of us in all). Everyone just ate off all the different plates.

I´ve been eating a lot of meat lately, because they eat a lot of meat in Spain apparently. Felipe and Isabel wanted me to try this certain type of meat dish, some type of pork mixed with eggs. So I did. I ate about 4 small chunks of it. They asked if I liked it, I said yes. Then the told me what it was -- ´´sangre´´. Blood! Specifically, pig blood with rice and a little big of onions. I didn´t eat any more after that.

After dinner we ate some cake, had a couple more drinks and talked (they talked, I mostly listened and tried to understand). It got to be like 1:30 am and we were still at Isabel´s house. Since it was so late, I thought I must have been mistaken when I thought she said we were going out dancing afterwards. But I wasn´t. At about 2am we went to El Casco to a club that was inside an old church. We danced till almost 5am, by then I was exhausted and my eyes hurt from all the smoke. It was fun, but I felt pretty lame for being so tired because as we left the club there was a line of at least 30 or 40 people waiting to get in (at 5 am!) and many of them were much older than I was...in their 30´s and 40´s. Isabel told me that a few years ago Spain had one of the lowest birth rates of any country. She said it´s because people here like to go out at night too much to have kids.

Tomorrow is my first day of school. I have to take a bus to another part of town and meet a teacher named Nuria. The only buses to Yunclillos are 7am, noon and 7pm. So all the teachers carpool. There is a teacher named Inmaculada who lives pretty close to me, I could´ve walked to meet her, but when Isabel asked her if she could pick me up she said no. Isabel said she is really weird and gossipy, that she´s nice to your face but will stab you in the back. I´m kind of scared of Inmaculada.

Yesterday I ate lunch with Isabel and her grandparents. They are awesome. Her grandma kept talking to me really loudly, as if that would help me understand. She made some fish with pumpkin and as I left told me I could call her or stop by if I ever needed anything, and Isabel gave her my address so she could come take care of me if I was ever sick.

Today I ate lunch with Isabel and the rest of her family. I met her 8 year old sister Lidia. Lidia has Down syndrome also. With her lime green outfit, purple glasses and a plastic recorder she was about the cutest kid I´ve seen in Spain so far.

I was having a pretty up and down day in Madrid on Thursday, mostly down, because I couldn´t understand 90% of what was said at the orientation that day. I was even thinking that I shouldn´t be here and that I should go back home, that I wouldn´t be able to live here for 8 months. And then I checked my email and learned that Chelsea, my youngest niece, had been diagnosed with leukemia. All my worries suddenly became trivial. Chelsea started chemotherapy yesterday, which will last for 4 days. For more details about what´s going on check Carey´s blog --- cbranam.blogspot.com

I slept for 15 hours last night, so I´m feeling very refreshed and not jet lagged at all. Isabel is at school today, so I´ve been hanging out with her boyfriend Felipe. He took me to the old part of town to change my money, and we walked around a bit and I got to see some of the old buildings and narrow streets you see in the pictures. It is really really gorgeous. We ran into a couple of Felipe´s friends in the street, I didn´t understand much of their conversation, I heard something about clothes and watching and imagining, and for some reason I thought they were standing there scoping out women. But afterwards Felipe, who is a policeman, told me they were friends from work and there were working right there undercover watching for a thief from Madrid who they think is in Toledo. They know what he´s wearing today, so that´s what they were watching for. Then we each had a drink at an outdoor bar, I had cerveza con limon (beer w- lemon) which is what a lot of Spanish women drink. It´s really tasty and there´s not much alcohol in it.

Felipe speaks almost no English, so talked in Spanish for a while and then came home, now he´s cooking lunch. I just can´t get over how nice he and Isabel are! Isabel spent so much time yesterday, and Monday, calling people to find apartments for me, and yesterday took me to three different places to look. After I get my first paycheck I´m definitely going to take them out to dinner or something, and I think I´ll have mom and Laura buy something sweet to bring them from the states. Oh yeah, and Isabel has a tatto on her back and a nose ring. I asked if she was allowed to wear her nose ring to work and she said yeah, you can wear nose rings, jeans, dreadlocks...whatever you want. Also, mom, Felipe has been a policeman for a year now and said Toledo is very peaceful, quiet, almost no crime. He said it is very difficult to get a gun here in Spain, so almost no one has them. I told him Topeka is mostly safe, but has some bad areas, he said here in Toledo there aren´t even any dangerous areas of town. He said all the bad guys are in Barcelona and Madrid.

Other than the language, and the gorgeous old part of town, things aren´t all that different here. American music is all over the radio, Felipe likes U2 a lot, and Isabel listens to The Strokes, The Killers etc. I haven´t been in any house or apartment yet that had carpet, it´s all tile or wood floors. Isabel and Felipe own a house in the suburbs, their front door doesn´t have a doorjam or anything, it´s totally flat as you walk through, the tile just extends from their hallway inside out to their porch. Their house, and the apartments I looked at had small front loading washing machines in the kitchens, and everyone just dries clothes outside. Cars are smaller (but there aren´t any smart cars), meals are later, people are more well dressed and more people smoke (especially women, according to Isabel)...those are the main differences I´ve seen so far.

Isabel said I would be working mostly with kids ages 3 to 7, but also I will be helping a teacher named Miriam who is supposed to teach English, and teach science in English, but she doesn´t speak English herself!! I´ll work monday, tuesday, wednesday and be off thursday and friday. Isabel said I can do extra stuff and make more money, so I´ll probably do that.

i´m not dead

it´s been a crazy and overwhelming but awesome day. On the way to Chicago I sat next to some newlyweds on their way to Greece for their honeymoon. We chatted a bit and I found out they both graduated from Truman State in 2002, how weird is that? I slept about 30 minutes on the plane from Chicago to Philadelphia, but couldn´t sleep on the overseas flight. Instead I watched 4 Penn & Tellers and the cheesy movie ´300´´. My bags were very heavy and it took a long time to walk to the Metro. Once on the Metro, I had to ask the woman next to me how to get to my destination (I relied a lot on strangers today). She was very helpful and explained that I would have to get on at least 2 more different metro lines. I regretted not telling her about the lipstick on her front tooth after she was so helpul to me. After the metro took me to Atocha, I took the train to Toledo. I had to change some money first, and the woman behind the glass asked for my passport to do the exchange, then she pointed out something on my passport to the man working with her and they both laughed quite a bit. I almost cried when getting on the train because my bags were so heavy and all the low spots were taken, so I had to lift one of them up to the overhead compartment...there was a line of people behind me...I was really tired. But the train ride got a lot better because I sat next to a guy from Venezuela and we chatted for the entire 30 minute ride, mostly in Spanish. He was visiting his daughter, who he hadn´t seen in a year. He cried a bit when he told me that and showed me her picture. He had a much smaller personal space bubble than I did, but it was okay because he was so nice, encouraged me to practice my spanish with him and even told me it was good. Isabel, one of the english teachers at my school, picked me up at the train station in Toledo. She is awesome (more later). Because of her I have an apartment with two college girls, ages 19 and 20. It´s kind of old, like 60s or 70s, but looked more ´spanish´than the other two places I looked at, and the girls seemed nicer. They don´t speak any English, which is sweet. ´My room is big, (plenty of room for visitors!) and its in a really good location, close to a big park, bus stop, shops etc. Still haven´t been to the old part of town that you see in all the pictures, but will go tomorrow. I haven´t slept in about 30 hours though, so that´s it for now.

adios Topeka

I never thought I'd have a blog, but I'm leaving for Spain tomorrow, so here it is. Mark says anything I write will be lame, "because it's a blog." Hopefully he's wrong.