New Year New Beginning

Happy New Year!

The last weeks before my family came to visit were getting pretty rough and I was finding myself in a place I truly didn’t want to be in. So the 2 weeks in Malaga traveling with family were therapeutic and allowed me to re-evaluate my time in Spain and make a plan to improve the situation. 

I fell in love with Malaga while I was traveling around with the fam and am going to plan a time to go back and visit to spend more time there and feel it out some more. Malaga has a beautiful center of town, is near the beach (the med!), and has 2 vegetarian restaurants! Mainly Spaniards live there and there are few English speaking tourists but in the 3 towns nearby do have a good population of English speaking tourists for the times you need to be around the native language. 

My Mom and Mike and I had a wonderful trip and did a lot of traveling as well as a lot of chilling out, something that was desperately needed. Our hotel also had some English channels on TV which meant a fun surprise for me, American movies...in ENGLISH!!!

We also visited Cordoba, Granada, Sevilla, and Gibraltar. In Gibraltar we traveled up to the top of the “Rock” and went into an incredible cave and then took a tour of the WWII tunnels that were occupied by the British military who actually lived in the Rock for about 3 years. No map has ever been made of the tunnels so that no one will know their exact locations. We learned that the American military used these tunnels to practice when they were preparing to go search for Bin Laden. 

There are also 300 monkeys living in Gibraltar and we got up close and personal with them as our driver had one jump on me without telling me first, after he had just told the tour group not to touch or feed them because they bite. So I was not too pleased with the surprise but gave the monkeys a second chance for a photo. 

Coming back to Barbate was a bit of a struggle as I was already missing having my family with me but I tried to be positive and optimistic. The evening I got back was a Saturday night and I had planned on going out with my roommate Mirna. She was not feeling well though so she gave me Mario’s number, one of the guys I had met before I had left. So I went out with him and his friend to a bar that a bunch of their friends had rented out for the holidays. I was able to make some new friends and get a lot of Spanish practice in and actually stayed out late and had a great time! I also befriended a guy that I had seen at the gym and am working on making him my new Spanish friend! :)