Porch-you-gull

Wow! what a trip! This past week was Semana Santa (holy week) here in SEvilla. Which basically means huge religious parades and processions of monks and brothers who are dressed up in robes with hats that seriously look just like the KKK. Kinda scary, but it's what they all wear. So we had the week off school. I went with four friends to a beach on the coast in Albufeira Portugal. It was incredible. Here's our beach
Adam Van Gelder...cool name, I'm jealous...and myself chilling on the beach. We got pretty darn tan.
Perhaps my favorite picture of all time. I was just goofing around and took this. It turned out really cool.
Mike and Adam trying to juggle a volleyball. We juggled a lot, and peppered a lot. It was pretty darn sweet. The sand was just incredibly fine. It was so nice.
Action shot! Sometime while we were peppering. So the ocean was freezing, so I never actually got in it more than up to my knees. Every day it was about 75 degrees, with a little wind. If the wind was blowing a bit it was nice. Without the wind it was a bit toasty. It was the perfect weather for a week on the beach. We were at the beach literally at least 4 hours a day for 5 straight days.
We stayed in this great little 3 star hotel. We put 5 people in a 4 person room, and it cost us a whole 8.66 euros per night. Incredibly cheap. Our room had a little kitchenette, so we bought all of our own food at the grocery store and cooked. It was super cheap and a lot of fun. You can see the worst ketchup of all time on the table. We bought it at some little store where all the food was labeled in greek...still can't figure that one out. That pot is a bot of potatoes that we fried in a pan with some oil. They were good.
This is me cooking French toast. The kitchen area was actually really dark. There wasn't a light in that part of the room. The only light was that little stove light. So I wore my little headlight so I could see when the french toast was done. It tasted incredible. We could've eaten that every day and been content, if we hadn't run out of syrup on our 3rd day. It was so good I would've just eaten the spatula.
Adam, Carine, and Hayley chilling in our kitchen area. Probably cooking rice or something. We had rice one meal. Hayley had this great idea to cook the whole bag. Holy cow that was a ton of rice. After Adam and I ate 3 helpings each, and the others each ate a good ammount, there was still half the pot left. Adam tried to snack on it throughout the night but couldn't make a dent. So we left it on the counter for the next few days and occasionally picked at it. Eventually we gave in and threw it away.
Ya we decided to go take modelling pictures on this huge rock. So this is Adam and I being hot.
The ole wink...

There were these really cool rocks that jutted out into the ocean. So Adam and I climbed up them and hung out for a little while. So this is me striking the Stuck pose. Good times...
And on the last night, to top the week off, we had a bonfire on the beach. Had a hilariously great conversation complete with the classic questions about if you were stranded on a desert island what would take, and if you could have one super power what would it be. We tried to roast some little hot dogs, but their hot dogs here suck and theyre tiny, so it didn't work well. We sat around and talked for 4 hours, til the fire died, then headed back to the hotel for some sleep before we headed out.

Funniest story of the trip: One night we were playing the card game presidents until about 3. Well then we had the idea, 'hey let's just stay up all night and watch the sunrise.' So I looked it up online and it said 'sunrise 7:15am.' We still thought it was a good idea. So we played presidents for another 4 hours, straight, not as good of an idea. So come 7am we strolled down to the beach to see the sun rise. Well if you noticed in the above pictures, the beach is kinda walled in by really tall rocks all the way down the coast. And our beach didn't face east, it faced south. So the sun rose, and it was probably beautiful, we just couldn't see a thing cause there were huge cliffs between us and the eastern horizon. We went to bed a bit cranky at 8am.

Frustration of the trip: My credit card company placed a hold on my card cause my parents had called on my behalf trying to set up a PIN number so I can take money out of an ATM here. Well the credit card company thought it sounded fishy. So they thought a third party had my card and put a hold on my account. Even after I got on my online banking and sent them messages they refused to pull the hold off my account, so I had ZERO euros for the trip. Thankfully Carine loaned me money, and a lot of it. It was frustrating.

