Busy, Busy, Busy

Hola!
So,
A lot has happened since I last posted.

First, as I'm sure a few people know, the rest of my family came to visit me here in Jerez. From there we traveled to Malaga and Cadiz which was nice because I'd never been to Malaga and the beach in Cadiz is absolutely beautiful. I'm very excited to start spending all my weekends there before I leave, which by the way, is exactly two months from today! Of course, after I leave Jerez I'll be doing a little more traveling before I go back to the States but, to me, the day I leave Jerez is the day this year ends. I've never been more emotionally confused about anything in my entire life. I mean, on one hand, I can think about the fact that in just a little over eight weeks I'll be back home with my friends and family, in a place where I don't have to constantly think about what I want to say before I say it. On the other hand, I really have grown accustomed to my life here. Jerez is like a second home to me. The people here feel like my real friends and family, and I have a feeling that going back to speaking English all the time is going to end up boring me after a while. There's no challenge in it and I've come to learn that I need to be challenged or I will get extremely bored, extremely fast. Luckily I've signed myself for four AP classes next year which should be all the challenge I need for one year.

On a lighter note, I finally bought my flamenco dress last week! Feria is still more than two weeks away but I'm already super excited. People have been talking about this festival since literally the day that I got here. I'm not sure if I've talked about Feria before but if I haven't, it's basically like a bigger, longer, more amazing version of Clam Fest (for all the Yarmouth readers), for anyone outside of Yarmouth, picture the biggest fair you've ever been to and then double, maybe even triple it. The dress I bought is for the Sevillana dance that I've been learning. I don't have a picture of the exact dress yet but I'll put a picture of a slightly different one so you get the idea. The problem with the dress is, is that because I have broad swimmer shoulders instead of the typical tiny Spanish shoulders, the tailor has to make a lot of variations to the dress making it cost a fortune.. lucky me... (well, actually, lucky parents... heh heh)

I'm not looking forward to these next couple of weeks before Feria. Teachers, knowing nobody is going to school during Feria, have decided to assign a ton of homework and tests making me pretty stressed out. That, on top of my dance classes, on top of my new pact to go to the gym at least 3-4 times a week, on top of dress fittings, has me REALLY stressed out. The only reason I'm able to write this blog post is because I'd planned myself 20 minutes of nap time for today but decided that the time would be better used writing a blog post, considering how little I've been posting recently. Usually I do pretty well with stress but it's a lot harder when you have to add listening and speaking in another language on top of everything else. Basically, even though I just had one, I need a vacation.

In History, we've just started learning about World War II. Even though I already knew most of what was being taught, it was really interesting to hear what people had to say about it from a different country. Most people didn't even know what Pearl Harbor was, and had some pretty interesting opinions about the United States and their involvement. I can't explain everything because I still have trouble completely understanding what people are saying when they're not talking to me but, from what I understood, the general opinion of the class was that the United States had a very minimal affect on World War II. I guess when my classmates think of World War II, they generally just think of Germany and the Nazi's. Luckily, I have a really good History teacher here who is doing a pretty good job at enlightening my class just how complex that war actually was.

Anyways,

According to my pretty busy schedule, I now have to go the gym, then to a friends house to practice guitar (finally), and then back home for a nice fun three hours of homework.

Yayyy
Adioss

Cute, right?