Zodiaco Bailen

... the side of the road. I managed to duck sideways in my seat and avoid one but the other caught me in the upper left chest just at the neck line of my leathers. It hit me hard enough to move me back in my seat and it went flying lifelessly to the side. After we pulled over to look at the damage, I was relieved to see just some redness in the area of impact and some minor bruising. There would surely have been serious bruises and ...

... begin teaching. I met all three of the bilingual program coordinators who were very nice and very eager to begin the program. This is the first year they will be doing it so they said they would need my help very much considering even the coordinators do not speak perfect English. The school is the city high school in Jaen and is called Jabalcuz. It is an I.E.S....Instituto Escuela Secondario, a secondary education institute, a high school in the US... Within it is the high school and an ...

... back down to Granada, spend one night in a Hostel, and then catch an overnight train to Barcelona, where we plan to spent a good bit of time. By the way... sorry about the lack of photos lately... we've still been taking quite a few pictures, the problem is that... well the problem is that I don't feel like going through the whole process of transfering them, picking out the good ones, re-sizing and then uploading them. Maybe tomorrow :-)

... to practice and we've even learned a couple of good idioms and a few dirty words, which is always handy. They manage to work a tiny lesson into almost every topic we discuss, without disrupting the flow of conversation. Since there is not a whole lot to "see and do" in Ubeda, we've also had some extra free time to lounge out on their gorgeous patio and improve our tans. We've also taken some day trips outside of Ubeda. More to come soon...

... and we would stop to chat (charlar). One person we ran into was a friend of their oldest son (Jose 27), out taking his two year old son for a walk in the stroller. A lot of men here in Spain do a lot of the child care and appear to be very active parents. In this case, Moses had suffered some brain injury from a car accident and was unable to work, so his wife worked and he cares for Ramon and does the house work. Ramon is just two, but looks ...

... or from Laura herself. But the time difference, and technical difficulties kept us from the computer and Laura was somewhere on a road-trip, out of cellphone range. It would have to wait for another day. We decided we needed a drink to cheer us up and went in search of El Gallo Rojo. Luckily, the owner of our hostel knew exactly where it was and directed us 3 blocks down the street. SWEET! "Dos cervesas grandes, por favor ...

DAY 4 - Jaen, Bedmar Still full from stuffing ourselves Spanish style the night before, we were out the door by 7:25 am to catch a ride with a coworker to Bedmar. I was taking Justin to work with me, and all my students, from grades first to sixth, were eagerly awaiting his arrival. Not just because they'd get to practice English with someone new, but because they'd finally get to meet ...

... of you not lucky enough to have Señora Blanc for Spanish, or who haven't heard of her techniques, "Silla Caliente", which means "Hot Seat", is one of the hardest things ever. Basically, she hands out a paper with 10-15 questions in Spanish that we had to write out answers to. Then, in class, we had to go up one by one without our sheet of answers and we had one minute to answer as many questions as we could. We had to speak in complete ...

... the remains of the once connected small town (Alcazaba)which now is just a few squares in the dirt, ruined walls and a still intact watchtower complete with a spiriling staircase that leads you to an amazing view of the now bustling Granada. Plus some hotels, souvie shops and small musuem. Origianlly it was a 9th century fortress then in the 13/14th centuries the Nasrid emirs turned it into a fortress-palace adjoined by a small town. It ...

... bar today. Cerveceria International, has 250 different bottled beers and 15 european drafts. That's enough to rival my collection of bottles, pretty impressive. So we stopped by and the 3 of us that went all tried something different. Pretty neat place. I'll have to take pictures just to express the amount of bottles on the wall. It's been a long day in the sun, time to crash, hope all is well.