Sunday continued

So meeting was great. We didn’t realize that it was going to be such a long continuous thing so we were kind of holding on until the end of the hour for bathroom breaks. Not anyone else though. Every single person walked out of meeting at least once. Also all the girls wore pants and since it was absolutely freezing, we were more than a little jealous! After meeting they made an announcement in Spanish and then looked expectantly at us, we managed to decipher that they wanted to take us out to lunch. We all walked down the street to this huge mall and went to a Chinese buffet. There’s something a little funny about a couple of Americans, some Bolivians and a Canadian going out for Chinese in Spain! LeAnne accidentally ate OCTOPUS!!!!! She mistakenly took some salad that she thought was just vegetables and didn’t realize what she was eating until she had taken a huge bite of it. Upon closer examination, she realized the purple roots she thought she was eating still had tentacles attached!!!!! Needless to say, the rest of the salad was not finished. The other girls thought this was pretty hilarious but they weren’t the ones with the mouth full of squishy stuff. After the meal our hosts wanted to know if we would like to go shopping at the mall. Silly question! OF COURSE we would like to go shopping!! We went thru several stores and ended up at the grocery store since we all like food pretty well. After that they volunteered to drive us all the way back to our hostel instead of just to the metro stop. We were happy not to have to ride the metro back and thought we could just sit back and relax. Wrong! The car LeAnne and Char were riding in apparently wasn’t used the weight of foreigners and kept dying on the hills! We were a little freaked out especially since it was heavy traffic and we kept rolling back down the hills. We never actually hit anyone, for which we were very thankful but we came very, very close and had a more than our share of car horns. Glad to be out of the car, we decided that we really needed to see some people who spoke English, so we thought we would change our tickets to go to Barcelona and see the Brown boys. We hopped on the metro to go to the train station and were able to change our tickets with no problems. As the only non spanish speaking girls in our group, Amanda and LeAnne were elected to speak to the hostel lady and let her know we would be leaving a day early. We had learned earlier from our Italian buddy Simon, that the owner understands English very well, but prefers to use rapid-fire Spanish in an attempt to confuse poor, unsuspecting tourists. Stomping our feet, saying 'no comprende' every time she tried to use Spanish and a little attitude was all it took. After five minutes all details were taken care of. We went back to our favorite Turkish place and got some dinner and even free dessert from the owner who obviously remembered the five cute Americans/Canadian. Back at our hostel, we met up with the Councells and their friends. Apparently we girls were a little too loud and excited to meet up with friends for our hostel lady. She actually opened up our door twice to poke her head inside and tell us to be quiet. Okay this is the end.

LeAnne