Last update of Spain

The last Sunday has finally come!  I feel like I have been here for years, but I also feel like I haven't been here for long enough!  I really do not want to go, but at least I have a few days more!  Now to talk about my week!

I had my Spanish speech on Monday, and I think I did pretty well!  A few words I stumbled over cause I was quite nervous, but at the end everyone clapped and looked like they understood so I am happy!  It was so nerve wracking at the end though, because once I finished, the teacher told the class 'Everyone has to ask a question (in Spanish) about New Zealand (my speech was about NZ).  A few questions were weird, and they had to re-phrase them, but otherwise I did well!

I made Torrijos with Maria, and they were really good!  Torrijos are basically bread dipped in milk (that has sugar), then dipped in egg, then fried.   I also went to a different town, Redondela, where people were making long flower carpets.  It is actually a tradition, they do it every year, and they start at around 12:30am, and the parents draw the outline of the image, and then all of the young children place the flowers and bark in the outlines.  They also use coloured salt with the flowers.

I went to Corujo, the small town where my family has a beach has, and we made a BBQ!  And when I say we, it was only Irlanda, Alba and I (with a little help from Mario), making it!  The parents left it up to us, and it was soo hard to get the fire started! There was a lot of smoke, and I had to borrow some glasses that were really small and I looked soooo bad!  But we cooked everything decently, and it was nice and yummy to eat! I also went surfing with Alba, and it was my first time ever surfing!  It is a lot harder than it looks, but I can nearly stand up!  I was using a small board so when I go again it will (hopefully) be easier to stand up!

I took a small boat with Maria to the Isla Cangas, a small town maybe 30 minutes away from Vigo.  You can drive, but it takes a lot longer!  The town is really beautiful, it has a lot of old buildings, and there are lots of people in the streets, lots of cafeterias and things like that!  If I could pick a town to live in, Cangas would be in my top 5!  Today I went to the beach, and it was so hot! It has been around 30 degrees or 28 degrees here, and I am so close to dying of heat stroke I swear!

I am really going to miss Spain, my friends and family here and everything that I have been doing, like my ukulele lessons, skating, being able to Portugal by car, and just how lovely everything is here! I am definitely going to try and save up so I can come again, because I just love it here so much!

Anyways, here are the photos! If I have any time between my flights on Sunday, I will post the photos of everything I will do this week, but I don't think there will be much time for writing an essay like this!

These are some of the finished flower carpets we saw

With the fam

 

On the boat to Cangas

These are the kids putting the salt and flowers in the outlines

 

There was a small fiesta where the flower carpets were, and we bought some cotton candy!

Eating the cotton candy :o

More flower carpets

They have boxes and boxes of petals to use for the carpets

Surfing with my cousin Alba, sexy wetsuit I know

Doing the BBQ, the smoke was horrible

Us nearly drowning

Me trying to stand up

This was when I could go from lying down to sitting on my knees, it was a big moment for me :p

On the way to Cangas

Chilling in the boat

Having breakfast in Cangas (Above)

Eating the BBQ

More surfing

My attempt at standing

So that is it from me, thanks to everyone that has been reading this and the people that have kept in contact with me while I have been here :)  I will be seeing all of you guys soon, and I am coming with a lot of presents!  I put everything in my suitcase to see if I could actually close it, and I can, and I still have heaps of space! More shopping here I come! 

So goodbye from me, this is the end of my adventure in Spain :)

Second to last update!

Only two more uploads (including this one) left for me to do!  So you guys won´t have to read many more paragraphs of randomness.

This week has been pretty casual, just been going to school and walking around, because I am now able to walk around knowing where I am, which was a lot better than the first month when I got on the wrong bus and was bussing around for an hour.   But school was so boring, because now it is around the final exams are coming up, so I have had hardly any classes.  But, because the teachers STILL think I don´t know any Spanish, so they never tell me when we don´t actually have class, so I am stuck hanging around near school for around 2 hours, which is not fun because there is nothing around the school!  But it´s ok, I have a new person talking to me now!  He moved here from South America, and he saw me sitting down before school and just started talking to me.  So now I have someone to talk to every morning!

And I got to see some horses the other day.  This doesn´t actually sound that exciting but I got to feed them and they nearly ate my hands.  On another note, my Spanish has gotten so much better.  I can speak to randoms in the street and it feels really natural, and everyone talks quite fast, but now it is normal, like talking to everyone in English at home. Quite a few people have commented on how good my Spanish is now, because they talk to me normally and are surprised when I can respond at a normal pace, because before it would take me a while to respond, but now it doesn´t!  Of course I am not fluent, because there are words I still don´t know, but I can understand 90% of what everyone is saying.  And sometimes it is really weird because someone will talk to me in Spanish, and I understand what they are talking about and what they mean and everything like that, but I can´t translate it into English.  I don´t really understand why but that is what is happening!

