The Rain in Spain...

Hi everyone,
I´m starting to think Sunday´s a good day for posting since I tend not to have too much else on so I´ll probably stick to this day to share my latest adventures with you - not that I´ve got that much longer left before I finish this job!

On Monday I had my normal work schedule followed by Spanish class. We had a couple of new students joining us including another German student and a lass from Japan - it´s great to get such a mix although it´s a little funny now hearing the Cypriats disscusing things in Greek on one side and the Germans on the other while the rest of us stick to English and Spanish.
After class I met up with the regular Friday night pintxos group for dinner since one of the girls was going back to the US. We had a nice evening and I had a good laugh watching most folk struggle through the giant burgers on offer at the bar we ate at - literally the burger was about the size of the dinner plate and stood a good five inches high! I kept to a plate of chips since there were no other veggies to share one of these giant sandwiches with but I was happy enough with that.

Waiting next to this guy outside the Guggenheim for the rest of our group

Not a whole lot happened on Tuesday as I spent the majority of my work time just trying to get Isa to speak/play with me but I got a good amount of studying done in the afternoon and spent some time getting a few more things organised for Uni this year. I also had to order a new pair of shoes since my 4 year old baseball boots decided to split right around the back of the heel - typical that they waited unitl I was away to do this,

It seems Isa decided she was happy playing on Wednesday and we spent a good part of the morning playing and blowing bubbles in the garden while the cats tried to catch them - it´s days like this when I really enjoy my summer job,
By early afternoon the weather had changed so it was a rather cool walk to the metro for class. It turned out the two Cypriat girls were finishing their lessons that day so we said our goodbyes at the end an extra interesting lesson where we got to look at some other Spanish speaking countries in South America.
In the evening I had a phone call from the other half which was great but as always left  me missing home a little more than usual.

Bubbles in the garden 

Rain and a cold wind on thursday meant swimming lessons weren´t an option but since it would have been the teacher´s last day before he went off to study in Chile he came by for a quick visit and to say goodbye which was pretty nice of him.
My afternoon was spent doing some online research and starting to plan things for getting work when I get back to the UK in just over a month.

Friday was still a bit cold and damp and it seemed Isa´s mood corresponded to the weather for most of the morning. My knees were also pretty stiff from the change in weather so it was pretty quiet on both sides.
I spent a fair bit of time in the afternoon trying to repair my shoes until the new ones arrive - sewing through the canvas was easy enough but stiching onto the rubber edging was something I´d want to do again anytime soon - stabbed by self with the needle far too many times - however it seems to be holding ok.
Later in the afternoon everyone piled in the car, Chinese teacher and her kid included, and went to get a meal out. As the teacher was heading off on holiday at the weekend it was sort of a ´have a nice summer´ meal which was a nice idea. Unfortunately the ´restaurant´ of choice was a rather well known American fast food chain which I won´t eat in so I sat and waited while the kids ate until it was time to go and meet my friends for pintxos.
We had a good night out and after spending some time with one of the new girls in my class and another new student from Norway I rejoined the usual group. Seeing a couple of lads who clearly weren´t Spanish standing nearby one of the lasses decided to bring them into the group and I had to laugh when we dicovered they were actually from Newcastle! They stuck with us for the rest of the evening but when everyone else decided to head off to a club in the same direction as my metro station myself and the two geordies were apparently walking too fast and ended up losing the rest of the group - oops. Instead I went home as planned and the two lads headed off for food.

Making paella - that pan´s about 2 foot wide!

On Saturday there was a big paella festival in Getxo that Emma was going to with her friends and I was invited to come along with them. It looked pretty grey once again and was apparently only 22 degrees so I went out with jeans and a shirt. Typically the weather had totally changed by the time I got there and although I had a vest top under the shirt I could wear I was stuck with the jeans.
Now, I assumed the festival would be a bit like a mini local fair and while the main focus would be the paella competition there would also be the Spanish equivelant of best jam and cake bakes - I was totally wrong. Instead it seemed that groups of people had pitches spreading all over the field where they would cook their paellas on campfires while loud, drunk fiesta-goers roamed around to the sound or various stereos blasting out the latest and greatest tunes from Spain, the UK and the USA - not a single jam jar or potted plant in sight.
We had a good time and although I still find it a little odd to be hanging out with 17 year old Spanish kids we had a good laugh and we all got a bit of launguage practice in too.
We ended up eating out with Emma and Adam´s dad instead of at the fiesta since Emma´s boyfriend was doing the first proper meet-the-dad-day. The food was great with prawns and salad and such, and allow I proved I´m still hopeless at fish it was a really good meal and a nice break away from the heat of the afternoon sun.
My friends from class had planned on meeting me at the fiesta in the afternoon but ended up not coming so after a little more time hanging out with Emma and her friends they split off to find the fluorescent paint everyone seemed to be covered in while I walked back to Sopelana. By this point I´d gotten a bit burnt, not having expected the change of weather but it was a nice walk back along the coastal path.
That evening I had a good long chat with my friend Courtney back home - talked a little about what we´d do when she came out to meet me in Barcelona and after that I had an early night.

