Mushroom Gathering in Andalucia

Angela and I have been trying to hang out for awhile now but it just never seems to work out with our schedules, so when she invited me to a 2 day mushroom seminar I had to say yes. For me its more about experiencing different aspects of culture here in Spain and also improving my Spanish than it is about learning all the scientific details of the fungi family. When she invited me, it was right as the bell rang for school to start so quickly she explained that it was about wild mushrooms, it went on for 2 days, they would teach us about psychedelic mushrooms, there would be lots of interesting people, a special dinner prepared with different types of mushrooms and we would go out and pick our own on Sunday. So, AFTER agreeing to buy her last ticket for 10€ I started feeling uneasy about it. What if it was a bunch of hippies out in "el campo"(countryside) taking psychedelic mushrooms? What if they put them in the food and then I ate it and started fryin balls with a bunch of people I don't know that are saying a bunch of weird stuff in Spanish or try to get me to make out with them or something? Then I would have a horrible trip. My mind was racing with what ifs. I really had no idea what I had gotten myself into but I knew that I had made up my mind that I was going and had told Angela that I was going....so, I WAS GOING.

As it turned out I had nothing to worry about. It was a course at Casa Azul where they brought in some mushroom experts to teach people how to classify fungi and identify edible vs. poisonous vs. psychedelic mushrooms. We ate a big lunch prepared by the ladies of la Casa Azul made with all different types of mushrooms. After that, we all sat around and had tea. After tea everyone kept yawning and saying that it was "la hora de siesta" so we all closed our eyes and slept for a maybe 20 minutes max. It was just funny how everyone got really quiet after lunch, started yawning, snuggling up and laying their heads on their neighbor...then we all dozed off....me included. I heard them whispering while I was dozing off "la americana esta durmiendo la siesta" (the american girl is taking a siesta). I didn't care. I truly WAS sleepy from hardly sleeping the night before after my late night salsa class. My legs never will settle down and let me sleep after salsa. So, that day I was happy to have a little siesta even if it was with a group of strangers.

After the siesta we had another lecture by a guy with his docterate in mushroom biology or something like that. So Saturday ended up being 10 hours of all Spanish with lots of big scientific words and I was exhausted by the time I got home. I was supposed to meet up with them again the next day to go out to el campo and find mushrooms. I ended up waking up late and not going. I had been so tired and I knew that I had lots of stuff to do for the upcoming week, so I told Angela that I wasn't going to make it for the second day. I felt kinda bad and It would have been fun but next weekend Juliana and I are going to Morocco. Today, instead of mushroom gathering I did laundry and planned for my classes this week so that I will be all caught up and ready to go to Morocco for the puente. Puentes are when a holiday is attached to a weekend kinda like our Thanksgiving and you get the day off in between too. So, they call it a puente which means bridge in Spanish. We have a puente the weekend of December 4-7 so we're headin to Africa with a tour group. So, we should be nice and safe traveling with the group. Until Morocco my friends :) :)

Tienes Suerte

I have already been thinking about this quite a bit since I've been here...the fact that I am lucky to have been born a native speaker of English. But today in one of my fourth grade classes, a pretty little girl said in Spanish with a sad look on her face "you're lucky". I said "why?" She said "because you speak English. All the good movies and tv shows are in English..the whole world wants to speak English." You had to have seen her face though. She looked so sad and frustrated and hopeless. I said "but you're going to learn English too" with a smile. Her posture perked right up and she couldn't help but smile.

el patio en San Lorenzo

My school, C.E.I.P San Lorenzo, has a few different patios inside it. Here is one of them. The music is obviously not Spanish but its the music that came with the computer program for my flip. Its just silly Caribbean music cuz I thought it went good with oranges.

Ripped Jeans

If you really want to fascinate the people of Cordoba and have an endless conversation starter, wear ripped jeans. It seems to be working for me and Juliana. We both have ripped jeans that we brought from back home. It seems perfectly normal for us to wear them, as you ALMOST can't find jeans without rips already made in the U.S. Plus, I love em. And jeans that wear out on their own like this, preciosa....they are like a treasure to me and I can't get rid of them until the ass rips out of em. So, I have 2 pairs that I wear regularly here in Spain..not to school, but around town and to salsa class or wherever. They are only ripped in the knees and a small rip in the upper thigh. But I am telling you EVERYWHERE we go, somebody says SOMETHING. Little kids try to put their fingers in the holes and tickle your legs or try to rip them more. So, I have to be careful around children. Men stare. Big surprise. One of my salsa teachers, Alex, who is learning English, said to me last night "broken jeans" and I said "you mean ripped jeans?" and he said "whatever. sexy jeans". Its so funny to me that he said broken jeans cuz thats a direct translation from Spanish to English because ripped and broken means the same thing in Spanish but in English there are two seperate words. These are the types of mistakes that I probably make all the time trying to translate from English to Spanish. But anyways, it seems as tho these pants cause quite a stir and I love it!!! Makes me feel like a rebel americana.

