Day Trip to Segovia

There are quite a few neat little cities within day trip distance from Madrid, so we headed out to Segovia yesterday!  I haven't put a video on here for a while, so I figured why not switch it up a little?  Enjoy!

Disaster

I usually meet with my Spanish tutor three times a week.  Due to the fact that I'm a Spanish novice, typically I say or write something that she finds hilarious :).  This is compounded by the fact that sometimes she'll randomly choose three of my vocab flashcards and have me write a sentence using all of them.

So this afternoon, I was working on a sentence using the words "leg, spoon, and wash."  What usually (read "always") happens is I think of a sentence in English, then I translate it into Spanish.  The sentence I came up with was, "After the mother washes the dishes, she sees a spoon next to the child's leg."

If you can come up with a better one, leave it in the comments and maybe I'll use it next time :).

Anyways, my tutor was watching me write the sentence in Spanish when she throws her hands up in the air and exclaims:

"When you translate from English into Spanish word by word, is a disaster!"

So, I about died laughing :).

Keep in mind that she's not insulting me, she's just speaking in general terms.  Spanish and English sentence structure is different, so anyone learning one language after growing up speaking the other is probably going to have some trouble with it.

We discussed the sentence after we finished laughing and she helped me form it into a Spanish sentence. Here's the result:  

"Despues de fregar la madre los platos, vee una cuchara al lado de la pierna de la niña."

My spell check is going crazy with that sentence :).  

I know that we haven't been studying the language long enough to be anywhere near proficient, but I'm more impatient than I care to admit.  I just want to know it all now.  

So, I've been learning to lean on Jesus more in order to give myself grace and practice patience.  Otherwise I would get extremely stressed out and extremely frustrated.  Which isn't at all a good way to represent Jesus and bring glory to God.  So, probably I'll be getting refined in that area for a while :).

Mission: Hairscut.

When we left Lincoln, it was obviously so difficult leaving our family and friends behind.  But, it was also tough leaving some of the professional relationships behind.  

For example, my dentist is not here, my doctor is not here, and my hairstylist is not here.  Fortunately, none of us have required the service of a dentist or doctor at this point.  But the hair just keeps on growing.

Thankfully, Jenee had located a stylist by the time I was really needing a cut.  So I scheduled an appointment with her guy.  

When I arrived, we managed to communicate the basics with my limited Spanish and his limited English.  I watched him like a hawk for a while, then when he started asking questions I told him, "Eres el profesional."  Which he seemed to like :).

And it worked out.  I've never seen my hair this straight, but it's kinda fun.  And when I'm feeling lazy I can always let it be it's naturally curly self.  So yeah, found a stylist in Spain.  

Mission: Accomplished.

Mercado de la Paz & Plaza de Colón

I was checking out the Mercado de la Paz this morning and couldn't remember if I had shown you all what a market looks like yet.  So, I started snapping some pictures.

entering the market

beans & dried goods

gorgeous shellfish

fruit & vegetable stand

cheese!

Then I explored the neighborhood a little before ending up at Plaza de Colón, which is named in honor of Christopher Columbus.  Apparently, his name in Spanish is Cristóbal Colón.  Who knew?  The national library is south of here as is the archeology museum.

The huge Spanish flag caught my eye.

Sadly, the gardens were being renovated.

the national library

the Christopher Columbus monument

Life. Recently.

Last week, we had the honor of hosting some fun visitors from LBC.  This year's USB team experienced a glimpse of our lives here and they brought goodies and encouragement from home, which was super sweet!  I think I can speak for all of us in saying that we loved having them here and getting to spend some good times with them :).

From our team's perspective, it was also really neat to experience the process of preparing for them to come.  We got to see a lot of our strengths in action, some areas where we can improve, and it was just really neat to watch God show up in our lives as well as in the lives of our visitors.

It's been pretty rough trying to get back into the swing of things though.  My first meeting with my tutor post USB was brutal.  I started trying to speak Spanish to her and she looked at me with complete and utter horror :).  It's funny now, but those were a tough couple of hours!  In order to not have a repeat of that today, I tried to get some intense studying in this weekend.

It was so hard to focus though!  On studying, that is.  I could easily focus on anything else.

For example, I was obsessing about getting some flowers to put on my desk.  I don't know, apparently it's easier to study when pretty flowers are present?  I finally just hopped on the metro and went down to Plaza de Tirso de Molina.  There's a big plant/flower market there where the prices are extremely reasonable.  So, I picked up some flowers, a rosemary plant, and a couple other plants for Nikki.

At home, I got the flowers happy and settled in some water.  Then I tried to hit the books and flash cards again.  Next thing I know, my mind is drifting off into dreamy visions of Chinese food.  What?  Really?  Yes.  Really.  I expressed my frustrations to Ashley, and we headed over to Plaza de España for some Chinese food.

Unfortunately, it got devoured before a picture could be taken, but here's a picture of the menu :).

Then I was able to study for a while, and my tutoring session today went much better.

We'd still be thankful for prayers though.  It'll be interesting to see how life looks different after USB, now that we don't have that to prepare for and look forward to.

Also pray for the USB folks.  They're home now and probably not having much fun with jetlag.  Hang in there guys!

Residency Card = Attained

On Wednesday, four of us took the train down to Malaga in order to pick up our residency cards.  Nikki and I had been wanting to take the train rather than fly, mostly just for the experience.  Turns out the price for tickets was about the same and it doesn't take that much longer from a cumulative standpoint.

Here's the deal.  I love taking the train!  

- You wouldn't believe how much legroom there is.

- There are no violent takeoffs and landings.

- There are no restrictions on the fluids you bring on board.  I carried a water bottle and had my hairspray with me!

- You can watch the lovely views of the countryside going by :).

The train is moving so fast that it was tough to get a good picture of the scenery.  It just turned out to be a blur.  However, the video turned out ok, so I thought some of you might enjoy seeing Spain from a train window :).

I was able to get off the train feeling all relaxed, which I haven't experienced probably ever when flying.  It was quite nice.  Pretty much I'm taking the train anytime I need to travel in Europe unless there are significant price or time considerations in effect. 

And, we have our residency cards!  So, we're official now!  Therefore, it was a pretty successful trip, in my opinion :).

Protest March on Fuencarral

Yesterday, I was out and about when I heard some noise that sounded intriguing.  Now, I know that I live in a city and it's pretty much always noisy.  But, you kind of get used to typical city noise and you don't really notice it much after a while.

This, however, was not typical city noise.  It turned out to be some kind of a huge protest that had shut traffic down on Fuencarral, which is the street that serves as the line between the Malasaña and Chueca barrios (neighborhoods).  Fuencarral is always pretty busy, so I guess it's one of the logical choices if you want to hold a protest march.

I think this one was about jobs and the economy, based on some of the signs people were carrying.  Don't quote me on that though.  We haven't covered protests in language study yet :).