At least now I have a giant vocabulary.

Well, the exam I thought would never end is finally over.  On Thursday we went to Granada to take the first part, the oral exam, and then on Friday morning we did the rest of it - four hours of reading and listening comprehension, writing and grammar, with a measly 30 minute break somewhere in the middle.  We took it pretty easy while we were there, treated ourselves to nice dinners twice, and went on a hunt for the perfect shoes.  On Saturday we had much needed massages scheduled but the guy who was supposed to give them to us never showed up after we got up early and went out of our way to find the place in a city that neither of us can get around in very easily.  But massage or not, we are under a lot less stress than before.  I have almost all my work done for the quarter and much more time to breathe.  Kate has resumed her Sudoku addiction and I have been enjoying just lying in bed reading.

Rather than going on excursions and having any sort of fun for the last five weeks, I have spent the majority of my waking hours at our school.  It's a good thing it's a lovely place to be, as you'll see from the photos.


Here's the outside of our school.  It's a renovated 16th century palace.  I robbed this photo from the school's website.  You should check it out:  http://www.abadatescuela.com/school.htm.  I have translated a few of the texts on the site (the good ones, of course) and I have a testimonial there in both English and Spanish.  There are several other cool photos on the site, some of which are from my trip here last year.


This is the patio in the school as seen from the front door.


This is the view from the other side.


And yet another view from beneath the stairwell.  You get the idea: it's pretty.


If you take your first right when you enter the school you end up in this hallway leading to the sala de internet on the left, our classrooms on the right, and the baño at the end.


Here's Kate in the sala de internet, where we spend way too much time.  This was taken about a week before the test.  She's looking a little stressed.


My classroom.


Oh, the marvelous green chalkboard where all the grammatical concepts that are now burned into my brain were born.


Even the bathroom is pretty (sorry about the flash in the mirror.)


If you go back out onto the patio and cross to the other side of it, you find these big dangerous stairs that lead to the cantina, a cave-like structure where the inhabitants of the palace used to store olive oil, wine, and other staples in big vats.


As you near the bottom you can see one of the vase-like structures used to store liquids.


They are almost as tall as me.


Here's one view of the entire cantina.


And another view.  The school occasionally uses this space to host concerts or art exhibitions.


Speaking of art exhibitions, here's an example of the paintings that were recently displayed here.  If I had 600€ and a way to transport this giant portrait of Kafka (3X4 feet) I would have done so in a heartbeat.


This is the school's lovely stairway and phone hub as seen from the patio.  If you have ever received a phone call from any of us, we were probably sitting on that bench while making it... or pacing back and forth trying to stay warm since the patio isn't covered.


If you ascend the charming stairway this is what you see.


If you look up you can also see this enchanting painted dome.


This is the upstairs gallery.  Notice the pleasing, warmly-colored art hanging all around.  Just in time for winter it has been replaced with a bleak, modern sculpture collection in which every piece is the color of rust.  Blah.


This is the library where I have spent countless hours these last few weeks.  In fact, I am sitting in the red chair on the right as I type this.  Usually the only reason I even go upstairs is to visit the library, although there are other classrooms that are seldom used, and the teachers' office.

Okay, so it wasn't exactly true that I haven't been on a single excursion.  The last week of my prep class my friend Farid showed up in Úbeda, having just returned from a vacation home to Algeria, and offered to take Kate and I on a little drive around the province.  Needing to get the hell out of town, we took him up on it.  First we had coffee in Jaén and then we went driving around until we happened upon this tiny little village called Los Villares.


There we found some friendly horses that gladly accepted the plants I fed them.


This horse kept trying to bite Farid's fingers, and Farid kept letting him try.  It was scary.


Making baby-talk at the animals, as usual.  Hey, at least I did it in Spanish.


After Los Villares we drove a little further until we found an abandoned house just asking to be explored.  Kate was only pretending to be grumpy (for once) - we were actually both in very good moods that day.