Arab Baths

I know this is a terrible video but cameras aren't allowed and at least I got a little peak for everyone. I will include the link to their website so you can see what it really looks like in there. Also, it was superdark and my flip doesn't have a light. So....the Arab Baths were AMAZING. Everything from the marble, the candles, the architecture, the music, skylights, different temperature baths, the oil rub down, the smell...nothing short of amazing. So glad we went and on a rainy, dreary day. It was perfect.

First off, you have to make a reservation if you want to get in on a weekend. Juliana and I tried to go yesterday and were turned away at the door. With the rain and cold today, it turned out to be a better day for a bathing experience anyways. So, you just bring your bathing suit and thats it. They have big, thick towels that they give you and a locker to put your stuff in. They also give you a little menu looking thingy with instructions and recommendations for what order to do things and the reasoning behind it. They recommend the temperate pool first which is the one you see for a second in the video. Then, you move into the hot room and those tubs are frickin HOT. I am the type who loves hot tubs and takes really hot baths and showers but to me it was scorching. I love it!!! Then, they recommend that you go from boiling water to the ice cold tubs. OMG!!! I screamed a little. Felt like the rivers in Washington. Something about being good for the circulation to go from HOT, HOT, HOT water to FREEZING ASS COLD water. Then, they showed us where you can sit on marble slabs and sip on hierbabuena tea from silver arabian tea pots. Then, we went into the turkish bath house which is basically a sauna but with star shaped beams of light shining down through the steam and beautiful marble and tiles. The floor would almost burn your feet as you walked across to find a seat on the marble benches. It wasn't a superhot sauna like my mom likes to give. I don't think its supposed to singe your nostrils Mom!!! After that, we went back into the temperate pool and thats when the real relaxation started to occur. Thats when we stopped talking, giggling and getting in trouble by the noise natzi. We were too relaxed to make chit chat. At one point I looked over at Juliana in the HOT tub and she looked like a little baby sleeping. I've never seen her that relaxed. Wish I could've taken a picture. I too could have seriously fallen asleep in that water listening to the fountains and sensual arabian music.

From that point on we just wandered around in a euphoric daze; in and out of hot, cold, temperate and steam with some sips of tea in between until they called our number for our massages. I wasn't going to get one but Juliana talked me into it and said she would pay the extra 7€ for me to get a 15 min massage and essencial oil treatment. So glad she talked me into it. And not only that, she let me have the guy massage therapist. What a friend!!! So we layed on our bathside massage tables face down and let the magic begin. My guy was in his thirties and a little cute. He started by slowly untying the top and bottom ties of my bikini top. Then, he slid my bottoms half way down my cheeks and slathered my whole body in oil that smelled like jasmine. It wasn't the type of massage I was expecting. I thought it would be deeper and get to the muscles like the other ones I've had before. But no, it was a slippery rubdown of the whole back side of my body for 15 minutes. Whoa!!! I thought to myself while lying there, "you better enjoy every second of this, cuz this is probably the only action you'lle be getting for awhile." I was a little dazed and confused when I got up and when I said "MUCHAS gracias", he said "A ti." He said for me to shower and then we could continue our bathing adventures until our time was up. You get an hour and a half in the baths for 33€ with the "massage" and essential oils. When the lady said our time was up, we both pouted. I coulda stayed there all day. The atmosphere was unbelievable. Here is the link if you want to get a better idea of what its like.

http://www.hammamspain.com/cordoba/

arab tea house

We went to an Arab tea house in the Jewish quarter last night cuz we couldn't get into the Arab bath house without a reservation and we dropped the ball on that one. Instead we will go to the baths today. Anyhow, it was kinda cool in the tea house. You are basically paying for atmosphere. This is my second time to one of these and I probably won't go again unless we are with a bigger group. Otherwise its pretty much a ripoff. You pay 5€ for a tiny pot of tea which is like $7 american. And then if you wanna smoke the hookah, its 9€ which is like $12 bucks. So, i'm thinkin for that price they should put somethin good in there rather than just cherry or strawberry tabacco. Jk GG.

La Sombra

Meet my new guitarra. She is nothing fancy although she DOES look much better in person. She is my first guitar and that alone makes her special. She is an electroacustica which means I can plug her into an amp someday if I want. And I named her La Sombra because in person she has this shadowy effect where the black fades to brown. Now lets just hope that I have the discipline to actually learn this time.

Rounding A Little Corner

FINALLY after almost 2 months here in Spain, I feel myself rounding a little corner with my Spanish. I HAVE learned lots of new vocab words but thats not really the corner I'm talking about. In one of my earlier posts I talk about how I was making mistakes that were so obvious and was mixing things up that I already knew. Well, I think I am starting to move out of that phase. I don't know what a linguist would call it but for the first several weeks I was mixing up the gender and 1st and 2nd person and all sorts of ugliness. Well, two days in row now I have had people I work with tell me that my Spanish is improving. I asked Lola what she meant by that because its hard to notice your own progress some times. She said that I am talking faster.

