Aaron Arrives!

Wednesday February 27, 2008

Lets just start out by saying that I didn’t sleep last night, for the record. It was kind of like the night before Christmas. I finally got up and went to class, which I struggled through because I couldn’t pay attention at all. After class ended I headed to the bar where I was to meet Aaron. If things were as planned he would be sitting at “Las Columnas” and waiting for me. As we walked up, Allison spotted a white arm in the distance and we automatically assumed that it was Aarons. After spotting a guy surrounded by luggage, I knew that he was our target. I walked up behind him and gave him a huge hug and then it kind of hit me that he was finally here! I couldn’t believe that he even made it to Spain, let alone to the bar by our house that I had given him. Apparently he had been waiting there for about an hour and a half and was more than ready to come with us to our house. I showed him his room and we moved all of his stuff in. Then we went upstairs; I gave him the grand tour of my house, and introduced him to Rocio. It was fun not being the one who had no clue what was going on for once. He knows a little Spanish, but the hardest part about “knowing” a language is actually speaking, which is quite intimidating and hard to do. We stumbled through that introduction with Rocio kissing him on both cheeks and he headed downstairs to shower before lunch. Lunch was a mix of Spanish and English, mostly translation, but its really nice having such a great host family who so kindly took him in as part of our family. He didn’t get to meet Encarna today because she had left already to visit her other daughter, Fatima, in Madrid for the holiday. After lunch we finished packing up and then headed to the bus station. We got on our bus at 5:30pm and we were on our way to the beach! After about a two-hour bus ride we arrived at our stop. Sam struggled with getting our luggage out from under the bus, as the driver almost shut her in the luggage compartment and drove away. Pochi (yeah, that’s the name of Encarna’s friend) came and picked us up at the bus stop and took us to the apartment. She’s a really nice lady, which I wouldn’t expect any less of her being Encarna’s friend and all. She showed us around the apartment, gave us maps, and told us where the best bars and restaurants in town were. Before leaving she informed us that she is our new “mom” for these next 5 days and if we needed anything we were to call her. After unpacking a bit, we hit the streets to find dinner. We ended up at a bar/restaurant called, “La Gloria.” It was definitely a small hole-in-the-wall bar and probably didn’t have more than 10 seats, but it was amazing. The bartender was great and we ordered dinner. We got a mix of different dishes but they were all delicious. As we went to pay the bartender insisted that we all have a round of shots, and he immediately took them out and poured them for us. The shot wasn’t bad, some sort of Vodka and fresh squeeze orange juice combo. We talked to the bartender for a while and he asked if were we from Canada (what?) and we rebutted that one for a while. He gave us his card, we paid (the shots were on him), and we headed out. We came home and went to bed, Aaron was tired from his travels (which I don’t blame him) and the rest of us were just being lazy. Why not? We are on vacation right?