Visiting Zaragoza and Madrid

Despite the situation with my grandmother, last week and this weekend were nice. I didn't have to work at the high school on Thursday because they were taking exams and Friday I went with the kids to Zaragoza on a field trip. From what I could tell, it was a joint field trip between the science classes and the history classes. I was tipped off by the fact that we went to an environmental science center and a bunch of Roman ruins.

I'm told that the kids at the high school are fairly well-behaved in comparison to other schools in Spain. I suppose they don't get in fights or bring guns to school or anything, but "well-behaved" is not an adjective that I would ever even think of using when describing them. Nonetheless, they are entertaining. They, like the kids in the primary school, assume that I don't understand a word of Spanish. I'm still baffled by how they could believe that, considering I've been living here for several months now. So when I have a grin on my face after they just swore or insulted one of the teachers under their breath, they get red-faced pretty quickly. It's weird because I don't

Descanse en paz, Granny Faye

The following is more personal than my travel blog normally is, but it is in some ways related to being in Spain (while not actually being about Spain itself). It's important to me and I think that being in Spain has made this situation even more complicated than it would have otherwise been.

Last week, I found out that my grandmother had passed away. I had known for a long time that this had been a possibility because of her poor health and complications. But even so, it came as a shock. It's the first time in quite a while that I've lost anyone that close to me in the family and experiencing it now, as a supposedly wiser and more mature twenty-three year old, I assumed it would be different somehow. I figured I'd be more prepared for a loss of this magnitude and be able to reason my way out of taking it too harshly. How arrogant I can be at times.

It's difficult to know how to react to something like this, even if you think you're wiser and more prepared for these types of things. But really this is just another learning experience. I think, on some level, the expectation is that all those years

Valencia with David

I went to Valencia with my roommate, David, last Sunday. He had a short race to run in the park, so I tagged along to get a better look at the city than just the airport (which is all I had seen previously). We left early Sunday morning and made the hour and a half-long journey, listening to Mike Oldfield and conversing in the surprisingly effective way that we do (I speak in Spanish and my roommate speaks some kind of Spanglish). I probably drove him mad asking about just about every road sign or interesting-looking city between Teruel and Valencia.