It has been a while since I have written, yes, but I figured it would only bore you to hear of how little has been going on here. However, I've had a few randomly interesting experiences over the last two weeks. One of them was the surreal experience of going all the way back to San Francisco just to pick up my visa because of a consulate difficulty--at three days in the air and three there, it earned the dubious distinction of the shortest trip to the US in the history of the school.
Another has been teaching this conversational English class to high schoolers three afternoons a week. Each of these classes is entirely different, and they're all very curious about the US, California in particular. Lucky them, that's where I'm from. What's amusing is that two of the groups just want basic vocabulary on how to not get lost in a city, etc--the other very specifically wanted to know everything there is to know about having fun in Los Angeles and Hollywood. That group also had really random questions about where "Springfield" is. With my roughly hand-drawn map on the chalkboard, I felt the need of a good US map terribly. I may buy one in Carrefour this Friday.
We had our first choir performance this last Sabbath, to kick off Week of Prayer. The speaker took so long first service that by the time it was our turn to sing, we didn't do nearly as well as we could have. The teacher, frustrated, managed it so that second service, we sang before the sermon. It sounded much, much better.
That afternoon, I did something really stupid. Bored and curious about the castle that had been staring down at us the entire time here, my friends Jenny and Lillian went with me to explore the castle which crowns the town of Sagunto. Why was this stupid? Because only an idiot would not recognize that the looming dark gray clouds meant rain. This registered on a very theoretical level, but we were too eager to have fun to pay it much mind.
We had a great time exploring the castle. It is a beautiful old thing, a mixture of Roman and Gothic architecture, and surrounded by cactus, oddly enough. We took all kinds of pictures, enjoyed the view, and then. . . came the rain. It came lightly at first, merely refreshing. Then it fell in great drops, slickening the path so that Jenny fell and twisted her knee. I had prepared for rain, but she had not--I lent her my umbrella, as I had a good rain coat, but I had left the raincoat's hood way back at the dorm.
Pretty soon, all three of us were waterlogged, stopping in a supermarket to dry off. Lillian got a plastic bag to cover her head, but it did not do much good. Shivering, cold, and wet, we could hardly see the way back over the bridge to the road that led to the school. Much to our profound joy, someone from the school was driving along and that road, saw us, and took us back up to the dorm, making us vow to put on dry clothes and never try to go to the castle in the rain again. No argument there--that is burned in my brain as something I will never, ever do again.
Since then, it's been a fairly routine round of classes, though today we had the fun of performing Spanish folk songs in Folklore class. Much to my consternation, both my group and another picked the same song, Mar y Cielo, but it turned out all right in the end, when the teacher had us combine to teach it to everyone. The video of that is online--we certainly had a good time with that.
Please pray for me to learn patience. I have become frustrated with two things: the rain, and the habit my deans have of locking the doors of the dorm during the Week of Prayer meetings. I would go to worship even if the door weren't locked, but it just makes me irritable to feel like they don't trust me enough to do this on my own. It tempts me to spend the worship hour somewhere else on the grounds writing just to make a point, even though I know in my head that would be counterproductive. It's a part of Adventist culture I've had the good fortune to avoid so far, but is just a part of the way things work here.
At the very least, I'll have a week to cool off from this as myself and the other ACA students travel to Andalucia starting this Monday. We will see all kinds of things I'd always dreamed about seeing in Spanish class back in the states, like Seville, Granada, Cordoba, and even a small bit of Morocco. I hear there's lots of sun in Andalucia; I certainly hope so, as the unseasonable rain here is really starting to get me down. When I saw the sun yesterday, I nearly cried, it was so beautiful.
Hope life is treating all of you well, with lots of sunshine and good music.
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