No hay mal que por bien no venga

hi. sorry it's been a real long time..i forgot we had these little things called midterms. speaking of midterms, ya like the album title? 'member when i told you in my first post that i'm really bad with idiomatic expressions/sayings?? well, for my translation class we had to learn 50 idiomatic expressions in spanish. i don't even know any in english. but now i can even say that gift horse one in spanish! talk about learning experience (also the title in english means "every dark cloud has a silver lining")

anyways, i've got some good stories for ya today.

where should i start? i think i'm gonna go backwards so i can remember stuff.

SO today i had three midterms. yes three. 4 1/2 hours of straight test-taking. thats like the same as the SAT's but like worse because it's all essay. it was really fun NOT im actually really convinced that my spanish lit teacher things im the biggest bimbo there is and is extremely subjective when grading and thus refuses to give me a good grade. you can imagine how well i did on the exam today...yaaaaaaa. i lie. i actually don't think ive ever written two worse essays than i did for that midterm despite studying + paying attention in class (dont kill me yet dad!). sometimes ya just gotta get on the teacher's good side though ya know. too bad i dont have my own oven to make these... then i bet he'd give me a good grade. oh well.

speaking of food, i gotta tell you some stuff about madre.

last week sarah and i had the best week of meals. like everything our favorite, she made. AND SALADS! salads came with every meal. it was great. tasty. plus, i asked her for tea one time after dinner and then i got it every time after. it was delish. our bellies were very happy.

then we had a little incident. ya see, sarah and i are not really fond of the 9 hour time gap between lunch and dinner, so one time, when she was out, we snuck into the kitchen and ate some tostadas with marmelada. and i by some i mean we had one each. and mayybeee a tablespoon of jelly.

so then the next morning, while sarah and i are eating breakfast, she comes up to us and starts ranting in spanish about how there was enough cereal/toast/and jelly for breakfast last night when she went to bed and now there's not enough and blah blah blah asking us if we ate it. obvi sarah and i had to deny it - it was soo awkwardddddddddd but i mean sue me lady i got hungry! she was pissed. then she brought it up AGAIN at dinner that night and started mumbling something under her breath (i think a prayer for our souls) to which we ate in silence without the TV on. double awkward.

so now, since she's pissed, she's back to giving us nasty food (including the gross mushroom pasta she gave us tonight...) and salads are few and far between. sigh. maybe i should get her flowers or something. she keeps sending hints.

happy 21st carly! :)

yummmmm

in other news! let's go back to last week. last wednesday was carly's 21st birthday -happy birthday carly fries!- so we celebrated by going to a fancy lebanese restaurant (it was sooo gooooood) and got a delicious chocolate cake that literally had me drooling the entire meal. the rest of the girls went out but i, like a true nerd, had 5 hours of tutoring the next day, so i figured it would be best to go home. 

over the weekend, sarah fled to geneva to see a high school friend (jealous) so i held down the fort with feli here. luckily our friend megan maclean who is studying in Grenada this semester came to Valencia! so that was uber fun! she didnt get in until friday night so during the day, since we didn't have class and it was gorgeoussss outside, i went for a really nice in the parque and then met up with yackie again later in the parque for some gal talk. later that night i went to go get megan from the hostel she was staying in (because our madre told us we couldn't have people stay here even though other people's madres let them COOL). after meeting up with the rest of the crew, we mozied over to this really authentic italian restaurant that was sooo delicioussss. i got pasta w/ pesto and i think i devoured it in 3 minutes. for dessert i was convinced against my will to get the cheesecake because the waiter said it was the best (never heard that one before) but let me tell you...it was literally the. best. you could totes tell they made it from scratch; creamy goodness over crunchy shortbread crust topped with a homemade, warm strawberry sauce. im salivating.

since we got these flyers for a "nations party" earlier that day at this cool discoteca called Indiana, we decided to try it out. it was a really cool place...loots of study abroad people which was nice to meet other foreigners! they also played really good american music which was essential for the mood, ya feel me? on saturday i had every intention of waking up before lunch but that didn't happen so i ate lunch w/ madre. paella! the second time she's ever made it. this was before the breakfast incident though, back when she liked us and didn't punish us with meals. how does she know me so well?! anyway it was great and after stuffing my belly to the brim i rolled back over to megan's hostel and we wandered around valencia all day. on saturday night, madre said megan could come over for dinner. she made tortilla and chicken (fish for me) and for dessert she even gave strawberries and whip cream! she really liked megan and couldn't stop saying how sweet she was :-) i walked megan back to her hostel after the Feli Show (which was legit two hours and ranged in topic from franco to what constitutes a marriage) and we called it a night. 

Sunday was the first day of the partying before Fallas so they had this big parade/bomb-sounding explosions called "Mazcletá" in the BKP (they are going to have this festival every day at 2pm until Fallas) so it was a nice way for megan to spend her last day! sarah also returned from geneva just in time to see megan for a couple hours.

That was my fun weekend.

And then i had a paper and presentation due monday, an exam on tuesday, and THREE exams on wednesday. also, can i just say really quickly before this post turns into a novel, that whoever said the classes abroad are easy are liars. straight lies. taking five spanish classes is not easy unless you take grammar 201. taking five spanish literature classes is like taking five english literature classes but then having to translate and interpret everything you read. so like....doubly hard. ok im done ranting.

TOMORROW WE GO TO GRANADA  YAYYY

ALSO HAPPY 20TH BIRTHDAY ELIZABETH CACCIAAAAAAA!