SPAIN UPDATE by Mia

Lately we have fallen into a nice routine. We have school, sport, and activities all figured out, and we do it all without the car. A typical day is school, eat, laze around, get some exercise, eat again, sleep. We eat a lot.... We have been getting fondue chocolate and strawberries from the grocery store and eating them after 'siesta meal' which is kind of like a really late lunch.

School has been pretty interesting, but manageable. There have been a few weird instances when I realized that when my math teacher kept saying "pee" he actually meant "pi", and things like that. It makes sense because Spanish is a really phonetic language so they say wifi "weefee" and sound out the name of the singer LMFAO (its an anagram). They say "limfow" instead.

The school takes us on tons of field trips! Zander had two this week and I have one tomorrow. They are usually small, but I'm going to Granada tomorrow and there is a trip to Portugal later. I'm to late to sign up for that one, but I'll get a few days off from school anyway. Zander went all the way to Cordoba last week for a night. He came home with some interesting stories that I am not allowed to tell you....

For exercise, we play padel at the sport center. Padel is like a mix between squash and tennis because it is a smaller court and you can use the walls, but you use tennis balls and the court is like a mini tennis court. Sometimes I think we get more exercise laughing at each other and ourselves than from the actual game, but racket sports have always been that way for me! We go there almost every day, so we are really familiar with the lady at the desk at the sports center. We don't even really have to ask to book a court anymore, she knows us! She is really nice and she's the only one who ever works the desk, so we know her really well.

Kayley and Sarah are doing a flamenco dancing class at the cultural center
on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that's when we play padel. Most of the other days we play soccer on our street or in the plaza, depending upon if we have a ball or not. We have already lost one over our neighbor's fence and we can't get it back because no one lives in that house. We got a cheap new ball at the mini bazar off the square, and then lost it over another locked fence at the sport center. We just got it back today, and hopefully nothing else will happen to it!

Its really weird to live in such a small town, though! Every time I go outside the house I see someone I know. The smallness is also nice because it means we can walk absolutely everywhere, so we only need to rent a car for the weekend trips around Spain, and to Morocco. Its really weird to live in Spain and I am starting to realize how difficult it is to do anything if you can't communicate easily! I really hope I become fluent after all of this, and I will never take my language for granted again!

So in summary, here is my day:
Get up at 7 am, get ready, leave for school at 8am sharp (I refuse to go earlier, it takes exactly 15 min to get to school and I don't like being early), school starts at 8:15 and ends at 2:45, after school Zander and I walk home (sometimes via the bakery for some fried fat covered in chocolate, but only on a bad day ;)), get home, eat like starving people, then eat some more, laze around and do homework if necessary, exercise, come home (sometimes via the grocery store, you would be surprised how fast we go through food), eat dinner, laze around (watch one of the Godfather movies daddy downloaded on to the iPad. The first or the second are the best, never the third. You know a movie is bad when you are laughing at the tragic ending because of horrible acting), and, finally, get to sleep by 10 or 11. SLEEP AND REPEAT :)