Today´s been pretty quiet so far since I´ve mostly been studying and reading.

Well that seems to be all for now anyway - I´m off to read a little more of my book.
I´ll be writing again soon but in the meantime just a little reminder to check out my Facebook page where I sell all the knitwear I make back home. There´s a load of items still for sale and available while I¨m away and I´m taking orders for new items for when I get back to the UK in September. The page is:
 https://www.facebook.com/driftinggipsyswoolcraft

Some of the items I make over on my Drifting Gipsy page

Thanks guys.
Ciao for now!

Happy Halloween!

Hi everyone,
Sorry it's taken me longer than normal to get this post up, but power and internet have been in short supply around here lately - I'll explain why later.

So it's ben yet another relatively unproductive week around here. On Monday we headed over to the schools to check in and finish sealing the gaps around the posts holding the fence in place around the weather station. Because the fencing around that particular schol isn't complete it had been decided that it wasn't safe to have the weather station on the ground - insted we fixed it on top of a flat roof of one of the school buildings. Unfortunately as they'd had to drill into the roof to fit the fence, the ceiling was starting to leak - oops. However we're pretty sure it's all fixed up, might go and check tomorrow.

On that trip we also discovered that the school kids were all going to be on holiday for two weeks. Apparently there was some teacher competition thing going on although I don't know if that was the reason for the two week holiday or if they just held the competitions over pre-existing holidays, either way it meas we haven't been abe to do any school related stuff for a week and a half now.

I did get to spend some time making up a couple of very proffesional looking signs for our weather stations so I'm looking forward to getting them up soon.

Another 'outreach' task over the last week has been to plan a stand for Forest Week which is happening in town (Pilcopata) over the space of next week. It sounds like there's going to be events and things going on all week but we have a stall on the Saturday with, I presume, a few other 'green'groups in the area. We're going to be showing what Villa Carmen is all about, some information about our community outreach programs, things like that. I'm looking forward to it, I just hope that with our limited resources we can actually make a proffesional job of it.

Spending some free time playing football with the workers

Meanwhile in my free time I finally decided to make myself some swimwear. Now I know how silly it sounds not to have some with me already but the plan had been to pick some up in Edinburgh before I flew out here. Unfotunately that didn't happen so I've been improvising lately. However using a pattern I found online (link to be found here) I made my own bikini top - since I'm fine just wearing the swimshorts I 'borrowed'of my other half. Despite the fact the pattern was geared up to be made using a sewing machine I slowly but surely finished up and it only took me about two days - I was being very precise with the lines I stitches I needed to sew.  I got to test it out yesterday and luckily it had no problem in the water and doesn't look near as makeshift as I expected!

One big thing from last week was the fact we all got together for some Halloween fun. The School for Field Studies (SFS) students all dressed up and we along with anyone else they could convince and we all spent the afternoon playing halloween games, like pin the parts on the zombie, halloween pinata and other things like that. They also all carved watermelons and had competions for face painting.

Me trying to hit the piñata

Now in the early hours of Halloween - literally around 3am - there was a huge storm that sat over Villa Carmen for hours, with thunder so loud I and lightening so bright it seemed almost inevitable it would hit something on site. Instead it seems the storm saved it's damage for when we weren't expecting it. The power went out Halloween evening, clearly due to the storm. The power out lasted almost 24 hours which wasn't such a big deal but it did mean going in search of an actual pyhsical book once the battery on my tablet prevented me from reading what I had been working through.

Everyone in their halloween costumes

Although the power came back pretty quickly, the internet was completely gone all weekend, and even though its back at the moent it's been coming and going for the last few days - so I guess I better hurry up and finish writing while I can still post this!

Besides I can't think of anything that's been going on here lately, except for some more studying, oh and we now have a second bat to look after, since it was knocked out of it's nest by some of the workers (who I'm not too happy with because they killed a nuber of other bats from the same nest). So the second bat is a little bigger than the first but we've only had it a couple of days. I've been trying to focus on getting it to eat but it's still kind of scared - hopfully it'll come around soon.

In the mean time I think a few volunteers are heading off into town so I'm going to go see what's happening there - hopefully we can go and grab some ice cream!

Speak to you all soon!!