Merry Christmas from the USA.

Hello Everyone, I made it home for Christmas with minor luggage complications but it is all okay and my luggage arrived in time and mostly unharmed. I will be at home until January 29 and then I will head back to Sevilla. These are the pictures from my trip to Paris. I won't describe it other than to say it was wonderful and I loved it! I'll let the photographs say the rest!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I'll post again when I'm back in Europa!

~ Bye ~

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Okay, I know that it is Not Thanksgiving anymore but I think I can still wish that you all had a happy one!! Now Christmas is sneaking closer and closer and I will soon be coming home! Just a quick update before I tell you all how my Thanksgiving went. First, my grandma is here and has been here since my Birthday and we are going to Paris this weekend and Barcelona next weekend!
I will be home on the 17th of December for anyone who is interested. Also, I would appreciate any prayers for safe travel... : )

So, now for my Thanksgiving story. It started okay. I woke up a little late, around 10sih. Oh, First, I have to tell you all the story inside the story. SO, The oven does not work here in the apartment my grandma is renting. She called and told José the english speaking son of the owner that the oven does not work and he asked why it mattered since we had a microwave, she explained that Thanksgiving was coming up and that it is a major american holiday. So he told his dad. His dad came over to the apartment when I was in class. He does not speak english and my grandma does not speak spanish, so it was interesting. Later, I called him ( his name is Fernando) and he was very polite and said that the oven is too old to fix so he wouldn't be able to fix it in two days in time for Thanksgiving. So, he said we had 3 options. 1, he could buy us a pre cooked turkey. 2, he could take us to another apartment to cook the turkey. 3, he could take us to his house to cook the turkey. We chose option 2.

So back to the other story. It is 10am and I have just woken up, remember? So Fernando, the owner, is coming over in 1 hour to take us to another apartment. I get up and get ready and 11am rolls around and our bags of food, including pumkin pie fixings for the school dinner are all ready to be lugged across Seville to bake. 11:30am rolls around and we decide to call Fernando who assures us that he is only 10 minutes away.

Careful, 10 minutes is not a real number to Fernando, it is a synonym to later ( sometime in the future). So anyway, we decided to run to the grocery store to buy sugar for the pie and we still had time left over. Then he got there and it took us forever to decide who was going where with whom. Basically, I was translating half of what each person said and trying to decide what I thought was the best idea. We still hadn't bought the turkey, honesty, we weren't even certain if there was a whole turkey at the grocery store. We ended up deciding that my grandma and Fernando would walk to the aprtment which was "10 minutes away" together so that she could start baking the pumkin pie for the lunchat 1:30pm. It was presently 12:15ish pm. So they went and I went to the grocery store and bought a whole turkey which I had to ask the clerk/butcher for special, because they don't really sell whole turkeys he was very floored that I wanted the whole thing... NOT cut up!!

So, after a lot of other little things I ended up walking the "10 minutes" to the other apartment with a huge, whole, raw turkey in my backpack. After walking for More than 10 minutes I got a phone call. It was from Fernando, he said " Well, the oven doesn't work here either so we are going to take the turkey back to my house... I'll meet you at the front door of the apartment in 10 minutes with my car, so we can go to my house". I was slightly confused but turned around and hurried back to the apartment. I went back to the apartment and waited for about 20 mintues... if you remember I was 10 minutes away from the apartment and 10 + 20 = 30! Fernando should take a arithmetic lesson. He arrived around 1:10pm and we had the Thanksgiving dinner at school at 1:30. So I told him we couldn't go to his house which was MORE than 10 minutes (who knows how long that could end up being). He offered his to have his wife cook the turkey for us... I wasn't so sure. Carrying the turkey through the streets of Sevilla had really killed whatever faith I might have had in the man. After a game of hot potato with the turkey my grandma finally said, " just give him the turkey and we'll decide what to do later!!". So, I gave him the turkey and the promise that we would call him later to share a copa (drink) and retrieve our turkey from his house. Then we went to Thanksgiving dinner at the school, it was good. There were some incredible sweet potatoes and apple pie but NO pumkin pie which was supposed to be our contribution to the dinner. Some people were quite upset. We also went by the ever popular STARBUCKS to have some coffee after our eventful morning!

We came back to the apartment after the dinner at school and rested. Then we decided to take the bus to go the the suburbs where Fernando lives and where our turkey was being held. I called him, Fernando not the Turkey (who, by the way, we named Fernando) to ask which bus we needed to get on... but finally some good news, he said his wife was going to bring it to us since she was coming into town. Thus, we got our Turkey. And it was beautiful and whole and smelled wonderful! But we did not eat it because we were saving it until we had pumkin pie as well.

We made the 2 pumkin pies the next morning at my Señora's house and watched Home Alone.
Then that night we had a real thanksgiving dinner with my friends Sheila and Afton and it was Perfect even though it was kind of a day late.

And that was Thanksgiving 2008 in Spain. I have no regrets and as it has been pointed out, I will have a great Thanksgiving story for years to come.


~ Happy Thanksgiving ~