birthday paella!

It’s been a very interesting and very full week. Classes are still going well, I actually had my first midterm on Monday. It’s so hard to believe that I am already so far into my semester and it’s somewhat nerve racking because I have a hard time knowing what to expect from Spanish professors, but it went surprisingly well.

I’m in a literature/theater class here at IES, though to my surprise it turns out to be more theater than literature. One of our major projects for the class is to select and direct a scene from one of the plays we are reading in class and then “defend” our work and our directorial decisions (in Spanish of course) in front of the class. For the last few weeks we’ve been discussing a play called “La Noche Dividida”, a short modern piece written by a female playwright, so I selected a quite funny scene and a couple friends and last Wednesday I got to watch them perform. It was quite a challenge considering I have no real theater experience, but it turned out well. One of the directors took pictures and I’ll be sure to post one or two when she emails them to me.

On Saturday on of my IES friends turned 21 so a group of us celebrated together over paella and chocolate fondue (check out the picture of birthday paella). My roommate and her friends from last semester are good friends with a Spaniard who is conveniently a fabulous cook so he and his roommate hosted a small birthday party for Kateri. To Kateri’s horror a couple friends gifted her a tiara that read “Besame, es mi cumplianos!” or “Kiss me, it’s my birthday!”, which I think was opportunely lost at some point. Anyway, it was an adventure and lots of fun.

It is a bizarre feeling to be settling into this lifestyle. I finally have a routine that I follow and everyday I feel like less of a tourist and more of a Granadina. But, all the same there are aspects of this life that catch me off guard. I absolutely adore my host family, but I find it very interesting, and sometimes difficult, to interact with a 50+ year old man who has spent most of his adult life raising boys and is suddenly taking care of two college aged women. We are, after all, very different from his sons and he is very set in his ways.

I haven’t been feeling very well the past few days and I spent most of the day yesterday in bed. It seems that my body has not been reacting well to Spain so I’ll clearly have to pick a different Spanish speaking country to live.

I continue to meet all sorts of interesting people here, I even met a guy from Wales living and teaching English here who spent sometime in Costa Rica working with sea turtles. What a small world. Speaking of sea turtles Allison, our one flippered turtle from Sea Turtle Inc., will be getting a prosthetic flipper sometime later this spring or summer. Because her story is so incredible STI has been getting all sorts of great publicity including from National Geographic and BBC. Check out the National Geographic story on her: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080229-turtle-picture.html. Needless to say I’m thrilled and can’t wait to get back to the island.

bss