Mid-week/Friday report,

Well its been a pretty busy week for me. Class wise the week started off with me in class by myself. The girls were returning from their trip in Morocco and got held up upon their return to Almeria. I had decided not to go because I hate tours or set trips especially to a country with such a high poverty rate. Although there stories of the trip sounded like fun it seemed far from the experience that I encountered this summer. Staying in a three star hotel with actual toilets and a swimming pool seems so far from sweating your ass off in a bug infested dump with a hole in the floor to shit in and perhaps a negative star rating if possible. Ok, so anyhow class went generally pretty well and for once my confusion was pretty limited. Monday night was an early one for me, doing nothing fun but enhancing my mine by reading a bunch.
Tuesday it was back to the usual class schedule with me being the odd man (literally because two other girl students and a women teacher) out because of my lack of vocabulary. It is really frustrating when you feel like your Spanish is getting progressively worse instead of better....The most enjoyable thing of class was me trying to argue the point that I did not find grammatical stuff as important as having a large array of vocabulary knowledge....and i think same with English, I think it’s far more important to have a large vocabulary then be a perfect speller because in time the one will lead to the other. After class I conducted an interview with a professor in the school of greenhouses here. I will write more about the interview in my next blog entry.
Wednesday....Happy Halloween!! Normal day of classes with nothing to report. The afternoon was set aside to wait for the arrival of my professor and chair of my committee to arrive in Almeria. She, her husband and one of their children are on vacation in Spain and were nice enough to make a trip to see me. At five (after I was starting to think she was a no show) I got the phone call and we met up. I took them to the Moorish fortress here in Almeria, then for some tapas, paella and then goodbyes. It was a short visit but still nice to see a familiar face. In addition, I got to learn a whole new world on Saffron. My professor is throwing around the idea of studying it and made a stop here in Spain to visit one of best known Saffron experts in the world. Now I know why these strands cost so much. Not only rare but great human care (rapid care) into preparing it.
Wednesday night was pretty fun and I dressed up as....well...I guess it would be an Australian cowboy with red and yellow stuff all over his face. Not too sure what that would be but that is the basic idea. Pretty fun but nothing to great.
Today I and 7 other friends went to the beach in Cabo de Gata. I posted a few pictures from the beach on my other site. It was really a beautiful day and I had a great time although a bit of a headache from the night. Just earlier it was movie night at a friend’s house...Resident Evil III and Hard Candy. The latter being the better of the two. RE was your basic action sci fi with lots of guns, hot babes, violence, and the norm....hard candy was good probably 3 1/2 out of 5. It just did not hit me as a great movie.
Well tomorrow or this weekend I will recap the latest interview and update everyone with anything else exciting that may have happened.

Peace and Love
Ty