Surprise, Surprise!

This was a week full of surprises! Lots of strange and crazy things as always, sometimes thing just work out, and sometimes they don't but it's always an adventure to say the least.

Monday morning I was awakened by a phone call, I looked at the screen and was totally confused because the caller i.d. said it was Mads but her phone had been stolen on the weekend, so my brain was just like wtf is going on?! I answered it, saying hello? and got a slightly confused '..hola?' on the other end, after realizing it was a spanish girl I attempted to speak in spanish in my half-awake state, turns out the girl had found Mads phone that night at Camborio but hadn't been able to contact me earlier because the phone had died and when she turned it back on she needed the PIN to get into the phone but of course she didn't know it, but luckily Mads had written it on a piece a paper and put it into the phone case because she always forgot the number and the girl had found it and then called the last number dialed aka me once she had access into the phone! Que suerte! We agreed to meet at a central location at 7pm and that was that. I was also lucky that she had called me because I forgotten to turn on my alarm the night before and she had called me at 9:45am which is about the time I need to get up for class so she saved me from missing my morning class too!

Immediately after getting off the phone with the girl I sent Mads facebook messages saying that I had found her phone and not to buy a new one because she had been talking about going to buy a new phone that day, of course she had already gone to class so I had no idea when she would see it, so I also tried texting two of her roomies to see if they knew where she was and to tell her the news if they saw her.

Thanks to the spanish girl I made it to school on time and suffered through my monday morning classes, nothing interesting as usual, until I got to POE... we had just started a new topic which was basically 'mysterious things' this topic lead into many interesting discussions which was great, until we got to religion, our prof asked us what we believe in and no one wanted to say anything so of course she asked me what I thought, I kinda just rambled about souls and past lives and whatever, then CrazyGirl pipes in with the whole god speel and something about how the rapture is coming and how we should all praise the lord.. in very bad, broken spanish. Silence. Then N somewhat aggressively states that she believes that you just die. And that's it. She seemed weirdly offended by CrazyGirl's views, then again CrazyGirl seemed offended by her too. Awkward situation. Then our teacher steps back into the discussion and asks who agrees with those opinions, that made things even weirder because a lot of people sort of agreed with N, and then CrazyGirl decides to ask the whole class.."te sientes seguro?" I'm not really sure whether she was trying to ask the class if we felt sure or if we felt safe but that just brought on more silence. Eventually the prof said that she didn't believe in god either and that was the end of class. What a weird class.

Tuesday morning I headed to Caja Granada bank to pay the tax for my residency card that all residents in Spain have to pay, I got to the bank and the guy at the desk was being pretty unfriendly, I had to fill out a government form which I didn't totally understand since it was all in spanish so I asked the guy a couple questions and he looked rather annoyed with me then kept asking me for a cuenta -check- to pay the fee but I don't have any checks because I can't open a bank in Spain until I have residency card ! I told the guy this and he just looked at me like 'well that's your problem not mine' so I just said gracias and left. Typical spain.Was so pissed off after that I just stormed off towards campus. Of course just after that I discovered that my headphones had ceased working while walking to class. Great. So went to Italian, learned nothing as usual, and then went to CL with Hiccup for our usual tapa touring/day drinking, got a little drunker than intended, of course, mostly because I didn't really have any food in my system. After that just headed home and whatever, then a friend invited me to go to paddy's bar with a few friends around 8:30 so I went to that, chilled with a bunch of scottish/irish people and then went back to CL to meet some american friends for dinner for fish and chips night. Delicious as always.