Overall it was incredible. We relaxed on the beach the whole week, got some great tans, ate some good food, and played a lot of cards. 6 nights at a hotel, and meals for 7 days, + bus tickets and little souvenirs, all totalled 110 euros. Absolutely fantastic. Now I just have to survive 11 days, before I head to London, Dublin, and St Andrews for 10 days!

Good Friday

In honor of Good Friday, I'm going to post a poem. Enjoy, and remember the pain, suffering and love that this day represents.
(i actually wrote this as a concrete poem in the form of a cross, but after spending over two hours today trying to put it on here in the form of a cross, I gave up. So use your imagination for now:)


The grain of the wood grinds against his bones
He winces in pain as another splinter embeds itself
in his already torn and ragged flesh.
He sways, tilting his head upward
bringing into his blurry, stinging vision the outline of a hill.
“This will be impossible” muttered the man on the other side of the beam.
But he was a man of impossibility.
He staggered forward, his footsteps quick and panicked
as he tried to steady himself.
He sucked in deeply and heaved forward,
placing one foot squarely in front of him.
Another two steps left him gasping for breath.
He swayed back and forth in place
as he tried to wipe the blood and sweat from his eyes,
succeeding only in wiping some sweat away
but replenishing the streaks of deep, red blood around his eyes and in his eyebrows.
He tried to rehoist the beam of wood on his back
with the help of the man on the other side.
It landed with a soft thud between his shoulder and neck
drawing forth gasps of breath.
With determination he started to lift his foot again
Unable to take another step up the hill,
He stammered, shifted off balance
then was dragged backward by the unbearable weight of the cross.
The man on the other side of the beam called to a few nearby for help.
“This is impossible” the man said to two men who helped them to their feet.
But he stood, and started again with determination
for he was a man of impossibility.
He had known it would come.
He had come for this reason.
The time had come.
He was bearing the cross.
He was bearing the sins of the world.

Matalascanas

Right, so on Saturday we decided, hey, lets go to the beach on Sunday. So we bought tickets and went to the beach, which is rather evident by the color of my skin. We had a good time though.

So there was a cold wind at the beach and we were cold most of the time. So we dug huge holes in the sand so we could lay out without being in the wind:) Best idea ever. So here's Carine and Blake in one of our holes.
Us playing soccer on the beach. Life is good.
This was a cute little boy who was running after his family. So I took a couple pictures of him and the beautiful ocean behind him.
Here's Micah and I decorating our aforementioned hole. So we're guys. So there was naturally a competition of whose hole was coolest. Well we built the biggest and best, then went to buy lunch and when we got back, we had been surpassed. Well we didn't want to dig anymore, so we went for asthetic beauty. We tried to smooth all the walls and floor etc. Then we went to that grass in the top of the picture and picked a bunch of flowers and lined our hole with little yellow flowers. Then we found these really nice cool big purple flowers, so we picked two of those, one to go at each of our heads. We also had a little bottle shaped hole in the sand for our two-liter of coke to protect it from the sun and keep it cool. Yeah, we're pimps...
A view of the ocean from inside one of our holes.
So that was our day trip to the beach. It was great, we had a good time. Life is good. I leave in two days for Portugal. We are going to Albufeira to chill for an entire week! So you will be seeing plenty more beach and ocean pictures in the next week. I love being so near so many beautiful beaches. Hope you all are enjoying Kansas and Arkansas:) (yaya Thomas I know you get to see it every day, but I'm in Europe, so I win. :)

