Friday October 1, 2010 – 9 am Spain
Well, it’s the first day of school – my 20th consecutive first day of school. However, this one stands out because this time I’m the TEACHER and not a student. So I guess my count starts over again and this is really my FIRST day of school.

Can't be without a "first day of school picture"



Here's Tad and Michael Lynn trying to figure out how to get to school (I embarrassingly had to pull my map out on my walk because I got a little lost).




The program told us that we should be ready to go to school today at 9am when the school day starts but I had been in contact with my coordinator at school and he said that we were having a meeting at 11:30 with the English teachers to talk about expectations and what not. I had emailed him about whether to come at 9 or 11:30 and didn’t hear from him before this morning. So I got all ready to go with Tad and Michael Lynn and Antonio (bilingual coordinator at my school) texts me and says that 11:30 is ok to come and this was at like 8:20. So, I have some spare time to catch up on all the exciting things that have been happening lately.
I finally have a home in Spain!!! Yay. We ended up renting the same piso (apartment) that is in the pictures from the previous post.

Here we are in the rental office signing our lives away for our piso



It’s so nice – our land lady (Maria) is still working on some things but we don’t really mind. She is so nice and has driven us around and helped us bring over our luggage from the hotel. She is pregnant and might be the cutest thing ever. She has lived in London for 10 years as a teacher and so she speaks English and Spanish. I always want her to speak Spanish but it has been nice when there are certain technical things that we had to discuss and we could easily communicate with her.
After deciding to rent the apartment, we had to do the only thing that was fair as far as picking which rooms we will all have – we drew from a hat. The three choices were BIG – ORANGE – BLUE (as there is a big master room, a room that is entirely blue and one that has orange curtains in it). Well, guess which room is mine????
I lucked out and drew the BIG room.

This is an initial picture.....it will look different soon, hopefully!



Tad picked the blue room and then Michael Lynn has the orange room. We spent a lot of time unpacking yesterday and Michael Lynn and I took a trip to Al Campo (the closest thing I can think of to Wal Mart in the US). We had to get some essentials (hand soap, dish soap, hangers, shampoo/conditioner, etc.) Some of our rooms are lacking storage space and so we are thinking a road trip to IKEA in Málaga might be in order once we get the car from Tad’s Uncle (Tad’s uncle lives in Spain and lucky for us has a car that we can use while we are here because he just got a new one). It’s a manual and Tad is the only one who knows how to drive a manual. Michael Lynn and I said he could teach us how to drive it but seeing our parking garage and how hilly this town is…..um, I might just let him drive me around  (thanks, Tad!)
We cooked a rather American dinner last night after Tad and I went to the store for a few essential food items (this of course included alcohol). We even ate a very American hour (around 7:00) because we hadn’t eaten the main meal of the day (at 2ish) and we were all starving. We made penne pasta with a tomato sauce with oregano and then we had a salad and of course the Spanish staple, bread. It was delicious!! After dinner, we had a champagne toast out on our balcony to our new home.




We sat out there for a while and just chatted about life and relaxed from the day.
I’ve only been here for a week and a half but it feels so much longer (Tad has almost been here 7 weeks and Michael Lynn nearly 4!) I am not missing too much from the US yet (though I did finally open the bag of goldfish I brought yesterday afternoon because I was so hungry and needed something to hold me over). I did finish the box of Mike & Ikes that I had brought with me – but there’s plenty more candy to be found around here so I’m not too worried!
I send my love and hugs to all 