Wednesday wasn't feeling great, started to feel kinda sick tuesday night, so I ended up sleeping through my 2 morning classes on wednes. Don't think I missed much since my classes were have empty anyways, it was a long weekend so a lot of people left tuesday and wednesday to have more travel time, it's near the end of the semester anyways so whatever. Apparently there was only 6 people in my grammar class. Aha. I did drag my ass out of bed though to go to conversational class at 4pm, it was pretty interesting since we still on the topic of mysterious things, CrazyChristian and N weren't there though so the discussion was a little more calm and open which was kool. After class we headed over to the main plaza where the big christmas tree and christmas markets are to see all the lights be lit up, finally! They've had the tree and all the hanging street lights up since mid november, we've been waiting for them to be lit forever! There was a couple of school choir groups singing and the mayor of the city made a speech, we weren't paying that much attention because we were wandering the markets trying samples of cheeses, jamón, and chorizos. Finally they lit up the lights which were beautiful and cheesy and just made the whole city feel so christmas-y. I love them. It definitely began to feel a lot like Christmas. After that went and had some churros with hot chocolate to warm us up, it was rather cold out that night, they were so greasy and delicious of course.

Then we wandered the city, checking out all the lights and eventually stopped to get some dinner at a cervecería bar then it was time for our wednesday intercambio! We went back to the same bar went to the week before for the wednesday night intercambio, it's a nice little bar run by a lovely little british woman. This week me and my two friends ended up at a table with 2 americans and 4 spaniards, definitely had some interesting convos. Intercambios are definitely great practice, I spoke more spanish there then I probably had all week. When I got my Russian Love -not literally- messaged me on skype, was so happy! We talked and giggled for quite awhile, catching up with friends is so nice!

Thursday was a holiday so there wasn't any classes so I moved into the new apartment. Moving is such a pain in the ass. The girl moving into my room showed up around 11am and my room helped her move a bunch of stuff into my house, around 12 my Finnish friend Saara showed up to help me move, ash showed up a little while later to help too, so finally after about 3 trips I was more or less moved in, thank god the houses are only like 2 minutes away from each other. Once we were both more or less moved into our new places, me and the other girl went to talk to the land lady of my new apartment to sort out the finances and whatnot. She literally lives in the building just behind ours which is pretty convenient since my last landlord didn't even live in the same city. Their house/apartment, not too sure what it is, is really nice, clearly they're pretty well off. We met with the land lady and her husband, they were a really sweet older couple, both in their 60s   . She's definitely a chatty old woman, like most spanish women aha, but her husband seems to be a bit hard of hearing and was kinda confused during some of conversation, he also mumbled a lot to so it was kind of hard for us to understand him sometimes. Eventually we had to politely make our excuses to leave since we still had a couple other house things to sort out like keys and whatnot. They are a really nice old couple though, they even invited me over for Christmas dinner, so sweet!

Once all the moving was more or less done we all headed over to café for some lunch and then I started unpacking (which I still haven't finished doing), unfortunately the internet was down in the new apartment because the people we usually steal it from were on vacation for a week and a half apparently. Great. So I ended up going to CL and using their internet to skype mi padre. Found out my step-grandparents are vacationing in the South of Spain for a week and a half, which was a great surprise! And started making some plans to go and visit them.

That night at CL was a Finnish themed dinner because it was Finland's Independence day, Saara brought a bunch of her Finnish friends and then there was a handful of us Canadians/Americans. It was an awesome night! Lots of delicious food and interesting conversations, Finnish sounds so interesting and they have some pretty umm interesting music in Finland. Originally we were planning on going to an intercambio after the dinner but in the end we never did make it, Mads had to take off a bit early and then we just kept rounds of drinks.. around midnight I decided I needed to get home though because I had to get up early the next morning to go deal with the extranjero office again. But of course whenever you plan on having an early night it never happens. I got home around 12:30 and was just catching up on tv shows before going to sleep then some of the people from the Finnish dinner were texting me because a bunch of them went out to a club after the dinner and then J came over to apologize for not helping me move and to check out the new apartment.

