Just had a class of only karaoke in my last class. Not trying to imply anything but the boys didn't win any until I sang with them and then they won every song after that. I might try to put a video up.

It's been raining 5 out of the past 6 days. BOOOOOO!!!!!

 

The Thanksgiving dinner we prepared for some of our Spanish friends. Spaghetti, two completely hand made pizzas and home made chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Everything went decently. We only burned a few cookies that we forgot about while working on the other things. I also might have accidently thrown a pan of cookies across the kitchen.

Day #3 in a row of rain. Here is a link to one of the teachers photos. He has a couple pics of me from the mountains.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12666552@N06/

Happy Thanksgiving everybody! Disfrutalo! (Enjoy it!)

 

Here is a pic of my own tennis racket that I got on Thursday. When I showed up to class the teacher had it for me. 120 euro tennis racket but I will only have to pay 50 euro for it. And even though my shirt says that I have game, I don't. But I will...

here is the new link to my pics.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jamal424

Tennis class was horrible. I took a stop forward after the first class and about 3 steps backwards after the second class. Oh well. It's raining today. Only the second time that is has rained since I've been here. I can't complain about that.

The pics are up but for whatever reason it only loaded maybe 1/4 of the pics. I am having too many problems with webshots so I will try to find another place to post my pics. Hopefully by the end of the week I will get all of the pics up.

So my second tennis class went a whole lot better than the first. I didn’t hit any balls out of the court and into the woods like I did the last time. I think I am finally getting a feel for what I am supposed to be doing. I have another class tonight so we shall see if I am actually learning something.
Friday was the beginning of the camping trip I was talking about. Five teachers from my school, two that used to work at my school when I was here two years ago, Cal and myself were the participants in this adventure. We went to some mountains that are in the next region over, Andalusia, and called Sierra de Segura. In all, the trip took about three hours with the majority of it being us driving through small villages on the way up through the mountains on two-way streets big enough for one car. Upon arrival we quickly noted that we weren’t in Aguilas at the beach anymore. We picked our rooms, settled and ate dinner. Around 1 in the morning, we decided to take our first excursion. We ventured out in the woods that were right on the other side of a stream that ran beside our house. Needless to say, we got lost on our way back. We spent probably about 20 minutes just roaming around trying to find our way back. It was pretty funny because we could see the lights from our house but couldn’t get back to it. I took a couple videos of the night adventure but I am not going to post them because everything said is in Spanish and you can only see something every now and then because we only had 2 lights. Once we made it back, we just chilled out and eventually went to bed.
Saturday was our big day. We got up and had a big breakfast in preparation for our hike. We headed out around 11 or 12 in the cars to a spot that was closer to the particular area we were going to be hiking. We parked the cars on the side of the road and began the hike. The hike up took about 2 ½ hours to reach the top of the mountain. The views along the way were incredible. If I have enough time I will put up my pictures today or tomorrow. They said the area we went to has the most greenery in the entire south of Spain. Once at the top we chilled and had lunch. The vultures noticed our presence and kept flying around and checking us out. When it was time to head back down, three guys who were familiar with the area decided to take a different route back that would take four hours. The rest of us returned the same way that we came. Once we made it back down someone finally had coverage on their cell phone and got a call from the other guys saying that they got lost and were heading to a different town that they found. One of the teachers headed to go pick them up and about 90 minutes later everybody was back at the house. At the end of the day the three guys who went on the other route walked/hiked around 30 kilometers and the rest of us did 20 kilometers, which is around 12 miles I think.
Sunday was our chill day. We got up, ate breakfast, packed, cleaned and then drove to the next village to see this museum that was an old house typical of what the people in that area lived in in the past. After that we headed out. We stopped at a restaurant to eat and watch the last Formula1 race of the season. I think that if Fernando Alonso, a famous Spanish driver, won or came in 2nd place he would win be number one for the entire season. He lost. After that it was back on the road to continue down the mountain and back on the highway to Aguilas.
Everybody had a great time and enjoyed the time out in nature. It was also good to see some old friends who aren’t at the school anymore. I think everybody was ready to get back to the warmth of Aguilas. In the pictures you will see that the weather was incredible. Very hard to believe it was the middle of November and we were walking up a mountain in t-shirts and sweating. Good times

I just booked my flight to Morocco for the first weekend in December!! I'm going to the Motherland.

We also may be getting internet today so I might start calling everybody soon.

