The Mother Daughter Adventure Begins....

A couple weeks ago, I was blessed with a visit from my mom aka Pacific Northwest folk musician Susan Welch. lol. I was soooooo happy to have her come all this way, across the Atlantic ocean on a 16 hour flight to come spend time with me and see a little bit of the world I have been living in over the past 8 months. It really meant so much to me. Like many of the other Americans in my programs, I didn't go home for the holidays so I was really missing the feeling of having someone around who loved me unconditionally and understood me as much as any person can understand another. You must consider the fact that you are perceived very differently when you speak another language and with a strange accent and lots of little mistakes mind you. It felt really good to have someone around who saw me in the light that I am used to being seen in, rather than as a silly little foreigner. Plus, I wanted to hear my mom's impressions of the country even if only from the perspective of vacationer, rather than someone living and working in the country which is a whole nother ball game as you could imagine.

So, our trip started with me picking her up at the Madrid airport on a Monday morning. We both shed a couple tears at the airport, me more than her understandably. I have just been alone over here for what seems like forever and missing SO many people. To see her face just made me so happy and I am more of "a tears of joy" than a tears of sadness person.

So, after the waterworks, we took the Metro to the bus station and then caught a 45 minute bus to Toledo. I feel a little bad cuz I was stressing myself out by worrying about all our plans and making sure I we caught the right connections and found our way around these cities on public transportation and such. My poor mama was probably not understanding my stress and was feeling her own weird exhaustion from being jet-legged and overwhelmed in a new country and language. But we found our hostal, which as it turns out, is not a hostel but a step up from that where you get your own room but is less expensive than a hotel. Its a great way to go when travelling through Spain and only costed 45 € a night for 2 people. And what we call a hostel, where you share a room with others and there is a community kitchen, is called an albergue apparently. Anyways, so our hostal was really nice and the people that worked there were super-nice as well. We had a little balcony and from it where able to watch one of the processions of Semana Santa come through at night. I thought the night processions where much more effective and dramatic. Up next is a video that I shot from our balcony. Stay tuned for more mother daughter adventures :) This is only the beginning!!