A New Kind of Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving was celebrated a little differently this year. It was just another normal Thursday - no one knows about Thanksgiving here (and why should they?). My celebration did not take place on the actual day of Thanksgiving like usual, but instead three days later. And it was celebrated with Spaniards, not family. However, it was still just as fun, and just as special, as any other Thanksgiving I’ve had.

At school that Thursday, I spent the day teaching my students about our holiday, feeling proud to be an American as I shared my favorite foods and traditions with them. When a few of them would wish me “’Appy Tanksgeeving Raashel!” (most of them can’t quite pronounce my name correctly) in the hallways it made me feel…a little emotional I guess. It hasn’t been difficult to be away from home, but a part of me may have felt a little homesick during the holiday.

The weekend began with my good friend Rachael English coming to visit. She studied in Sevilla with me three years ago, and is now living and teaching in Toledo (a small city just outside of Madrid). She came in October with another friend of hers to visit me before too. It is always so much fun when we’re together, even though she always seems to bring the rain with her. It rained almost the entire time she was here….and has barely stopped since.

We spent that Saturday talking, grocery shopping, and making a pumpkin pie from scratch. That’s right, we bought a butternut squash from the local SuperSol grocery story, chopped it up, boiled it, and mashed it. We also made the pie crust from scratch as well. And you should all know that when I say “we” I mean Rachael.

We went to Ana Bello’s house to help her with whatever last minute details or dishes needed to be prepared. We were there late into the night, and as a result slept until about the time we had to go for Thanksgiving the next morning!

We arrived to Ana’s house bearing beer and coke (staple drinks for a Spanish lunch), and all excited for a Spanish-American Thanksgiving.

There were ten of us in all; four Americans and 6 Spaniards. Ana had outdone herself: the table looked immaculate, and the meal was incredible. She even made a “turkey” out of different foods and utensils (picture below). And we actually had AMERICAN food!!

There was: corn, green bean casserole, stuffing, turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, and most importantly, PIES! We had two pumpkin pies and two apple pies! It was as authentic American food as you can get here in Spain. :) It was absolutely delicious. Some of the food the Spaniards had never tried before, like the sweet potatoes and the green bean casserole. But everyone there loved everything, and we stuffed ourselves as much as we could, then somehow still managed to find room for dessert (coffee or tea, and two pieces of pie each. Yum).

After clearing the dishes and washing up, we decided to play games. Now normally I would be in a food-induced coma sleeping off the feast I had just indulged in, but Spaniards don’t know all the Thanksgiving rules quite yet. So we decided to play Taboo. As you all know, I LOVE playing games, and this is also a tradition in my family during holidays. But playing a game where you have to describe words….in Spanish?! Needless to say I got quite nervous, and was not at all excited to play.

Rachael was good encouragement, and soon it was my turn to describe the word. And you know what? I did GREAT! Rachael and I both did. I was so impressed with us, and so proud of myself for being able to describe a word well enough (without being able to use those obvious clues) that Spaniards could actually guess correctly. What an ego-boost.

The day continued with lots of other games: cards, Parcheesi, poker…and lots more talking. All in all, Rachael and I passed ten hours there, speaking in Spanish almost the entire time (we did have our few off to the side sarcastic responses here and there, and they just wouldn’t be the same in Spanish).

On Monday after work, Rachael and I went to our old school (Acento) to visit our old professors and go to a flamenco show put on by this semesters’ students who have been taking flamenco dance lessons. The show was great, and afterward Rachael, Ana, our friends Kike and Martin, Sarah and Jordan (Acento’s student-coordinators) and I all went out to a couple of bars for drinks and tapas. It was the big rivalry soccer game between Barcelona and Madrid, so every bar was packed full of spectators (Barcelona won 5-0 – a blowout game and a big scoring game at that! Some people are calling it Barcelona’s greatest victory game). We had a fun time talking the night away, ending with tea to keep away the cold edge that the night had brought on.

