'splorin' (& some actual work, too)

12.2.12


First of all, happy December, everyone!  I am so excited that Christmas is fast approaching, and that I will be home in 13 DAYS! :-D

In the meantime, I've been having a very enjoyable weekend in Lugo.  Went out for tapas with some cool cats Thursday and Friday (because if there's one thing I've learned here, it's that you can basically never have enough tapas), and Friday I discovered some really good beer thanks to another auxiliar & we also came darn close to winning 500 euros in a raffle drawing... So close. (ish.)

This is the beer. Grimbergen. Such a relief after all the Estrella Galicia-- never again will I order a caña that is not tostada.

Saturday night Julia (my roommate) and I went over to the apartment of some other girls for a taco night; international food has gotten infinitely more exciting since moving here.  And today, a small group of us went hiking!  This was very exciting for me, because it was my first excursion like that here in Spain.  Our original intention was to get to a place called Fervenza, but when we realized the round trip was going to take 8 hours instead of 6, we decided to just walk in that direction till we hit the 3 hour mark and turn around.  And let me say, I'm pretty glad we did... Evidently I'm a wimp when it comes to walking that much, so I don't know that I would've been in very good shape after 8 hours.  Need to build up a bit.

Unfortunately it stayed very cold and foggy almost the whole time we were gone, but it was still very pretty, and we stopped and had a picnic lunch on a stone wall over-looking some field-y areas-- where I had my first wildlife sighting! A deer!  There are animals in Lugo after all.  I haven't mentioned it yet, but you really never see animals besides birds here; not even squirrels or something like that, although they supposedly have them.

Oh, and Annia brought her dog, Gwen, which was pretty great.  She's become like a surrogate dog/pet to all of us here.  And did you know huskies more often howl softly instead of barking?  Well, they do.  And it's adorable.  Needless to say, we all did a lot of that on the trip too hehe.

Here are some pictures:

 This is a cute one.  Annia, Maris, Julia, Ryan y yo (& of course Gwen).  Look at that fog in the background though, man!

 

 Our route took us down by the Río Miño, which was goooorgeous.  Can't wait to make it to those waterfalls next time.

I'm sure in the spring it's even more beautiful.

This is clearly the site of a recent UFO landing.

Practically all of the walls near any field, walkway, whatever are made out of stone here.  This is peering through one of them.

I believe this is about where we stopped for lunch and sat on the wall.  If not, it looks very similar.  So green!  I feel like it could be Ireland.

This little hike really made me want to do the Camino de Santiago, or at least part of it.  Julia recently acquired a book that is basically a guide to a bunch of chunks of the trail in Lugo, so hopefully something like that will be in our future.  Just need to give my legs time to recover first! ;)

Maybe it is because the morning was so productive, but I also managed to spend the last 2-3 hours working on recording listening activities for the students at my school (after a mini descanso i.e. veg-out period when I got home).  They're activities for the social studies class about "the globalized economy," so they aren't that exciting.  I do get to wear a cool(?) headset though:

 

I wonder if any of the listening activities I used to do in Spanish or Italian classes were recorded like this... Some girl on her laptop with wet hair and sweatpants using a headset that's almost too big for her.  Somehow that's never the kind of thing I pictured. haha.

And that's about all for this update.  More coming soon!  There's a puente (break) next weekend and I have more 'splorin' plans.