Tangier Morocco

Alrighty, here we go. This is our trip to Morocco. 10 of us went, 5 guys, 5 girls. We went through a travel agency so we got our ferry ride and 2 nights in a 4 star hotel for only 65 euros, which is really incredible. This is part of the group in the ferry port waiting to get on the boat. We were supposed to leave at 5:30, but in true Spanish fashion we didn't even board til 6:15. Awesome...
Yeah, we saw a pretty sweet sunset on the ferry on the way over.
So the first night we decided to go for a little stroll on the beach, that was 100 yards from the front door of our hotel. So our hotel faced the ocean, and all we had to do was walk out the front door to get to the beach. It was awesome.
Carine and I in front of some big palace in Tangier. We had this awesomely hilarious 75 year old Moroccan tour guide. He spoke some 7 or 8 languages. His english was pretty entertaining. The whole time he'd be like, "no, we don't do shopping now, we shop later. We ride camels now. You want to ride camels? yeah we ride camels now..." He was great. Oh and he was really short, darm skinned of course, carried a cane and shuffled his feet when he walked. I kid you not, he totally reminded me of Yoda. I even took a video of him walking so I can show you when I get back to the states just how much this guy looked and moved like Yoda.
Ya I rode a camel. Good times. I never rode one in Israel cause it woulda cost a whole dollar and goodness knows that was too expensive for some ;) So I payed the euro here and rode the camel in a circle. Pretty weird/cool.
Yeah, i liked the ride so much I moved in on him. I went 90 but he didn't come the 10. Thankfully he didn't spit in my face either.
This is our whole group at some cool lookout point in Tangier.
So we stayed at a really nice hotel. We decided to spend an hour and half and relax from our tough lives of shopping in the Arab markets and hanging out. So we got some sun.
That night we had dinner in the hotel. This is our whole group -Cora who was taking the picture. During dinner they had some Moroccan traditional entertainment that was pretty cool. The meal was pretty average. But I liked it more than I thought I would.
Yeah that dude danced around and spun that try of lit candles on his head, it was incredible.
These dudes danced around, did some really athletic stuff while playing these instruments.
The next day we went to this small fishing village called Asilah. As you can tell it was right on the coast. I'm gonna be spoiled by all the beaches I visit:) I'm gonna get back to Kansas and I won't know what happened.
Yeah, a tribute to my brother Jon Stuck. After Asilah we went right back to the hotel to check out, catch the ferry and head back to Spain. Spain has never seemed so great. We had a great time though. I bought some cool Moroccan stuff for cheap in the Arab market. We all got back safe and noone got sick. We had a great time and never felt threatened. Although apparently Tangier is a marijuana haven, cause I got offered 'hash' about 40 times in 2 days, no exaggeration. It was ridiculous. But the first guy to ask was pretty funny. In broken English he says, "I got good stash, you want hash?" I was pretty taken aback by the creative rhyme and all, but I still said no:) Well I hope you enjoyed the pics. Some day I'll put some pics up of the school. But not yet...not yet. (yup subtle Gladiator reference...)

Family and Malaga

So DnA and Dad came to Sevilla this past week. It was freaking awesome. So here are some pics of our times together. This is in the Alcazar Gardens. It was beautiful.
Ya so there were these cute ducks, so I started feeding them and one finally ate out of my hands. They were pretty fun. I think I must be eating one of my cookies right here, they were good.
Awwwwwww....DnA (that's my sister and brother in law if you didn't know that) at the gardens.
Dad and Adriel at the top of the Giralda, the tower at the cathedral in Sevilla. I forgot to take my camera off of sepia:)
Me at the cathedral, wearing my pretty sweet VanNistelrooy jersey from when he played on Manchester United.
At my old senora's house. That's my old senora with her back to me. This is the flat that the fam stayed at.
So after DnA left Saturday morning, dad and I decided, what the heck? let's go to Malaga! it's on the costa del sol in Spain so let's go hang out on the beach. So we went to Malaga and stayed with Ruth and Boaz, two missionaries from our church in Topeka. And this is a pretty tight picture.
This is me with the bull fighting stadium in the background, and the beach of course.
Dad with Ruth and Boaz. They were so wonderful. They had no clue we were coming, and we had no way to warn them. So when we got to Malaga we just found a phonebook and called them up and said, hey...we're in Malaga, can we stay the night? And they said yes and took us to this incredible restaurant and let us sleep in their house and took us to their church the next day. I must insert a story here. After church we went to eat at the house of another family from their church. They also work in the mission with Ruth and Boaz, who by the way are Moroccan, so their main language is Arabic. Anyway the people with whom we ate were from bethlehem, so they spoke Arabic too. I was the only person at the table who was bilingual. Normally you'd say, hey that's impressive or cool. But in this case it was because I was the only person who only knew 2 languages! The parents and kids all spoke arabic, english, and spanish. The grandma also spoke German. Ruth and Boaz speak classic Arabic, moroccan arabic, english, spanish, and french. And dad of course knows hebrew and greek as well as english. Incredible. And the meal? We ate rabbit. A ridiculously huge rabbit from Germany. And the other parts of the meal were middle eastern random foods. It was the most culture I will ever experience at a meal...ever.
And this is the beach dad and I hung out on for a couple hours before we headed back to Sevilla. Good times, good times. It was of course hard to say goodbye (to yesterday...) to the family, but it was so fun to see them. I'm excited to be heading up to Scotland to see DnA in a month so that will be superfun.
Many of you have asked what I am going to do about march madness. Yes of course I've already filled out brackets online. I will be using espn.com's instant updater whenever I can. I've already been reading tons of articles etc, getting ready for the festivities. I hear this is a restaurant here run by an American called Tex-Mex, where many people watched the superbowl. It is possible that they are going to show some games there, so hopefully I'll get to catch a couple, even if they are ridiculously late.
I was also thinking, far be it from me to stop anyone from sending me a package just because I didn't give them my address...so in case you feel the urge to send me gummy bears or something, here's my address.