Friday morning I had to go back to the extranjero office to finish my residency card process but before I could go there I still had to pay that stupid residency tax so I tried going to a different back near my place, this time it was so easy, just had to go to a machine, select the option I wanted and it gave me a number thing. Then when my number came up I just had to go to the desk, pay my fee with cash and that was it, no problem at all. I don't understand why it was so complicated the first time ! Bloody banks. Then I headed back to the extranjero officina. Luckily last time I had gone they had given me a number and a time so I didn't even have to wait very long when I got there, thank god. Got to a desk with a woman, she processed the last bits of my paperwork, took some finger prints which I found kinda interesting, she found it kinda funny that I was from Canada and was kinda asking me about Canada and the States and why I was so far from home, she was nice at least. Then she gave me some papers and told me to come back in 30 days to get my actual card. So all in all it was as horrible as I thought it would be to get my stupid residency card, although from what I've heard from other people, I was one of the luckier people.

After that I just went café hopping, still didn't have internet at my place so pretty much just went from one place to another using the internet and drinking coffee, was feeling kinda dead, long week and little sleep I guess. At the third café I was at Mads came and joined me and we hung out there for awhile then went to go meet our german friend Jules for coffee, yeah, more coffee, I know. We had made that coffee date a couple days before though.We ended up at this Spanish-version-of-Starbucks coffee shop, it was small and fancy and had lots of slightly over priced fancy drinks. Ended up having a chai tea latte, was the first one I've had in.. I don't even know how long, it was so good. Plus less caffeinated than all the coffee I had been drinking all day. Probably a good thing, I was pretty hyped on caffeine by then. We wandered around the city for a bit then I went home for a siesta and shower, was feeling so out of it all day, was definitely in need of a siesta and hot shower. After that went over to Mads and played some beer pong with boys, they were getting ready to go to camborio or wherever, Mads and I decided to have a chill night in instead. So we got some shwarma and watched How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days aha, awesome night.

Saturday was a lazy ass and spent a good portion of the afternoon in bed, eventually I got up and went to CL for some food and to use the internet. I pretty much did nothing with my day until about 7:30 when I went to meet up with some friends to check out the christmas markets and get some tapas, we wandered around there for a couple hours. Then just as I was heading over to Mads apartment I got a text from Mads saying they couldn't find TinTin which was a problem because they had decided to have a little surprise birthday for him. His birthday was the following week but he was going to Scotland then so they decided to have it the weekend before, etc etc. Luckily I had a pretty good idea of where he was. He's almost always hanging in Paddy's bar which just happens to be on the way to my place so I stopped in there and sure enough he was there having a drink with a couple friends. Then came the tricky part of trying to figure out how to get him back to the apartment at 10:30 (the original plan was for 10 but that was now out the window).. Luckily he came up with an excuse for me, checking his phone he saw that Mads had tried calling him and texting him and since he didn't have data on his phone he couldn't text or call her back and asked me to do it for him, then he mentioned that all the flatmates were planning on watching a movie together that night, so I pretended to text Mads and told TinTin that Mads said he should be home around 10:30 for the movie. Next thing I had to do was talk to P to make sure TinTin left paddy's around 10:30 to back to the apartment, so when P went to the bar to get another round of drinks I went with him and asked if he knew about the whole situation, of course he had no freaking clue. He was added into the fb msg only earlier that day and he can't read spanish very well so that's probably why.. Anyways I informed him of the plan and told him he had to get TinTin to the apartment by 10:30, then I made some excuse about having to go deal with roommate stuff and headed over to the apartment.

Originally the party was just going to be the flatmates plus a few other friends but then a bunch of other people were invited last minute, but if TinTin had come home at 10/10:30 like the original plan it would have just been the roommates and a couple other people but since he didn't actually show up until almost 11 -fail on P's part- there was probably 20-30 people in the apartment so the surprise was a pretty big one! Ahaha, it was great though, he had the most shocked look on his face for about 10 minutes after he came in, so funny. Was definitely a great party, lots of socializing, drinking, eating, etc. etc. I went home and passed out around 3:30am, didn't want to be out partying too late because Mads and I were planning on going to visit my grandparents the next morning.

