Por fin, I write to you at last

Sorry it has been so long since I have last posted. Things have been pretty uneventful here believe it or not until this weekend and I have been sick which makes it so much harder to be cheerful. School is going ok, I don't like having to do homework again, when we first got here it was more like a vacation and now real life is starting to settle in. My contemporary literature class has so much of it too, every day we have at least 12 pgs to read and then we have to write an analysis of what we read and all of this is in Spanish, much harder than I thought it would be.. But my phonetics class is still great, we are learning about tongue positioning right now, I hope to have a perfect accent by the time I leave that class. I am shocked at how well I have adjusted to the different eating times and how well my small breakfasts of toast sustain me. I am lucky though because my family eats dinner at 9 instead of the typical time of 10 so I think that might help too. Everything they have made for us lately has been really really good. Everyday our lunch consists of some sort of soup and occasionally another dish and then bread and fruit. Lunch is supposed to be the biggest meal of the day but lately I feel that dinner is way bigger.. Maybe the soups just have more substance than I think they do. Breakfast though is beginning to get tiresome. I want something besides toast everyday and miss all the crazy concoctions my parents would put together for me back home. But my host family has been spoiling me a little bit and taking really good care of me while I have been sick. My host dad Carlos would always checks to make sure I didn't have a fever and the first few days he would bring me tea or warm milk with honey. Thankfully now I am almost better. Last Wednesday we had a speed intercambio where spanish students came and talked to us for 5 minutes and then when the time was up we switched partners and got to talk to someone new. It was really fun and really good practice but it was so loud in the room with all the people it was difficult to hear them. Thursday I met with a professor and I am going to help her practice her English as well as attempt to teach her kids English. They are 7 and 9 and haven't learned too much in school yet so now I am going to be testing my knowledge of the rules of the language I speak and seeing if I can teach it in a foreign language. It is going to be much harder than I first thought but I know it will be a great opportunity for me since it is part of the career path I want to take. I just wish I had been able to take one class about teaching a foreign language before coming over here. But hopefully all goes well and I am able to teach them something at least. 

Friday was our excursion to Ronda, a little town in the mountains de Malaga. The white washed buildings are perched atop a huge cliff that is spanned by the New Bridge and it is just an incredible sight. We got to go to the Plaza de Toros and learn about how a bull fight works and now I am not sure I really want to go to one.. After that we went to the bottom section of the New Bridge which at one point in time used to be a prison. I only saw one room though so either it was a very small prison or the rest of it was hidden from us tourists. It was really neat though to be able to look up to the buildings on the opposite cliff that were above us and look down upon the river below us and then look out and see the fields spanning for miles. After lunch we went on a hike and I walked down all the way to the river and the view is gorgeous in all directions, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Walking back up the steep hills though showed me just how out of shape I am though so I know I need to start running again while I am here. When we climbed over a ridge we discovered there is a waterfall by the cliffs as well which just made the picture even better. Many of the people walked down to it and if I had had more time I would have loved to do that too and it seemed so neat from all their stories that I might just have to go back there when my dad comes to visit. I guess you scale across the cliff side on ladder rungs, that sounds like so much fun to me.   

Yesterday I took a day trip to Gibraltar which was also a ton of fun. As we were driving in toward the rock our bus driver was like "look, the cloud is over England, nothing new there" and it was funny because the biggest cloud in the sky was covering the rock and all around it in 'Spain' they were just wispy. After crossing the border into Great Britain we went on a bus tour of Europa Point and saw the lighthouse and across the straight of Gibraltar we saw the coast of North Africa. Pretty cool, now I have  "seen" almost every continent!! Then we went to Saint Micheal's Cave which is one of the coolest caves I've been in. The formations of the stalactites and stalagmites are so neat and one of them in the middle connects from the ground to the ceiling and is huge, I wish I was better at judging distance so I could give you an idea but it was at least the height of a two story house. The mineral formations that cover the walls remind me of an organ pipe. Another of the stalactites that fell thousands of years back is the width of a red wood tree and a slab was cut off so you can see the rings of formation. The brown rings form in times of drought and the white ones in times of lots of rain. The cave has lots of tunnels and an underground lake was discovered there by chance as well although we didn't get to tour that part. It has a ton of history too. It has been used as a military hideout and was prepared to be used as a emergency military hospital as well during WWII but was never needed. Now they hold concerts and shows in it as their is a big hall in the middle. Definitely just as cool as red rocks maybe more! Then we got to go the the apes den and see the monkeys and that was a highlight. They were so cute and would pose for us and it was amazing watching how far they could jump. They had a tendency to jump on people as well so many of the students ended up with monkeys on their heads. I had a baby come up on my arm and start pulling at my hair trying to eat it and another one climb into my hand, it was definitely something I will never forget. 

This morning I went to an evangelical church and listening to praise songs in Spanish is the most amazing thing ever, they have so much more character than American worship songs, I can get used to singing them in spanish easily and realized that I can actually roll my r's without even thinking about it. Things are still just as exciting as ever here and I promise I won't take so long to write next time and that I will post pictures that belong with this blog as soon as I get a chance to upload them. For those of you with facebook there have been tons of pictures that I've been tagged in so if you want more of a glimpse of Spain you should check those out and for those of you without I will try to incorporate a decent amount on here for you all. Miss you all!

Lindsay