This Thanksgiving made me realize just how much I have to be thankful for this year. Here I am living out my dream in the city I love so much, surrounded by friends who are encouraging me helping me through this new and challenging experience. I am so grateful that I’m here, and that I have my family and friends back home as well praying for me and thinking of me. :)

This is Ana cooking :)

Here are Rachael, me, and Ana at about 1:30am before our big day

Ana made this turkey out of different foods, and a rubber food paintbrush 

(I don't know the real name) for the top of its head!

The table was set so nicely, and the food was delicious! 

As you can see I still don't like my food to touch...

All of us ready to dig in!

Rachael, Kike, Martin, and Ana

The flamenco show!

My Spanish Life

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you are all having a wonderful time celebrating with your families and filling your bellies full of delicious food. Today was just a normal day for me here. I didn’t think it would bother me to not be home for Thanksgiving, but it did a little bit. I miss the tradition and the holiday, being with family, and eating a huge feast. I also missed watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade! I tried to stream it online but only caught the tail end of it (at least I saw Santa!) I will be having a Thanksgiving celebration on Sunday with some good friends here though, but I’ll write more on that later.

Today I wanted to talk about my life in Spain. I am working in a high school in a pueblo called Coria del Río (it’s about a 30 minute drive from Seville). I teach English on Monday through Thursday mornings to students ages 11-15, and in all different subjects: English, math, science, gym, and music. All I do in the math and science classes is read out loud in English and the students repeat after me to practice their pronunciation. It is actually really boring, for me and for the students. I love my English classes though – I have really fun students, and I get to make presentations for them, and teach them different things every week. They are curious and very talkative students.

The discipline in Spanish schools is very different than back home…meaning there really isn’t any. The students aren’t really bad by any means; they just like to talk a lot. I feel like half of the class period is spent by the teacher shushing the students so they can hear what she or I have to say. Sometimes it’s frustrating, but for the most part I love it.

I also teach private English lessons in the afternoons. I have eight different students, and they are all at different levels. One of them I meet twice a week in a bar in a cool part of Sevilla, called Alameda (it’s similar to East Grand Rapids), and the others are families in another pueblo called Tomares (about a 15 bus ride from Sevilla). I enjoy some of my private lessons very much, but there is one family that I struggle with every time I’m there. To them I am a glorified babysitter – I go to play with the kids for two hours (3 kids: a five year old boy and two seven year old twin girls) and speak with them only in English. It sounds like it would be easy and fun, right? Wrong. The kids are the most ill-behaved children I have ever met. On the first day one of the girls slapped me in the face! Her mom was so angry (I was too!), and sent her daughter to bed by 5:00. It’s gotten better, but they are just brats. The treat me like a jungle-gym, or a doll, or any other kind of toy. They don’t listen to me or obey me in any way.  The mom is a teacher, so you would think she would control her children more like she would her students. This is also wrong; she stays in the same room as us the whole time I’m there, but still does nothing to stop her little monsters. It’s awkward for me to discipline the children in front of her. I hate going over there every week, but I need the extra money, so I don’t really have a choice.

I spend the majority of the day speaking in English (because of my school and lessons), but the evenings and in-between times are all in Spanish. I’m learning so many new words and phrases every day. It’s overwhelming to think of how much of the language I don’t know and still have yet to learn. But I’m improving, poco a poco.

I am in love with this city. I treasure the fact that I’m actually here, living my dream! I love walking around the city and exploring new areas, or going back to my favorite hotspots. I especially enjoy the city at night. The bars and restaurants are always full late into the night, and the lights, architecture, and landscape turn Sevilla into a special metropolis that I revel in. It’s crazy to think how quickly my time here is flying by, and that I only have 7 months left until I return home. I have so much learning, improving, and exploring to still do in those few shorts months!

The Not-So-Great Beginning

Before I tell about my life now, I want to talk about the beginning. 

When I first arrived to Sevilla I felt completely alone. After spending a month side-by-side with my best friend it was hard moving to a city where I knew hardly no one. Thankfully, my very good friend Ana Bello, let me live at her house until I found my own apartment. She is the secretary of the school I studied at three years ago. I spent the first couple of weeks in Sevilla feeling like an outsider, and being extremely frustrated and embarrassed by my Spanish. I would stay up until all hours of the night talking with friends back home on Skype, then I would sleep most of the day away. It was a pathetic beginning to start my dream life. 

