Posted 9:26 AM by MelanieandSteve
4-4: Still in Aguadulce where a very kind internet shop has given us some free internet time. What a luxury for us. You appreciate it more when you get used to spending dollars on the hours, sometimes for substandard computers.

Anyway, some of you have asked some questions in your emails. Many of your questions echo other people´s questions. We thought we´d post these answers to questions asked by our friend Art:

How is your Spanish coming along? : In some ways good, but not nearly as good as I (Melanie) hoped. It is coming quickly, and I love trying to talk to people whenever I can. I´m at about 30 percent understanding. I had hoped to get fluent, but I had assumed we´d find a spanish speaking family to live with which would have made fluency come quickly. For having not lived with a family, and for having to seek out people to converse with, I think I´m doing OK. I still look forward to the South America part of our trip where I think Spanish will be more inexcapable (which is good). Steve and I are both studying a ¨Speed Spanish¨ course that we brought along with us on paper. Steve says his Spanish is coming back as well.

Is the living cheap? : Relatively. This week, Steve and I are on a beach front hostel on the mediterranean, for 11.90 Euros a person (about 13$ a person). That comes with free breakfast. Steve and I also buy a lunch each day for about $5.00. It´s huge and multi-course, so it´s enough for Steve and Me to share and still have some left over for a free dinner. Living is cheap, but only because we do things to make it so. (however, London and Paris were NOT cheap no matter what we did.) It all depends on where we are.

I hear they don't go out until 11 or 12 pm, and stay out all night. : This HAS been the case in many of the Spanish cities we´ve visited. Not all. Such as Madrid, they do stay out all night but only on weekends. Some places seem to do it all week. I on the other hand get tired. The most staying out all night we saw was during Carnaval when I don´t think the partying ended ever at any part of the day.,

Do people ask you about the war? : Yes, and I do enjoy discussing it and formulating my own opinions (I find it interesting that the news coverage we get here is likely different from what you get - probably the same facts, but with different slants, and may be a little more Aljazeera footage.) But sometimes the questions about the war can be very difficult because of the language barrier. My Spanish is SIMPLE, but the answer to the war question is COMPLEX. The week the war started we went to Portugal, and there, our communication was basically ¨Yes¨or ¨No¨, and people still wanted me to express an opinion. That was tough. Most people here, by the way, are adamantly against Bush´s actions. The day the war started, they burned a US flag in the square in Lisbon, Portugal. (Ironic because we had chosen to go to Portugal to avoid possible hate-American-ism in Morocco, where we´d planned to go the day the war started.) Consequently, we shared a floor of our Lisbon hostel with 6 or 7 Arabs from Egypt. None of us spoke Portuguese and they didn´t speak much English. But we tried to talk about the war a lot, with great difficulty. Sometimes, when we were all watching Portuguese television news coverage together, they would interpret the Arabic writing on the Aljazeera news clips for us.

Are they hospitable? : Every city is different. For the most part, everyone has been hospitable. Here in Aguadulce, the people are some of the warmest, most friendly people we´ve seen. I try very hard to speak with people, or at least say hola when I pass them on the streets, and I think how WE are helps define how hospitable THEY are. I´ve had some very special interpersonal experiences. To me that´s probably the most important part of this trip.

Posted 12:17 PM by MelanieandSteve
4-3

Writing from Aguadulce, Spain

Steve and I are taking a little break from running from cool place to cool place and have decided to stay a week in one cool (actually wonderfully warm) place. Aguadulce is in a warm, dry part of spain just west of Almeria. We are staying in a youth hostel right on the Mediterranean Sea. We´re using this time to enjoy the sun, run errands, catch up on cyber-errands, and generally rest and enjoy.

What I like best here is that the people are super friendly and happy. We go through town after town and each town has a personality. So far, Sevilla and Aguadulce have shared the warmest, most outgoing people. (Almeria, where we thought we were going to stay just east of here, was disappointing in part because the people seemed very closed and unhappy.) So now we´ve found what we´re looking for and we´re going to take advantage of it.

In the last blogspot on 3-29 we wrote that at we found an affordable hostel in Sevilla. Well, in the morning, the hostel said that the price we heard wasnt the price they said. They wanted 20 Euros more. Could be a communication error, but Steve and I heard the same thing. Interesting thing is they had us locked in and we couldn´t have just said, ¨this is what we´re paying and we´re leaving.¨ We had to pay in order to buy our freedom. So I loved the Seville I saw outside the hostel, but that hostel has got to go. If you ever go there, stay away from Hostel San Francisco.

I¨m keeping track of a list of expensive lessons learned on our journey from being tourists to being travellers. I´m at a grand total of 32 dollars lost for invaluable lessons learned (20 of those were at that San Francisco Hostel.) (5 by a pick pocket in Granada) (7 by the swindler in France that I wrote you about at the beginning of this trip). I could also make a list of money saved because of lessons. We´ve seen and stopped pick pockets, we´ve seen store attendants try to short change us but we´ve called them on it. Generally, however, I must comment that Europe has been very honest, friendly, and safe. I feel safer on a city street here than I would in some big cities in the U.S. So don´t worry about us, we´re enjoying studying the ways of the world.

But I digress, enough negatives. The freedom and beauty of travel is invigorating. Every day has been a blessing, especially here in Aguadulce. The Hostel we´re staying at is sponsored by Hostelling International, which means that it has certain standards and is likely to be very honest. Also, it has a great dining facility, ocean front property, and cute little cabanas (apparently converted quansit huts), a grass courtyard full of lots of trees with singing birds. It´s the down season, so Steve and I are about the only guests here (other than a group of school children here for summer camp - or spring camp.) It´s a long walk up the coast along a dirt road before we reach any touristy parts of town, and we´ve enjoyed many a stroll.

Happy Birthday Kara, yesterday
and Stefan the day before.