Yesterday (Saturday), we spent all day  at Mario´s football tournament, and he made it into the finals!  Their team didn´t win sadly, but it was pretty fun to get into it.  Because we all got so into it, shouting and screaming when they got close to the goals and everything like that!  Afterwards, we went to the bowling alley, and it was really cool!  I came 3rd out of 5 people, so at least I didn´t get last!  We finished around 12:30am, so Maria, Irlanda and I went on a really small walk so I could see how the night life is here, but there weren't many people because it was too EARLY! People usually start coming out around 1 or 2, I couldn`t believe it!  I was about to drop dead and people were getting ready to go out!

And other than that not much else has happened, my family and I are trying to find time to do things cause it is so hard with all the exams going on and everything like that!  So now for the photos, I only have a few this time!

These were my horse friends that liked to try and eat my hands.

I don't actually know why I have these, but I saw them in a store and I thought you guys would enjoy them.

These are from the football match

This is at the bowling alley.

Because it was so late they turned off the lights and it was all glow in the dark! 

These were the girls I was with at the bowling alley. 

I haven't put many photos of my host sister up so the person on the left is Irlanda, my host sister :)

And that is all, so one more update after this and then I am off!  So little time, and I am definitely not looking forward to having to speak English, cause I am so used to speaking in Spanish now! 

Hope everyone in NZ is having a good time back at home!  You will be seeing me pretty soon...

20 days to gooooooo

Howdy yaaaall

Only 20 days left for me here in España! Had an adventure filled week, coming back from England, having a day in Portugal, and fiestaring around Vigo during the weekend! 

England was exactly like you would expect: Rainy.  It rained pretty bad on Monday, so sadly we weren't able to go to many places, but on Tuesday it was a bit better so we went around.  It was pretty hard on Tuesday because Vicente and I went to get all of the car parts, and trying to talk from Spanish to English and then back to Spanish and then AGAIN back to English was horrific.  Especially because the words were very difficult to translate cause they were about cars, and I don't even know about cars in English.....  We went to the 'bullring', if anyone has heard of it!  It was great because there were people handing out a new type of chocolate for free, and coca cola was handing out free 'coke zero' sample cans with vouchers for a free bottle!  And because there were so many of these people, I got heaps of free food and drink, and about 7 vouchers for coke :p  They can only be used in the UK though, so I guess they aren't really that helpful..

In England I also went to the air force museum so that was pretty snazzy. Some of the planes were really huge, which surprised me because they were meant to be the stealthy fighter jets but they were massive :-/.   I also got a photo with a police man which I'll put beloow.

It was a lot easier coming back from England than it was getting in.  I didn't get stopped and asked a billion questions which was nice!  Because we flew from England to Portugal, we spent most of the day in Portugal!  We went to the library that J.K. Rowling based the library in Harry Potter movies on, and it was actually a lot smaller than what I expected.  It was pretty cool, and I bought a comic in Spanish, the first comic in the Tintín series.  So it was pretty cool to have a look around in there.  After that we just walked around Portugal and saw all of the old tiled buildings, and a river that ran through the city. 

And when we came back on Wednesday I decided to take a nap cause I was real tired, around 7pm, and a nap turned into a 15 hour sleep, I woke up at 10 the next morning!  I was so out of it, I didn´t know what day it was or what hour it was, and because I woke up so late I didn´t have to go to school!  I can´t remember what I did on Thursday so I guess it wasn´t too exciting!

I can now skate without a handrail, kinda! I am still pretty bad, but I´m slowly getting better!  I also helped to make a cake, because it was my auntie Erinitas birthday!  It is called ´´la tarta de la abuela¨ or ¨Grandmother´s cake¨ in English.  It is really easy to make, only some biscuits, milk with whiskey, chocolate and a cream ish thingy.  All of us helped to make it so it was pretty decent. 

AAAnd finally today we went to a small party that Mario and Irlanda´s school was holding, and there was soo much food I think I am going to explode!  We were there for quite a while, I think around 7 hours, so that´s all I did today.

Photo tiiime

Above and below two planes from the air force museum

This is the mall we went to in England (inside and outside)

Some old buildings I saw which I thought looked cool, I was in the car though as it was raining so the photos aren´t too clear.

I finally got a photo with a police man! He was really cool, he let me wear his hat and even held lucky cat for a photo!

They have a store like Kmart in England (and Spain) as well called tiger, and these are a few things I found while I was there.

This is the library that the Harry Potter one is based on, it is completly filled with books.

These are some of the tiled buildings in Portugal.

Some other photos from Portugal.

This is a statue in the bullring mall area.

The hotel I stayed in in England.

Us all making the cake

I fell over more than once trying to skate

I can't see which video is which, one is of me skating the other day, and the other is of me eating octopus for the first time cause turns out Maria took a video! So if you don't believe that I ate it, here is proof!

That's all for this week, only have 20 days left so I will be seeing everyone soon!  Hope everyone at home is doing well and enjoying the cold weather!