Busy, Busy, Busy

These past two weeks, have been crazy. As you all know, Halloween was last week. Since I am a "cultural ambassador" for these students, the other four assistants and myself were responsible for turning the library into a haunted house. Now anyone that knows me knows I don't really like Halloween, because I never celebrated it as a kid. I have only celebrated Halloween two times, and that was the past two years, because in college, you're lame if you don't dress up and go to the parties. So I thought I would hate to do this, but I actually really enjoyed making the haunted house. We had scary music,carved pumpkins, amazing decorations and made tunnels out of boxes and the kids loved it. Some of the youngers ones were so scared that they had to leave before it was over!

So like most of the other assistants in the program I'm in, I too am giving private English lessons. English is very much in demand here. So, last week I started mine. Once or twice a week, I give lessons to the principal's husband, Victor. She had asked me if I would like to do it and of course I said yes. Most of it is just conversation, but I also make grammar worksheets for him to do for homework and then we go over them at the next lesson. At first, I was really nervous, because I have no teaching experience, just an English mother tongue. But I like it because I can talk about interesting topics like politics, Spain and traveling. Victor works for an airline, so he's been all over the world (someday I wish I can say "I've been all over the world"). His English is actualy really good, he just never has the opportunity to talk to someone for more than 5-10 minutes in English.

This past week was also election day in the states and the following day, Obama was on the cover of many newspapers. I find this interesting because in NY, the president of Spain wouldn't be on the cover of the NY Times (or any other newspaper) after a Spanish election day. I had a few people ask me about what's been going on politically in the U.S. and I love to enlighten them. It's crazy how many Spanish people actually know about our government, whereas I know absolutely nothing about the Spanish government. Maybe now I'll start learning about it since I'll be here for a while.

Last weekend was also another holiday, so I had a four day weekend instead of the usual three day weekend. So I went to Cuenca, a neighboring town, about two hours east of Madrid. It's a very old city and the old part has these "casas colgantes" or hanging houses. The houses don's actually hang off the cliff, but it's still pretty cool. I climbed all the way up to the highest point of the city and the view was breathtaking. Pictures coming soon...