Craig Congdon
Paseo de Cristina 1-3
Entreplanta A-B
Sevilla Spain 41001

And to finish off I'll give you the quick version of a tale of immeasurable sadness, that you will all undoubtedly laugh at. Saturday morning when I was going to say gbye to DnA at their place I wore a hoodie and put my phone in the pocket. Upon arriving I had to pee, really bad. So I went to the bathroom and peed, and having finished peeing before I had the chance to flush the toilet, I just slightly moved my upper body causing my phone to fall straight into the very yellow liquid in the toilet. After a second of hesitation I plunged my hand into my own pee to recover my phone. I washed it off in the sink, then gave it a couple days to dry out, but all to no avail. It is broken, and it's gonna cost me about 35 euros, (around $50) to replace it. Oh and my ipod broke 2 weeks ago. So my electronics aren't doing so well over here. So if you have an ipod you want to sell for cheap, or if a friend wants to dump one to get a new one, let me know. That's all for now. Tune in soon for pictures of my school...I swear I'll put them up sometime. Oh and I'm going to Morocco tomorrow, so you'll get some pictures of camels this next week. Alright I'm done.

Holy Toledo!

Alrighty, well this is Toledo. And these are the windmills from Don Quixote, really they are which is pretty darn cool. And that castle is cool too. There was a shephard with a huge flock of sheep at the bottom of the hill. Cool stuff
And this is me and Adam. We decided we're gonna take pictures like this whenever we find posts, so get used to them. This is also on top of the mountain at quixote's windmill.
This is the cathedral at Toledo. And this is a really cool picture off of a reflection off a door accross the street. Definitely Micah's idea but I copied it cause i thought it was really cool.
Inside the cathedral, it was pretty tight
This dude is making gold medallions for necklaces, by hand. It's really cool. He is pushing the 24 k gold strand on this steel that is set in wax so that it won't move. It was pretty darn amazing.
Ya, boys playing with swords, I totally could take him.
Now we introduce one of the greatest games of all time. The name: Oreo Madness. How to play: everyone in the group gets an oreo, you twist it in half, the half without cream you eat right away. Then on the count of 3 everyone licks the side with cream and sticks it to their forehead. From there you try to be the first to eat the oreo...without using your hands. You have to wiggle and wrinkle your face to get the oreo to slide down your face, when it gets to your mouth you have to grab it with your tongue before it falls. If it falls you relick and restick. First one to get it to his mouth wins. Adam on the right there is the one who introduced us to this brilliant game, he then dominated us all. Good times had by all.
Carine and I-post oreo madness
The five of us at a pizza restaurant. It was good.
Blake, Dan, Andrea, and Noah, just chilling at this really cool scenic overlook of the city of Toledo. We did this on our way out of town, it was beautiful. Well that's all for now. More to come soon. Including...pictures of my first haircut in spain! and pictures of the new house. And probably a lot of pics of Daniel, Adriel, Dad and I because they are all coming in over the next 2 days! WooHoo!