Sunday morning definitely came way too early, we were going to catch a 9am-ish bus to the bus station to catch the 10am bus to Malaga, the plan was to meet at the bus stop at 9/9:15 but Mads ended up being like 2 minutes late to catch the bus we needed to get to the station -to be honest neither of us had no idea the buses actually ran- and the next bus wasn't for another 20+ minutes so that wasn't going to work.. Luckily a minute later 2 girls from my school showed up at the stop, I went over to talk to them and they were also headed to the main bus station to catch a bus up to the Sierra Nevada for the 4 of us decided to split a cab since it'd be about the same price as the bus. Good timing or what!

So we caught our bus to Malaga, once we got there we literally just had to walk across the street from the bus station to a big mall thing where the metro/train station both happened to be..so convenient. Then we caught the metro to this beautiful little seaside town about 45 minutes outside of the main city of Malaga to meet my grandparents. When we got there we had no idea where we were or where we were going, we only had the name of the hotel. We knew it must be near the beach front since thats were most of the big hotels were so we wandered down to the boardwalk area and eventually stopped in a restaurant to ask a guy for directions, he walked outside onto the boardwalk then pointed to a huge orange building about 200ft away with the name of the hotel in gigantic blue letters on the side.. well that couldn't be more obvious if it tried..we kinda fail. So we walked into the lobby, was definitely a very nice hotel and met up with my grandparents. It was soo nice seeing them. The weather was beautiful, so sunny and warm, omg was so happy, it was starting to get really cold in Granada so it was definitely a nice change. We went to a little restaurant on the other side of the boardwalk from the hotel for lunch and sat out on the patio, it was glorious. The whole time we were there we were wearing just our jeans and long sleeve shirts with the sleeves rolled up, no coats or anything, it was amazing!

After that Mads, my grandmother, and I went for a walk down the boardwalk to explore the area, it was a beautiful little town, had a nice harbour with some beautiful boats, lots of little shops and restaurants, awesome sand sculptures, etc etc. Eventually my grandmother got tired from all the walking to headed back to hotel. We went to check out their hotel room on the 15th floor then went down to the pool to meet up with my grandfather. We got some coffe and lounged by the pool for awhile, then Mads and I took off to go adventure around the city on our own for a little while. We walked down the boardwalk the opposite way and passed by a jungle gym and ended up climbing on there for awhile, gotta love childhood nostalgia. There was a bunch of areas on the beach with lounge chairs and umbrellas and things sat up but they costed money to rent -kinda ridiculous- so we ended up just chilling on this little strip of boardwalk down on the beach and lazing in the sun there for awhile. Was such a lovely afternoon. Eventually the sun started to set and it started getting cooler so we headed back to the hotel for dinner.

We had dinner at the hotel restaurant since there was buffet dinner offer there that my grandparents were already paying for. The food was so good, there was an amazing variety of food, it was so hard to decide what to eat, needless to say was sooo full by the time we finished. After that we just hung around in the hotel lounge area for awhile then figured we should get going to catch the metro back to the city. We didn't actually know what time the metro ran but we were planning on catching the 8pm bus back to Granada so we left the hotel about 7 to get to the metro. The metro was only like a 5 minute walk away but when we got there we discovered that the metro ran at 7:02 and the next one wasn't until 7:22 which was cutting it close since it took about 40-45mins to get back to the city. We got the metro back, ran to the bus station and discovered we were too late to catch the 8pm bus so we bought tickets for the 9pm bus and then went back to wander around the mall for an hour.

We eventually did get home, and when I got back I discovered my apartment finally had internet again! Huzzah! So happy. Although since we're actually using the internet from the girl in apartment 14 it's pretty slow and cuts in and out a lot. So we shall be getting our own internet in February. But yes, was quite the exciting week! Sorry this post is so late!


Dec. 3-9