Tomorrow I'm heading to the mountains with a group of teachers from school and Cal. It should be pretty interesting and cold.

As of three hours ago, I am a legal immigrant in Spain for the next 365 days.

 

Yep, this is where I live

Finally got the Granada pics loaded and they took forever. There aren't any descriptions because I have 24 mins left on my battery so they will come later.
http://travel.webshots.com/album/578945299fWYiHg

So the first tennis lesson didn't go so well, at least in my mind. Even though it was the first time I had really picked up a tennis racket, I feel that I should be halfway decent. I am far from it. I felt like Barry Bonds out there because I hit a decent amount of my balls completely out of the court and they will never be seen again. This whole concept of learning to play a new sport is going to take some getting used to. I have to make myself remember that I don't know what I'm doing and that I haven't been playing for years. It was my first day and I was as hard on myself as I am when I play basketball. I did have fun though and I will get better.

Here are a couple things that I have been meaning the bring up and I haven't. First off, the Daylight Savings over here happened this past weekend so now I am only 5 hours ahead of the Eastern time zone. Secondly, I have been talking with some teachers about taking tennis lessons. My classes begin tonight, so by the time I return home I will be coming back as the black Rafa Nadal.

So here is the rundown on our trip to Granada this past weekend. Once we began to search for a hostel to stay in, we quickly found out that apparently everybody travels to Granada when there is a long weekend. There weren’t any hostels that we could book. So Thursday night we started looking into hotels. We found one and booked it and within 2 minutes they were calling us back to say there was an error and that they didn’t actually have the room. At the exact same moment I was talking to one of my friends at dinner that lives there and she told us that we could just stay at her place even though she was going to be in Aguilas for the weekend.
So we head out at 6:45 am on our way. As soon as we get to the bus station in Lorca, the next town over where we are catching the bus, 3 cops approach us and ask for our passports. In the 14 previous months that I have spent in Spain, I have never had a cop ask for my passport or any type of identification. So of course we don’t have our passports with us so they took our drivers licenses and called them in. Everything was fine of course and they left. Two hours later we are in Granada and exploring the new city.
On Friday we pretty much just walked around for a little bit. That night we went and chilled at one of Cal’s friend’s apartment. Cal has a bunch of friends that are over here right now. Everywhere we go we always seem to run into someone that is from the Boston/Philly/Jersey area or from LA, never anyone from Tennessee. Haha, oh well. Pretty much everyone at the apartment was from Boston and three people were from LA. We ate dinner and chilled there for awhile then headed to the apartment to go to bed.
Saturday we got up and began walking around again. We ended up walking to the Alhambra and proceeded to see if it was sold out. We were hopeful that there would be tickets left since it was cloudy and raining. We finally make it up there and the tickets are sold out BUT there just happened to be these four girls from Italy who had bought tickets but had to leave right then because their bus was leaving and they weren’t going to have time to go in. So we bought the tickets and spent the next almost four hours there. The Alhambra was quite impressive. I do feel that I enjoyed the Alcazar in Sevilla more though. I don’t know if it because I was visited it first or because when I went there it was sunny or what. I just liked it better, contrary to the rest of the world. After that we headed out for an early dinner which consisted of tapas. In Granada, whenever you buy a beer, glass of wine or whatever they give you a small portion of a food of your choice. We went to a couple tapas bars and then headed back to the apartment. We had a Halloween party to go to so we found a store and bought some random things to wear for the night. We met up with everyone from the previous night at the party and then left later on to meet up with one of Ana’s friends that also happened to be in Granada. We went to another tapas bar and then chilled with them the rest of the night.
Sunday we started out walking around again. We went to eat lunch in this restaurant that had mainly all Middle Eastern food. I had lamb with rice covered in curry. I don’t like curry but I ate it anyway because I was starving. After that we headed back to the apartment to pack up our stuff and head back to Aguilas, where it is warm and always sunny.
Overall the trip was really good. Got to see some amazing things and meet some cool new people. I enjoyed the city and the Alhambra but did not fall in love with them like everyone else. I love watching movies so I have to draw a comparison to this trip with a movie. A movie comes out and everybody loves it and hypes it up and by the time you go see it you have pretty high expectations. Most movies might be decent, but don’t live up to the hype. This was the case with Granada for me. I should get some pretty interesting reactions this week at school from everybody when they ask what I thought of Granada and I say it was alright. Deuces