Sentimental birthday reflections

So I turned 20 two days ago, and if I were at school Aaron Schaffer would've congratulated me "for escaping teen pregnancy!" Praise the Lord! Let's be honest the birthday day wasn't the best of days: I woke up feeling sick, had to go to classes, couldn't talk to my mom and bro who tried to call because the phones were messing up, and my internet went out right when i tried to Skype my girlfriend. Consider it all pure joy though right! Well there were a couple highlights to my bday: one of my friends here gave me a shoebox wrapped in newspaper with gummy candy and a postcard inside, and another friend wrote me a rather humorous birthday poem. My bday night we went out dancing and had a jolley old time as always, even after we got last for 45 minutes trying to get there. And my birthday present to myself was skipping classes on friday and sleeping all day cause i felt like crap when i woke up:) One of my friends wrote me a note encouraging me to take the day to really examine my life and give thanks for all the blessings etc, that God has given me over my 20 years of life. Well I thought that was a pretty good idea, so here are some birthday reflections.
One of the great parts of my bday was the massive amount of facebook wall posts and emails that I got. Granted some of them were a day or two late (ya you know who you are:) and I didn't really know 1/3 of the people on facebook who wished me a happy bday, but it was still very heartwarming to be 1000 miles away, but still feel like people cared about me on my bday. It was great to get messages from people who I knew in elementary school, or from people who i just met 4 weeks ago and have spent the last month with here in Spain. Of course the most meaningful notes were from those with whom i have shared my life. To those friends who I have known since diapers, those who i have grown up with, played soccer with, gone on trips with, sung with, acted with, and just hung out with, thank you for filling my life with joy. Thank you for molding and "sharpening" me into the man who I am today. Thank you for laughing with and at me. Thank you for calling me out when I needed it. To you I say thanks.
Then there are those who I often forget but have had a great impact on my life. I.E. my past teachers, or parents of my best friends. I got some great emails from a past chem teacher, some young man named ralphie, and a couple others. Thanks for all the direct, but also indirect impact you have had on my life. Who knows where I'd be without you all!
Well that's enough sentimentality for now. Back to Spain. This week I bought my plane tickets to go to London, Dublin and St Andrews at the end of April. Plans for this trip include seeing Les Mis and possibly Wicked or Phantom on broadway in London, going to some pubs and hopefully a soccer game in Ireland, and checking out the world famous old course in St Andrews and chilling with the sister and brother-in-law. I'm super excited about Dad, and DnA coming to Sevilla in 2 weeks. That will definitely be a party! I'm already trying to figure out what all we should do. It's a really tough job, trying to decide what to do and where to go when they will only be here for 4-7days. But it is going to be a blast.
My friend Adam and I have officially kicked off what we call "hobo Jueves" (Jueves means Thursday in Spanish but what kind of a name is hobo thursday? no ring to it...oh by the way you pronounce J like an H in Spanish.) Last Thursday we took sandwich stuff and some cookies and stuff around to people who live on the streets just to give them some food and try to talk to them a little while to show them God's love. This Thursday we went and found a lady who was sitting on the street, so we went and bought food and sat and ate with her. She was from Romania and had only lived here for 4 months so she didn't understand much spanish, but we still tried just to hang out with her. This week afterwards Adam and I went to a little cafe and had a little 3 hour theological debate. It was great. I totally miss having those great talks, and i'm sure you'll hear more about our topics of discussion in later posts as I try to think in writing about what we discuss. We have some very very different theological views but he is a great guy and we have a great time talking.
Life is good. Last night about 15 of us from the program ended up in the same salsa bar. Well we were all dancing and having a great time. We were there from about 12:30-3:30, and micah and I topped off the night with a couple cigars in the upstairs room. And as we stood there relaxing, we could only look at each other and say, "life is good." The weather here is either incredibly beautiful, or incredibly wet. It pretty much alternates every day. Today it was about 75 and sunny. Yesterday it rained half the day and was dark and cold (cold here being 50 degrees). It has pretty much been one of those two every day for the past two weeks. But today was beautiful, we definitely got a little view of what the next couple months will be like here, and it was beautiful.
Next week we are back to having a four day week. Next Friday we have a school trip to Toledo. We are going up there on Friday, spending the night in a 3 star hotel, and coming back Saturday night. Our school trips here rock. it's gonna be a good way to end February cause during March we have a bunch of 5 day weeks (which is really rare for study abroad programs) and we have a lot of tests and projects in March. And I will be going crazy cause I won't be able to see ANY March madness. Which means I will be on ESPN.com all day long hitting 'refresh, refresh' which will actually say 'recarga, recarga.'
Well this is a pretty darn long post, so I'll end it here. So from Spain, I say adieu....ya i went there...

