Wednesday, December 23, 2009

I'm going to have a white Christmas!

Well, the weather in Europe has been especially brutal this winter and apparently Edinburgh has snow right now. Thats good in the sense that I will have a white Christmas but scary in case my flight doesn't make it. I am crossing my fingers and asking Santa to let me have a good 2 and a 1/2 week trip!

This week was very easy - seeing as we only worked Monday and Tuesday. Monday was especially fun because it was a San Sebastian festival day - Santo Tomas. This is an old Basque festival where hundreds of booths set up all over town and sell chistorra - a type of sausage - wrapped in a homemade panacake sort of bread called Talo and of course the Basque cider and wine. At one of the booths you could watch them make the talo in thier sausage covered booth. Quite amusing and delicious! I read in the newspaper that last year, the hundreds of booths collectively sold over 80km of chistorra - which I guess equates to about 50 miles of sausage! They also sell gifts and other holiday foods. It was originally a harvest festival when people from all over the area would meet in San Sebastian to sell what they had reaped over the summer. It is now just an all-day party where you can enter a raffle to win a 700lb pig haha. Seeing as it was a work day I went to the party in the morning with Madeline and her cousin and then worked after. Although many people dress up in the old farmer clothes, I didn't because the costumes are actually quite expensive, but our friend Heather dressed up and we took a picture with her - this way you can kind of see how half of the town looked on Monday!

In school we didn't do anything of merit this week - only Christmas arts and crafts. I haven't been feeling too well lately, with a bad cold, and so it was nice to be able to give them something to do and not have to talk the entire class. With some classes we colored these wooden ornaments for the tree and with others we made pop-up Christmas cards. These are my 12 year-old girls that I absolutley adore. It's fun to look at thier Christmas cards and compare them with the cards of the 8 year-olds. Quite an artistic difference 4 years makes! Yesterday, one of the girls in this class asked me what I had asked the 3 Kings for for the holidays (They don't have Santa - they either have the Basque Santa, Olenztero, or the 3 Kings that bring gifts). I said I hadn't asked for anything and was just hoping for a safe and fun trip. She said 'Amanda, maybe you should ask the 3 Kings for a boyfriend'. I started laughing so hard hahaah. So I guess Santa, if you're reading, my kids want me to ask for a nice Basque boyfriend hahah.

With my Christmas CD always on in the background, it was quite a nice few days of work and was a constant reminder that WOW Christmas is in a few days! I take an overnight bus tonight to start my journey, so I must run now to go start packing! Only about 9 hours until my super Euro-trip begins! I won't be taking my computer with me, so there will be no blogs until about mid-January when I return and can write them all. Sorry for that, but I promise when I finally DO write them, they will be about amazing places and I will have great stories and photos to share!

I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and that you start 2010 out with a bang! I miss you all and will be thinking about you during the holidays.

Feliz Navidad, Zorionak and Merry Christmas!
Besos!
Amanda

No comments: