Gran Hotel Husa Don Manuel Cáceres

Thursday and Friday the 1st and 2nd of October I had a 2 day orientation in Caceres. I met so many great people, and I barely made a dent in the number of people that were actually there. I'll give you a run down so you can get an idea of how it all went. We arrived Wednesday afternoon, and I made my first 3 friends--Colten (Georgia), Joe (South Dakota), and Davy--getting off the bus from Madrid and waiting for the bus to the albergue (hotel ...

... parents. At this moment my inner-monologue murmered , " O ****, now I have to speak Spanish." This was a opportunity that had evaded me the whole summer. Saying that my Spanish was rusty would have been like saying a pasta strainer tends to leak. Not only this, but I hoped to make a good first impression for the family I would be living with for 6 months. I drew deep breaths and formulated sentences as we filed out and were ...

Today is my final rest day of the trip and I am spending it doing the usual list of chores. Tourism Office here (which is not the easiest to find) opens at 8.30 am so after a hearty breakfast I popped in for info on internet cafés and a laundrette. With marked-up map in hand I strode to the other side of town for what had been described as the only laundrette in town. Unfortunately it was not a laundrette it was a dry cleaners, so it was back to the hotel ...

... in the dining room at 8.30 am (now THERE´S a surprise!) the attendant really made a fuss of me. After breakfast she even carried my bags down three flights of stairs! On the way out of town I stopped to buy some water and juice and not bothering to don my reading glasses it was only later that I discovered the juice was in fact a carton of orange juice with soya milk! It wasn´t bad to drink and a lot better than I´d thought. I picked up the N-630 straight away and started a slow but ...

... of the church's tower, which showed amazing views of the city. We then went to Pizarro's House, which has now been turned into a museum devoted to the exploration, and conquest, of the America's. It had interesting photographs and artifacts from Latin America, as well as copies of letters written home by Pizarro when he was in the Americas. Lunch was, by far, the highlight of my visit. We ate at a restaurant off the Plaza Mayor ...

... We then had a tour of the old town (called the Casco Antiguo or Ciudad Monumental), which you enter through the preserved town walls off of the Plaza Mayor. The medieval old town was eerily empty except for touring groups like ourselves. Adding to the "ghost town" feel was the fact that almost all of the buildings are made of the same sandy stone and that it was such an overcast day. We walked all around the cobble ...

... hours a day 7 days a weeks for the last 4 months with the one you love can be an exhausting period... if not, please let us know your secrets. The program started out with a 3 hour bus ride from Madrid to Caceres where seating arrangements were set up so that one English speaker (the English speakers where from the U.S., Britain, Ireland) and one Spaniard wold sit together. Conversation was a bit rough at first since you are sort of forced ...

... European. Closed on Mondays !!! This was weird. Normally, you expect things to be closed on Mondays, but everything so far had been open. The house in Medura, the Alcazaba in Trujillo, but not ****ing here. There is meant to be the largest amphitheatre in all of Spain. This just means we have to come back. **** it Jerez Because this is a ****ing Monday, we had loads of time to kill, so foot to the floor, pedal to the metal, we thrashed the ******* to Jerez. We ...

... to do it. He said that the only reason a person would dedicate that many years of his life of carvings of Mary, would be that he had accepted that at some point of his life, he was going to die. It wasn´t a pay check for him...he wanted to leave a mark. And he did. A big one on the wall of the Cathedral in Seville. During my siesta this afternoon, I had a dream in Spanish. My first one since being here. And go figure that it was of me having a conversation with a dog. More later.

... looks like he is wearing a white t-shirt. Anna suffered a vicious attack from a bee that wanted inside her hoodie, but aside from that, no casualties besides a painful 6th toe that is plaguing Lucie. The area before this was pretty neat, it was more farm land and lots of hilltop plateaus, mesas, and rocky, shrubby fields. Lots of rocky cliffs. And before that- forests galore. We´re doing more sleeping under the stars these days, sans tents- tarping it while ...