update

Hello western hemispherers...
so, i just feel like it's about time to post. Well I have switched houses. Our old senora threw out her back making our beds, so we had to move to a new place. Maybe I'll put pics up of the new place soon. Our new senora also has a son who is living with us. I'm sure many of you are thinking, oh cool a guy craig's age maybe who he can befriend and hang out with. "Erroneous, erroneous on both accounts!" 1) this guy is not my age, he's close to twice my age. He's definitely in his 30s and still living at home, which actually isn't abnormal in this culture. But it definitely seems ridiculous to me. So he is pretty weird too. He chills at home whenever he's not at work. He lives in his bathrobe and is super in to the gossip shows. When they come on the senora hollars at her son and he comes rushing in to watch the gossip shows. She then fills him in on the 42 seconds he missed. Our bathroom and shower doors are both that clear but that kind of hazy glass. So if creapy 30+ yr old still living at home in his bathrobe chooses to stand outside the bathroom door he'll have a pretty good view of whats goin on...awkward? ay!
So that's the new place. School is in full swing. For some reason, the profs here have this wonderful setup, where out of my 4 classes i have 2 tests on two back to back days. So on Monday and Tuesday I have a test in all 4 of my classes. They also decide to assign us compositions and presentations on the days right before our tests. So suddenly I feel like I'm here to learn and go to school or something. Weird.
I'm still deciding what to do with my first week long break, ya we have a week-long break at the beginning of April, then a 10 day break two weeks later. Right now Micah and I are looking at London/Dublin/St Andrews over feria. in fact we are working on buying our tickets now, and if we had enough money in our bank accounts we would buy them now.
Little bit of spanish culture 101 for ya. Meal times here are wack. Breakfast for us is at 8 before we go to classes at 9. Lunch isn't til 2:30! then you siesta, and all stores etc shut down from 3-5 ish. Then you chill til dinner....somewhere between 9 and 10:30. we eat dinner around 9:30 at my new house. So what this means is by the time lunch and dinner finally come around you are so starving you will eat whatever is set before you. Typical meals, soup or "lentajes" which is just soup which has more solid crap than liquid. then you have some sort of fish or chicken, and for desert....an orange or a banana and if you're lucky some pudding!
So if they don't finish eating til 10 or 11 that means that don't meet up to hang out til around 11:30. They then proceed to stay out til 3 or 4. naturally I love it cause I'm a night owl. This also means that everyone sleeps in. People don't like to wake up here. So i fit right in:) oh and that's also why they build a nap into their schedules. They know they're gonna be gettin some extra sleep. Well that's all for now. More to come later.

Barca!!!

Alright here we go! Here are pictures from my Barcelona trip. It was freaking incredible. Possibly one of the best weekends of my life. I took a little over 300 pictures, ya definitely didn't think that was possible for me, but I took about 60 in the aquarium and about 30 at the soccer game so i guess it wasn't too hard. This is our hostel. 9 of us were in this room, 8 guys 1 girl...On a sidenote I hate that my camera put the wrong date on these pics so ignore them
This is Gaudi's "wave." He had to have been crazy, but his stuff is awesome. He also designed la sagrada familia, which you will see pics of soon.
So we climbed up this hill to a castle that overlooks Barcelona to watch the sun set on the city. From here you can see everything. There's the beach that we spent a couple hours at too:)
A picture of all the guys from the trip. We had a good time
Me and the Baker brothers being BAs at the castle. There were a bunch of cannons and stuff.
This is the fountain at Montjuic (sp?) It is the coolest thing, the fountain has a lights and music show. It plays classical music, the fountain changes all the time, and the lights change too. Sooo cool.
This is the huge building behind the big fountain. Pretty tight
These are three french dudes and a german who i played soccer with on the beach. They were pretty darn cool. Pregame one of the frenchies says "hold on, we gotta smoke and drink so we'll play better..." riiiiiiiight. I'm sporting my new rhonaldinho jersey which i bought for the game.
THE GAME!!! Incredible. I took this picture from my seat, which as you can see, was dang close to the field. There was only plexiglass and 11 rows of chairs between me and the field.
Ya, that's Rhonaldinho in the first half. Naturally he had to score both of his goals on the OTHER half right in front of the rest of our group. Not too happy about that. But it was still incredible.
A view of the most beautiful field I've ever seen in my life from higher up
Me at the field, pregame
Here is la Sagrada Familia, the huge, huge, huge cathedral that Gaudi designed. They started building it in 1882, and they have no clue when they're gonna finish it. No they aren't restoring it, they're still building it. It is going to be even huger. They're guessing it'll take another 100 years. They have another 10 towers to put up, to go along with the 8 that are up now, and the others are gonna be taller...
Some of the decoration of a little section of sagrada familia
our reaction...jason needs to drop that O....
for my halo buddies..... EL PINGUINO!!!!! So we went to an aquarium, a freaking huge one. And there were penguins! which are my fav animal if you didn't know that. Oh yeah, there were sharks too
Told ya so. Big, scary, lots of teeth, looked pissed all the time. I would not want to run into this thing in the water. "He punches the shark in the face, and the shark says, 'ALRIGHT' "
Ok, well that was obviously just a tiny taste of Barca. We also found a sweet jazz club one night, walked down las ramblas, a crazy street with street vendors/performers everything. So I'm sure I left out a ton, but you're probly tired of reading this, and the guys probably stopped reading after the soccer game pictures:) The soccer game was incredible, and right now the only event that could possibly have a hope of topping that game, is if I get to see Les Mis in the queen's theater while I'm in London, which will happen:) Life is good here. I do have to switch houses because my senora threw out her back while making our beds. More to come on the move later this week. Peace!

