Sunrise to sunset.

Here's the sunrise from my window. At the end of this post, you'll see a picture of the sunset from my window. Hence, the title of this post.

I have (had) a new tradition that occurs (occurred) whenever I rode (would ride) my Sevici back home (I'm sorry, that was really annoying; I'll try to never do that again). Anyways, near the end of Lopez de Gomara is a stretch of orange trees with particularly low-hanging fruit. Before the city of Sevilla ruined my tradition by sending a crew of a dozen-ish men to pick the oranges off those trees (they do it periodically to most of the orange trees in the city), I would always pick an orange off its branch while riding and drop it into my Sevici's basket. Then, whenever I'd come across a parked Sevici with a orange in the basket, I would snicker to myself. Well, so much for that tradition. By the way, I'm writing/editing this on limited time, so please forgive any grammar mistakes :)



Picture of the river, in case you were wondering.

McDonald's BBQ Chicken Burger. 1€. Awesome. Legit. Other overused positive adjective. That's all.



Here's a picture of people relaxing. Like we will be this weekend. Read on if you want to know more! Extra credit if you can find Claire, Jenna, and Amanda in this picture.

So this weekend (well, in two hours) Kane, Tori, Stephanie, Caprice, and I are heading out on a road trip down south! We're gonna go to Jerez, Gibraltar, Estepona/Marbella, and various villages in the Pueblos Blancos. I'm really excited to see more of Spain and take a bunch of pictures, so the next blog post will probably have some new scenery in it! Also, I realized I have a trip for the next 6 weekends, including and not limited to Toledo, Majorca, Granada, Paris, Barcelona, and Madrid (those last three are gonna be with Taisa over my spring break!). I feel like I'm gonna be incredibly exhausted by the end of it all, but am really excited nonetheless. I would love prayer for safety and health throughout that time!



Another reason I'm excited about this weekend? I done with the first wave of tests and presentations. Had my fourth test on Wednesday, and that 50 minute presentation about photography today. We went outside for a little and I did a quick demo for the class (thank you to Jon and Kane for modeling, to Kaitlyn, Allison, and Karina for being flash-holders, and to random guy of the street for Tebowing with Jon and Kane). Regarding the speaking aspect of the presentation, my grammar was pretty atrocious, but hey, it's over. And at least I got to choose what I wanted to talk about!



Something I forgot to mention. I got to play trumpet with a random German guy I met on the street a couple weekends ago! I was riding my bike down this street named Tetuan with a bunch of stores (kind of like their State St., for you Santa Barbara folk), and I heard the sound of a trumpet coming down an alley. I biked up that way to investigate, and saw a blonde guy sitting on a step outside of an old catholic church, hidden amongst the mix of commercial buildings and apartments of the Centro. I waited til the end of his song, and then told him "Bien hecho!", (never know how to punctuate this kind of thing) at which point I realized he didn't speak Spanish. I introduced myself, found out his name was Alex and he was traveling around Europe for a year, told him I played trumpet too, and then made with him to play together the next day. This picture above is the place where we played, in case you're especially curious (taken about a week after the fact, for purposes of my own personal nostalgia :).



A couple more things about Spanish culture. Taxes are already included in the price you see on food, clothes, everything. Even these cookies you see above (the off-brand ones on the right cost 54 euro cents, so naturally I eat them a lot). SO convenient. WYSIWYG. Come on America, get with the program. However, a point that I think America does right is meal times. I was realizing the other day that it's a lot harder to be productive here in the afternoon because we end up eating two meals after school (and they're meals that already generally last longer than those in the states). So, instead of getting lunch quickly out of the way (not saying it's not enjoyable, just saying it can be done quickly) in the midst of classes, lunch and dinner are both after class, knocking a significant number of hours out of the day. Something else that I'm needing to get used to is writing tests on blank paper. That's all we get, several sheets of white printer paper. Apparently that's how all tests are done here, and lined paper is what the kids use in grade school. We got into a discussion about it in Literature, and Salva, our professor, was amazed that we use lined paper at our age in the States.



The things you hear while biking... A while back, I was biking on Argentina when I overheard a Mom saying to her to kids, "Pero, la caca de caballo..." Kind of bummed I missed the end of that conversation.

We were at McDonald's (I'm too lazy right now to look up whether that requires an apostrophe or not, so I'm gonna go with it) earlier this week, but Kane said something that was really funny. Well, I'm gonna say "seemed funny at the moment in light of the context" just in case you don't think it's funny. Anyhow, Kane forgot his money at home, so Caprice gave him her wallet to go buy him and her some food, and Kane's response was: "Caprice, how mad would you be if I paid with your ten instead of with the coins because I don't want to count the fifty cent pieces, because there are six of them? I guess I already counted them. But still, how mad would you be?"



Well, onto the highlight of my week. What an incredible night. Saturday evening a group of us from Iglesia Bautista and various other evangelical churches and ministries in town met up at Puerto Jerez (right by our school) to go pass out food and jackets, and also offer prayer and a phone number for an organization that helps get people off the street in Spain. I was a bit nervous, because I wasn't sure how we would get split into groups, and how the conversations would go, but it became very clear that this was what God had planned for me for the evening.

Our group of six was assigned to go up to the Alameda, an area north of the Centro, but we didn't find anyone homeless people in the area. We kept walking northeast-ish, in hopes of finding someone, and after a while got to a neighborhood of town called Macarena. We finally came to the intersection of two small streets, one of which was kind of darker and had two men sitting on a ledge, about halfway down its length. The girls in our group (we had four girls and two guys) were a bit nervous about approaching two grown men in a dark alley-like street, so they suggested that just Andres and I head down if we wanted to. So, Andres and I started down the street, a little bit warily, and when we got to the men we asked them "Disculpe, ¿Ustedes quieren algo para comer?". One of them responded, a bit confused at what we were asking, and as soon as he spoke I heard a thick Russian accent in his Spanish. I asked them if they spoke Russian, and lo and behold, both of them did! The conversation that followed was the most meaningful conversation I've ever had with strangers in Russian. We gave them both some of the food and juice that we had while Igor (from Latvia) explained that his documentation had been stolen (or so he claimed) and he couldn't get work or open up new papers, and that Nicolai (from Ukraine) didn't have enough money to fly back to his family. Afterwards, we prayed for the two of them, and as we ended I could see tears in Nicolai's eyes. Definitely a powerful experience that left me in those "wow, something really awesome just happened" type of shivers. As Tori put it afterwards, I never thought I would end up speaking this much Russian (almost more than I speak in California) in Spain.

Igor also invited us to come back, since he usually just hangs out in the same place, so last Tuesday after class I biked over to that area again and found him in the very same spot, like he had said. A great conversation that ensued, although I heard probably more words that sound a like the Russian word for pancake and like the English word for "kto" than I've ever heard in my life :) I got a little bit of Russian food from the Russian store (and also met a guy named Anatoliy who's from Brest; unfortunately, he didn't know anyone of the last names that I named for him) for us to eat, and it was SO GOOD! Never thought I'd miss хрен so much :) It was probably a kind of funny sight, now that I think about it, the two of us eating колбаса, черный хлеб, и хрен together on a small Spanish street while Igor recounted his story with a plethora of Russian expletives. Well, all that to say, God definitely made himself clear to me this week. If you could pray for the Lord to soften their hearts, I would really appreciate it!



Well, I need to start packing for our trip, so I should probably come to an end. Here's the sunset. Until next time! Tsa luego!