A few weeks back I was getting pretty impatient and frustrated with myself, so I put the word out that I wanted to do some intercambios. Now, I do 2 per week. One is with an 18 year old girl who is really cute and wants to better her English and the other is with a teacher from my school who has been helping me SO much by listening to me and correcting me nicely when I mess up and writing things down for me. And then, of course, my roommate Irene has helped me a ton. I learn lots of slang and cuss words from her daily. Thanks Irene!!! I mean it. She is really helping me to understand all the colloquial phrases and insults and what not. All necessary stuff.

Another really cool thing happened 2 nights ago when I got back from 2 hours of dance class in Spanish. I was trying to go to sleep and my mind wouldn't shut off like usual. But what I noticed right before I drifted off, was that I had been thinking in Spanish. YYYYEEESSSSS!!! You know what that means....yep, I'm on my way. And the next logical thing to happen is something I've wanted FOREVER and how people determine that they are fluent usually....yep, you guessed it, to dream in another language. Okay, I am gettin myself way too excited here. I just need to relax, keep doin what I'm doin and let it unfold.

Tour of the Castle

Here's a little video tour of the castle I went to last weekend. Took me a little while to get it edited but here it is. Its a 30 minute drive outside of Cordoba and I can't remember the name of that little white village below. The castle is a restored castle from a LONG time ago but once again I can't remember how long ago. I know that they have found Roman and Iberic coins on the castle grounds and the Iberic ones date back before the Roman times. They've also found measures and weights, arrow points, bullet casings, jewelry and treasures from when the Spaniards were trying to take over the world. The footage of the swords didn't turn out very good because there was a glare from the glass casing, however; they had really cool sword replicas from legends such as Columbus and Robin Hood on display. The entrance fee was 5€ I think, which is almost $7 (depending on the day) but Lola and Antonio paid my way because they invited me and thats what you do in Spain if you are the one who invited. The little boy in the video, that is so stinkin cute and says "hello" to the camera, is Alvaro. That's Lola and Antonio's oldest and I teach him private English lessons twice a week. And then you see his little brother in the video as well but I can't remember his name for the life of me right now. Lola is the English teacher that I work with the most at school. I assist her with a lot of her English classes and serve as a model of how a native speaker sounds. Her husband Antonio teaches English at a high school here in Cordoba. They lived in Washington D.C. for a year before they had Alvaro and loved it. In fact Antonio wants to go back to the U.S. to live for a little while again. When I asked about what they thought of the U.S., they had mostly good things to say. Lola loved how the trees looked they were on fire in the fall on the east coast because here they don't have a true fall. And everything gets greener here in the fall, not colored. They liked that you can ask for a doggie bag if you can't finish your food at a restaurant and you don't have to be embarassed. The only things that they didn't like was that the people live and die by the clock. Everybody seems to be on a tight schedule leaving very little room for spontaneity or to just relax. They also thought it was weird that we move away from our families a lot. Here in Spain most people live where there family lives whether they can find a job or not. They may go away for school some times but they usually come back to where their family is from, to live pretty much the rest of their lives. The stereotype of Spaniards being very family oriented is true so it seems. Anyways, enjoy the castle!!!!

Private English Lessons aka Clases Particulares

Lately I have been just SHOCKED at how well things are coming together for me here. I wasn't sure in the beginning because everything seemed so hard. From the locks on the doors to the bus systems and trying to get an apartment..everything took so much effort. Things that used to seem easy to me were all of the sudden hard, due to the language barrier and the fact that they just doing things differently when you're on the other side of the world. Plus, I had left behind so much family and so many friends and even my Bianca and Carlito. I truly discovered what it felt like to be lonely.

BUT... over the last couple weeks, things have really started to fall into place. And when I say "fall into place", I mean just that. With no effort on my part at all hardly, people are calling me to go have coffee and have intercambios (language exchanges) it seems everyday. Also, I am recieveing many phone calls to inquire about teaching private English lessons to people's children. I had been under the assumption that I would have to advertise by placing posters in cafes or have business cards printed up in order to drum up some business for private lessons. I can honestly say that I haven't done A THING to drum up business. They come to me. It is fabulous. From the day I started teaching at my school people have asked me if I was interested in teaching their children English at their home for side work. Of course I said "yes" because I can definately use the money for travel and what not. I wasn't sure how serious these people were though until my phone started ringing off the hook. I basically have 8 children now that I will be teaching English to...weekly. This is at least an extra 250€ a month that I can put in my travel fund. I could do more clases particulares but I want to save my 3 day weekends for going out of town and what not, plus I want to take advantage of this new laid back lifestyle that I am enjoying here in Spain. I don't want to come all the way here just to turn into the same crazy americana who overbooks herself and doesn't really enjoy the moments. That being said, I will have to start turning people away now. I hate to have to do that but I really want to enjoy being tranquila and have time to enjoy this precious gift. I am truly living a charmed life.