Pictures...finally!

Hello! Not much is new over here in Spain. Except I've been stuck with this same cold for about 2 weeks now! It just won't go away & most of the students in our school are sick as well. Something must be going around. My host mom keeps trying to take me to the doctor, but I tell her I'm fine it's just a cold. I am getting better, just slowly. Her daughter thinks it's funny, but agrees with me and tries to tell her mom I don't need a medico.

I also think it's funny I've been here almost 4 weeks now & I just discovered we have a pet rabbit! I knew we had 2 dogs, but the rabbit was new. My host mom told me I could watch a movie in their living room, so I went in & discovered we had a balcony. So naturally I wanted to go out and check out the view. It was then I saw the litter box & the rabbit hopping around on the balcony. I think it's funny after a month here, I'm still discovering things like that!

Classes are getting slightly easier & I have fallen into a schedule which has made the time go by a lot faster! I can't believe it's 2 weeks until midterms already!! I recently decided to do 2 more things to get involved and learn more while I'm here. The first was getting an intercambio. Mine is a girl who is 20 and lives here in Valencia. She is studying English, so we will meet once a week and speak English for half hour & then Spanish for half hour. I think it will be fun to meet someone my age who lives & will be great practice for my conversational skills! We meet for the first time next week, so it will be interesting to see how it goes. The other thing I decided to do was partake in a Service Learning Internship. There are many different areas to choose from like magazines and hospitals. I chose a local school though - how appropriate for my other major! I'm not sure exactly what we will be doing, but it will be 2 hours a week for 10 weeks in a classrooms with kids 13-18. We meet with our teacher next week as well. I'm really excited about this because I think it'll be a great opportunity to see what the education system is like here in Spain compared to what I am learning about at home.

Today we took a class trip to Ciudad Fallera. This is an area of Valencia dedicated to preparing for the huge celebration of Fallas. The celebration is 4 days in honor of St. Joseph. There are parades and fireworks, along with all sorts of other events. The event isn't until March they start pre-celebration events in February. This part of the city is where the artists live and work all year round on the statues they build for the parade. They are huge & elaborate, all around incredible! We saw the museum which housed some old statues, as well we got to see some works in progress for this years up & coming celebration. It was really neat to see & realize how important this celebration is to their culture!

Now the title of this post - Pictures...finally is because I finally uploaded and organized all the photos I've taken thus far. This link is on the right hand side of this page. It will take you to my photobucket page. On there you can pick album to look at (left hand side). Right now there are 2 albums up, but I will keep adding as I go along. Enjoy!

Adios. Kristin