I have completed nearly 3 months of study, 11 weeks to be precise, and I must say that looking back at it, it definitely has been worth my while!

I actually have 1 week of 4 hours per day left, but today also was the last school day of 2008 and for me it makes no sense to go back to school for 1 week after a holiday of 2 weeks. Instead I have decided to split that week into 2 separate weeks of conversation classes and I will take them for example at the end of January and February.

Obviously I will fall into some sort of gap as much of my work will take place at home and in school we were basically talking Spanish for a minimum of 4 hours each day, plus all the extra activities. Therefore I think it makes sense to have the two separate weeks to keep up my conversational level of español.

This last day of the year ended with a Navidad (Christmas) lunch where many students brought a dish from their country. We ended up with a pan-European smorgasbord and I of course made “Piet’s famoso pollo con coca cola” as some of the teachers were almost begging for that after having heard form our little dinner parties over the past weeks!

Yesterday’s 4 hours were very nice, I could actually wabble on quite a bit, especially in the first block with a really cute Valencian lady

For the second block my teacher was Pedro and he is gonna be my teacher for the rest of the week. Well he keeps the speed up! Blazing through the lessons, I guess he is pushing me a bit, but everything was going well. To his surprise I immediately udnerstood the difference between “hay” and “esta/estan” and today’s homework was that too.

Amparo, my landlord, had invited me for lunch this afternoon and we had a gorgeous lunch on a terrace/park next to the Turia with some tapas (clams, snails and small green peppers) and a large entrecote. At first I kindly declined el vino (I would have go to class afterwards), but when she ordered a 2005 Rioja, I of course had to take a few sips/glasses

Just in time for school, after repeating some of yesterday’s class, we moved on to things in the house (las cosas en la casa) and for tomorrow I have to describe our new home After that we also made a start with the possessive words, becomes quite complicated with singular/plural/feminin/masculin, pfffff…

Since Amparo moved most of her stuff out over the weekend I need to buy a bowl, a cutting board, a sharp kitchen knife and some cutlery. Now I wanted to buy stuff that came as cheap as possible, because I have all of it coming in the container in 6-8 weeks! So I had the shop attendant pick all the cheapy stuff for me, hahaha.

On my way back to home I made a detour of about an hour as after 20 mins of walking in what I thought was the right direction, I arrived back to where I started…O…K…

Near my home there is a shop run by 2 Chinese ladies who sell anything and everything. I wanted to look for a bag for my school books, so I asked one of them if they could speak Chinese. The lady said yes and we moved on to easier grounds. I had a nice chat with them and I will definitely ask them very soon where I can buy Chinese ingredients (especially lajiao) in Valencia!

Finally back home I tried to make tortilla, which tasted a lot better than it looked!

Now I’m gonna watch some downloaded CSI and then off to bed!

Hasta manana!

In the afternoon I met with Lynn, Lotte and Michael. Last year October they came with the dance-troupe ISH to Beijing and I took them to the Great Wall and we spent some evenings together.
Was nice to catch up with them again; we went to the Vondelpark and chatted until early evening.

Back in Zandvoort the pumpkin curry we prepared in the morning was ready to be served