I finally got my act together and started getting reacquainted with the city that I love so much. I thought it would be hard to live here again without any of my Spain friends here with me (though Raquael is in Toledo – just six hours away from me!), but it actually hasn’t been bad. I go to the places we used to frequent (like the river haha) and just remember how much fun we all had together. But I’m not sad that I’m here alone; I have ventured out on my own and made new friends! I have Spanish and American friends here, as well as German and Italian friends. I am living in an apartment with two Spanish girls, Fatima - 21 years old, and Silvia - 22; I’m teaching English at a high school in the pueblo of Coria del Río, I’m teaching private English lessons to 8 different students of all ages, and I’m now taking private Spanish lessons a couple times a week to get back into the swing of things with my Spanish.

I have noticed changes in me these past two months of living here in Sevilla, the biggest being that I have gained much more confidence in speaking Spanish. It has helped tremendously to live with Spaniards who don’t speak any English. They are very patient with me, and we get along so well! We eat together, hang out, shop and watch movies. I couldn’t have asked for better roommates.

I don’t know what I would have done without Ana Bello. She helped me get on my feet so much when I first moved here. I lived with her for all of September, and she was the best “señora”, and a wonderful friend. We spent a lot of time talking and hanging out together, and she introduced me to many of her friends so I could get to know more people here. She encouraged me in my Spanish, brought me to her family’s house in Peñaflor (a pueblo about an hour outside of Sevilla), cooked for me and taught me how to make a few dishes myself. My apartment is now just a few streets away from her, so we still see each other and talk frequently. I am lucky to have a friend like her here.

Those first few weeks of adjustment were harder than I originally anticipated, and I’m glad that’s all over now. Once I finally found my footing in Spain, I started enjoying it so much more. I absolutely love that I am here, and so grateful that I’ve been given this incredible opportunity. Who knows if I'll ever leave?! :)

The Adventure of a Lifetime

I am finally starting my blog for all of you curious readers out there. As most of you know, I am now living in Seville, Spain, the beloved city that I once studied in three years ago for a semester. For the last three years I have thought of little else than getting a job and moving out here. It’s all I talked about to my friends and family, and all I dreamed about as I laid awake at night, and now I am living the dream!

Before I talk about my time in Spain I want to fill you in on how this adventure began:

Getting here was much more difficult than anyone had anticipated. I applied for a teaching job last January and waited five long months for a response – in May it finally came! However, it was not good news: I had been wait-listed. In my mind this was as a rejection; I assumed that no one ever got pulled off of the wait-list. For days I cried and wallowed, but a week later I received the acceptance letter! And not only was I accepted, but I was given a job in SEVILLA, which of course was my first choice city. God is so good.

I then decided to join Adam on his backpacking voyage through Europe in August. I had one month in the summer to quit my job, pack, and get everything organized before I left. Needless to say, it was hectic and exhausting. Adding to the stress of getting ready to go, I broke my foot one day while running! I of course had no health insurance, and only 5 weeks for it to heal before I spent a month walking on it with a heavy backpack.

Things continued to go downhill the day of our departure – I had a tearful goodbye with my family, knowing I wouldn’t see them for a year, then it was off to the train station and Chicago after that! We first went to the Spanish consulate to pick up my passport and Visa which had just been finished a week before, only to find out it wasn’t actually at the consulate, but at their other building. They said they would have it ready by 1:30 that afternoon, so Adam and I met up with my sister Sarah and her boyfriend Jordan for lunch. We had a wonderful time, and then hopped on the metro back to the consulate with plenty of time to retrieve my passport. We then hopped off the metro, and realized we got off at the wrong stop and were now lost! Oh yeah, and the consulate closes at 2:00! We split up in different directions, sprinting everywhere to try and find out where we were and where the consulate was. It was about 90s outside, we were carrying 35 pound backpacks, and I was running on a broken foot with a cast. I was crying and looking like a crazy person as I madly and blindly asked people for directions without stopping.