This is where we parked the car so that we could go trespass.  Fall in the province of Jaén: pretty...


The house was situated alongside a little brooke that we just stared at for a while.  I think here I was giving Kate my expert opinion on something or other.


Trees, blue sky, deep breaths, oh yeah.


Farid referred to this as "being like Tom," as in the cat from Tom and Jerry.


Here's Kate expressing her astonishment at the fact that this fig leaf is bigger than her face.


Homies.


Amigos.


On the way back to Úbeda we stopped at this overlook.  Since Farid was sitting in his car being yelled at on the phone by some girl, Kate and I took his camera and did ruined the view by smashing our big faces into it.


Here's the view without our faces.


Kate enjoying some local flora.


And finally, I had to include this because it's astonishing.  See all those little cards with words on them stuck to the wall, along the baseboard and around the door?  Those are the flashcards I used to study for the exam.  Yes, all of that is in my brain now.

That is all for now.  Sorry for the much delayed entry.  Between being busy and having technical difficulties it has been a chore to get this thing up.  I'll try to be better, I promise.  Byeeeeee!

Barely enough time to breathe

You'll only be wondering why I haven't written if you are one of the lucky people who has miraculously avoided my complaining to you about the exam I'm preparing for.  The exam is called DELE (Diploma de español como lengua extranjera - or Spanish as a Foreign Language Diploma), but Kate and I have begun referring to it as "Duele" which means "It hurts."  It's the highest certification you can get in the world for Spanish as a second language, so as you can imagine, it's not real easy to obtain.  We spend the majority of our waking hours (the majority of our hours, actually, since we both have insomnia) either studying or in class and have developed what our teachers refer to as "El síndome de DELE" - all we talk about is complex grammatical concepts and are constantly depressed by the inconstant results of our practice tests.  The test is November 24th, and although I wish I had more time to prepare I'm glad it will be over soon - I don't think I can take much more of this.

Since so much of my time has been devoted to studying and I haven't gone on any interesting excursions for a few weeks, I decided to take pictures of our apartment so that you can see how we live.  I left it messy for the photos (not for realism, because it's usually pretty clean) to show how little time we've had for making bed, putting away laundry, doing dishes, etc.

Thursday night:

This is what we do every night, even on the weekends.


DELE is starting to affect Kate's ability to dress herself.

And just about every other night there comes a point where Kate and I just can't take it anymore and we turn into four-year-olds.  Those are the moments that call for steamrolling.  In case you're not aware, steamrolling is the act of lying down next to someone who is also lying down and then rolling over them.  This often causes us to laugh hysterically as Kate screams, "STEAMROLLER!" or the Spanish version "¡APISONADORA!"  I think our other roommate, Jackie, is beginning to question our sanity.


It is still possible to achieve artful self-photography while steamrolling.


STEAMROLLER!!!  This image is probably the best representation of our entire DELE experience.

Friday night:

This is how I feel about the exam.  Time for a study break.


What do you think, Kate?




The blur says it all.  When Kate is laughing so hysterically that we can no longer get a clear picture there's only one cure:


Homemade French fries cooked in olive oil and BUTTER!!!  Kate told me to stop being a kitchen nazi and let her stir them for once.

It takes a special kind of talent to sing, dance, and cook simultaneously.







I told her the fries weren't done but she didn't believe me so she decided to try one.  I also told her it was going to be hot and burn her mouth but she didn't believe me then either.  So here she is, burning her mouth while trying to munch on a fresh-out-of-the-pan underdone french fry.


With a flick of the wrist I turned them into cheese fries and we devoured them right there on the kitchen floor.  Then we had hot chocolate (made by melting Lindor milk chocolate balls and Dove dark chocolate squares into whole milk) for desert.  Yes, we may just suffer from cardiac arrest before we even make it to this godforsaken exam.