Cordoba!

oh i hate how it puts these in backwards, aight sorry about this, but you get it all backwards:) Me feeding birds outside the mosque
So when the Christians conquered Cordoba they decided to build a cathedral...Indside the mosque. Ya inside...it's a big mosque
the mosque, called "un bosque de columnas" a "forest of columns"
Part of the cathedral inside the mosque
Outside of the mosque. This is my grammar and art history prof.
The Samson pose. I've taken a lot of pictures like this. So cool story behind these ruins. It's the ruins of a city that a Califa (Muslim ruler) built. It's basically his palace city, but he named it after his favorite mistress. Then since she liked snow, but it doesn't snow near Cordoba, he planted orange trees, whose blossoms are white. So when the orange trees blossomed they covered the ground in white blossoms that made it look like snow. He was a pimp.
Adam and I...ya I've taken a lot of these pictures too. Maybe I'll get paid for this one too.
ruins
ruins
Sweet view on the way out to Cordoba. Most beautiful scenery yet.
So that was my trip. I did get to see the super bowl, thank goodness, I just had to stay up til 5am last night to see it, and got up for class at 8...awesome. Well that's it for now. Tune in later for more.

FC BARCELONA!

hahahaha, that's right boys, get ready to be jealous. Yesterday I bought tickets for 11 of us to fly to Barcelona, and I bought tickets to an FC Barcelona game. So in 9 or 10 days, I will be watching the best player in the world. I hope. So ya, we're going to Barcelona for 3 days, we're gonna stay in a crappy hostal, and we're gonna watch FC Barcelona play Real Racing...ya whoever they are. The stadium is almost full too, so it's gonna be CRAZY! So I'm hoping to get to watch Barcelona, Real Madrid, and Sevilla the 3 top teams in the Spanish liga. I should be able to see Sevilla since I'm here, and I'll just have to work on getting to a real madrid game.
Now that I've made you all jealous, let me tell you how much it sucked to set this up. Somehow I ended up in charge of the trip. Don't ask how, cause I have no idea. So when I first looked we could get game tickets for 18 euros, but screw that we got the 33 euro seats cause they are great seats. So when I first looked for flights they cost 46 euros, by the time we finally bought them, because of people stupid indecision and not being able to use the credit card cause my maximum was too low, they jumped up to 67 euros. But another person who is going with us found them for 53 like 25 minutes later. The reason I couldn't get those? Cause I had to buy the ones I found cause I was sitting outside a building in the cold using their internet. We had already bought the game tickets cause if we couldnt get those we werent gonna go. So I had to buy them then before my battery ran out. So I didn't have time to keep checking other sights. I spent about 6 to 7 hours on the tickets as it was.
Other than that, there's not too much more to report. Classes are goin. I'm understanding everything in my classes so that's good. The grammar class is crazy though. She keeps talking about all these rules and stuff that I've never heard so that's kinda intimidating. We're going to Cordoba tomorrow as a school to see the huge mosque there. So I guess that's kinda cool. A group of us are gonna try to go to the Rock of Gibralter on Saturday after we get back. So that could be interesting too.
Let us close our eyes, and talk about the weather, yes, yes, let's talk about the weather. But seriously it's making me mad. Apparently it never rains in Sevilla. In fact, they had been in a drought for a while, until we got here. The day we showed up it was raining for the first time in a long time. Since then it has rained 4 of the days we have been here. So it's wet, cause nothing dries here. Complaint number two. When my senora invited her family over, they all said "this weather is so weird for Andalucia. It never rains and it's never this cold." Ya it's cold here too. What a great combination. Wet and cold, my favorite.
I have yet to make plans for Semana Santa, and Feria, my two week long breaks in April:) I've been invited to go to Greece and Italy with some people for one break, but I still haven't decided. I'll put pics up of Cordoba and the rock of Gibralter hopefully on Sunday.
Sidenote it's really annoying that I don't get wireless in my house. last night I had to sit outside a random building in the cold in order to steal wireless from a big apartment building so i could buy the plan tickets before they got even more expensive.