After a lot of frantic running around, crying, and praying, I found the consulate…but it was already 2:15! I was definitely panicking. In my head I was seeing Adam getting on the plane without me, and me having to pay a thousand extra dollars to take a flight out the next day. But wait! Standing outside of the building just about to leave were three of the workers! I went up to them with my sweat-and-tear-stained face and begged them to open the doors and retrieve my passport for me. Whew, it was close, but I got the passport and we made it to the airport! My very good friend, Steve Terborg, was able to pick us up downtown and bring us to the airport in plenty of time. I made my final phone calls before turning my phone off forever, and we boarded the plane!

We spent the next 30 days traveling to 6 different countries and 11 different cities. We began our journey in Paris, and continued to Heidelberg and Berlin (Germany), then Lucerne (Switzerland), Ljubljana and Bled (Slovenia), Split (Croatia), Florence, Pisa, Rome, Nice, and back to Paris.

Through our hostels we were able to meet incredible people from all over the world, some of which I am still in contact with. We went to famous monuments and museums, fun bars and restaurants, beaches, castles, churches and cathedrals, saw fireworks, and went scuba diving (in Nice)! We went to the top of a mountain in a cable car, then luged down it. The weather was perfect and beautiful. It was almost always hot and sunny; though it rained a few times (it rained almost the whole time we were in Lucerne!). We spent hours and whole nights on trains getting from place to place. Thankfully Adam planned ahead and downloaded a whole season of Scrubs and some movies on his iPod. We also did a lot of cross-word puzzles together and read all the books we had stuffed down the sides of our bulging backpacks.

I was excited to practice my French and Spanish during our trip. In Paris I found out just how much of my French I actually remember from Calvin…not a whole lot. But what I did remember came in handy when we had to buy metro tickets from the teller, or when ordering at restaurants, etc. It was basic French, but I was so proud of myself for remembering certain words and phrases, and for having the confidence to try to communicate with the people there in their language. We also met some Spaniards at our different hostels – I even met a girl who is from Sevilla when we were in Berlin! We have kept in touch through Facebook, but have not seen each other here yet.

Everyone we met was so kind. You always hear negative things about French people, but honestly they try to be so helpful and are so pleasant to you. We also thought that the Berliners were probably the nicest people in all the countries we went to.

I’ve included some pictures of our European Adventure. Traveling for thirty days just fed my passion for seeing the world even more. Even though parts of the trip were very physically challenging, and even painful at times, I would love to do this every summer. There is so much of the world I want to explore, and cities and countries I would love to return to to discover what I missed before.

I will be posting the rest of these pictures on my Facebook soon, but for now enjoy this sneak peak! :)

This is Adam and I on the flight over to Europe. We were so excited to begin our adventure!

Our first stop was Paris! We took two bike tours (one at night and one during the day) 

and got to see and learn about so many different things

We loved the quaint little Heidelberg. We went to a Christmas store, and I was in Heaven! 

I bought a fun German ornament as a souvenir

In Berlin we did another bike tour and went to Checkpoint Charlie. 

We also saw the Berlin Wall and went to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.

This is part of the mountain (Mount Pilatus) we went to in Lucerne. 

This is the luge track! It was so much fun!

We tried new food in every country, but we especially loved our Slovenian lunch in Ljubljana.

We took a beautiful boat ride on the lake in Bled, Slovenia

 

After Bled we were on our way to Split, Croatia. Our hostel was RIGHT on the sea!

Getting our heavy backpacks on to go from Croatia to Italy - 

we took a ferryboat to Italy, and a train to Rome.

This is the Ponte Vecchio bridge in Florence (and the new dress I bought there!)

We took a day trip to kick, push down, and hold up the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

At the Trevi Fountain in Rome.

We went to the Colosseum multiple times, but I especially enjoyed it at night.

 

 

 Our last stop before returning to Paris was Nice. 

Adam gave me the perfect going-away present - a book about us! :)

The water felt great and was so clear!

These are just a few of my 1,000 pictures I took while traveling. :) I will post more on Facebook - but don't worry, I won't put them all up!

Stay tuned for more updates from my new fabulous life in Spain!