Saturday:
While the rest everyone else went on an 8-mile hike in Sierra de Cazorla, I decided I'd stay home and get some studying and other work done for school. I went to the school library and despite the extreme anxiety it produced in me, forced myself to study.  I got about an hour into it, looked at the pile of work that I still had to do, put my head down on the giant Spanish dictionary before me and bawled my eyes out.  I decided then that it was time to do what several people had already suggested:  Take the day off.


Here's how I spent the rest of the day; laying in bed, listening to soothing music.

Oh, and I also took the pictures of the apartment that I promised several paragraphs ago:


This is our front door as seen from inside the apartment.  To the right is a mirror and a table covered with magazines and books in various languages.  Underneath you can see the bags of trash that desperately need to be taken out.  To the left is the door that leads into the living room that we hardly ever spend any time in.


Off to the right there is a door that leads into a vacant bedroom.  There are 5 bedrooms total in our apartment.


Still the living room, just from the other side.


This is the balcony off the living room from which you can see our street, Avenida de la Libertad.


Facing west; from here you can see the Bazar Oriental (bottom right), the glorified dollar store where we get a lot of the random things that we need.  Across the little side street from that, with the green and yellow sign, is Mas y Mas - our grocery store.


Facing east: We never really go down this way so I'm not really familiar with it.  I do know that in this direction there's a spa where you can get a massage for half the price it would cost in the States, an ice cream shop with good caramel gelato, a sports pub with good calamari, and a Chinese restaurant that gives out free cheap jewelry instead of fortune cookies.


After you walk in the front door you take a left and find yourself at the beginning of our loooooooooooooooooooong hallway.  The first door on the left is the kitchen.  The window after that provides a view into the laundry room that is attached to the kitchen, the second door is the blue bathroom, and the third is the little tiny cell of a bedroom that I lived in last year.


We'll take the first left into the kitchen.  It's usually much more sparkly than this, but I was having a bad day and didn't feel like doing dishes.


If you look out the laundry room window you can see the inner patio of the apartment building.  Looking up you can get an idea of the weather and what kind of underwear the neighbors wear.


Looking down you can bitterly envy the people who are lucky enough to have a clothes dryer.


Venturing further down the hall you arrive at the blue bathroom, the only one with a functioning shower, although you're lucky if you get any hot water.  Yes, that is a bidet next to the toilet.  And yes, the garbage can is in the bidet.


When you reach the end of the long hall you turn left to arrive at our bedrooms.  The first door on the left is the brown bathroom (too boring and dirty for photo publishing), and the second door is Kate's room.  The first one on the right is my room and the second is Jackie's.  I didn't take pictures of my roommate's rooms because I didn't think they'd want to give you all the impression that we are disorderly.  Honest, the house is usually clean, we've just been busy.


Here's my less-than-orderly room as seen from the hall.  As you can see, I have a sliding glass door that opens onto the terrace.


This is what it looks like from the terrace.  I was too lazy to take more pictures of the terrace, so if you need to remember what it looks like there are pictures in my second blog.

Finally, my roomies came home and rescued me from my coma.  We got all purty and went to the best flamenco performance I've ever seen.  The singer was my voice teacher and the dancers were the people who own the flamenco school here in Úbeda.


So there you have it.  I'm stressed out!  Y'all should write once in a while.  All this stress makes me homesick.  Also, several people have asked what me we are doing for Thanksgiving.  Here's my four-part answer.  1. Spanish people don't celebrate Thanksgiving.  2. And even if they did, I still wouldn't because I'm bah-humbug like that.  For several years now my friend Kathryn and I have referred to Thanksgiving as "Give Smallpox to the Natives Day."  3. Even if we did celebrate Thanksgiving we probably wouldn't be able to find all the yummy stuff that Americans general feast on.  And furthermore, we don't even have an oven.  4. The DELE exam is the day after Thanksgiving, so needless to say, there's only one thing we're going to be doing:  Freaking out.

The end.