The week and a weekend in Granada!

Let' see, quite a few things to report!

First of all, got the internet up and running in my house so I should be easy to get a hold of on skype if anyone should so desire! and i am posting pictures as we speak. ...although the process may take about 10 hours, the internet isn't what you would call speedy.

I had a good week at school with my little monsters. Monday was the first day of the second language assistant to arrive at Orippo, a German girl named Lydia. Yes, she is German but is here as an English teacher. She studied in the States for two years, so she basically speaks better English than I do. Unfortunately for Lydia, she was placed with the worst teacher in the whole school, a crazy woman who is always yelling and screaming at her students. By the end of the school day poor Lydia was in tears. My partner teacher Noelia (my only source of sanity at this school) told her that she would change her schedule so she would not have to be with this particular teacher anymore. Tuesday Noelia had a meeting in Sevilla so I had to teach my class with out her support and I was very nervous but it actually went very well. Her class had a sub, which was the husband of the principal who normally does one on one help with students that are behind. Luckily he is very good with the kids so since he was there they were more or less under control. He later told Noelia that after observing my class he was very impressed with all of the vocabulary my kids knew! I have been working on food vocabulary and "the supermarket". We have been working on the same vocab for about a week so that day I had them make posters of their own super markets and categorize all of the foods into their appropriate groups, ie apples with fruit carrots with vegetables chicken with meat etc. I think the teachers had kind of given up on these kids learning any English but during the project the kids were calling out questions like "Los apples son en el grupo de fruit no??" So i scored major points, yay. We have also been doing the parts of the body, so on Wednesday I taught then "The Hokey Pokey", also a great success haha.

Thursday we headed out for a weekend in Granada. We took the 4pm train right after Jennifer was done with school and by 8 we were settled in our hostal ready to go out and explore the city. I take credit for our hostal because I booked it online, it was so cool! We were on the top floor and it had a patio with the most amazing view of the city. We could see the cathedral and all of the rooftops of the city, que guay (how cool). We took the advice of the dueno of the hostal and headed to a nearby tapas bar. Best part about Granada: At the tapas bars, with every drink you buy, you get on tapa for FREE. It is amazing. After we had our fill of tapas, we headed to an Irish pub recommended in our beloved guidebook. There we met a group of Spaniards who offered to show us around and to take us to their favorite tapas place the next night. During the day on Friday we went to up to the Alambra which was the palace of the Moorish kings when they had control of Spain. There are huge gardens there and it is up on a hilltop so it has a great view. Tickets were sold out to take the tour of inside the palace so we just walked around the gardens (this was a big bummer for Jennifer but both Maggie and I had been inside before when we studied here). It was much colder in Granada than we had become used to in Sevilla so then later in the afternoon we headed to a typical tetaria (tea house). We sat on pillows on the floor and ordered several pots of tea and a peach hookah ( 831 peeps: a little different from Indian Summer haha). Then later we met new amigos for some very delicious tapas. The good/dangerous thing about tapas in Granada is in order to make a meal of the free tapas you need to drink about 7 beers. The beers are pretty small, but we were having fun by the end of dinner to say the least. We went to several other bars around town and by 3am we ended up at a very cool discoteca and danced the night away until about 7am. We managed to get ourselves up by noon but by 1:30 when we tried to go to the Cathedral but it was closed for seista as were all of the other tourist spots. But we saw the outside of them, very impressive haha. We caught the 5pm train back to Sevilla Saturday. Today I am resting!

Then next week it all begins again.
I hope all is going well at home. Send me emails!
Beso,
MC