bienvenido, pienso...

Hola from Bilbao, Spain! For those of you who don't know, I have moved to the lovely Basque region of Spain for the next two months to be the student art teacher to the lucky 7-10th graders at an English speaking school. After something like 24hrs traveling and three layovers later I have finally arrived in my destination, sort of.

After we got off the plane in Bilbao around 7:30am here, Dana and I called Maria, our landlady of sorts, to tell her we arrived and would be taking a cab to her house in the suburb of Getxo shortly. This ideal situation turned out to be more problematic than anticipated, seeing as she is in Madrid until Sunday. Oops. Several harried and expensive phone calls later we found out that our program advisor was unaware that we would be arriving on the 4th, even though she told us to be here by the 6th, at which point Maria would still have not been home.

We were aware that tomorrow is La Día de los Reyes, or Three Kings Day, which is Spain's bigger and better version of Christmas. What we didn't know is that it is customary to take a long weekend holiday to the big cities of Madrid and Barcelona.

SO after several small heart attacks, Dana and I got a cab ride to Bilbao. We explained to our patient driver we needed a hostel that was muy, muy barato and instead he dropped us at a ritzy, 80 Euro a night hotel. The hotel directed us to Ganbara, a much hipper and affordable youth hostel in el Casco Viejo in Bilbao, to which we were toted by a much surlier cabbie. And here we are, drinking 2 Euro wine and without flip-flops to protect our feet from the shared showers. We spent the afternoon wandering the area, attempting to find something to eat and get prepaid phones, both which were mildly successful yet unaided by my disappointing ability to speak Spanish. Luckily, we have a handsome and helpful New Zealander working the desk to tease us for being from New Jersey and reassure us that Bilbao is cool.

Which it is! It's absolutely beautiful here. The area surrounding the airport was rural, like the area our school is in, and full of hills and random sculptures and muted color schemes. The city itself is an eclectic combination of beautiful, intricately detailed old edificios and brown 60's style architecture. The area we're staying in is full of little shops and restaurants that don't serve food before 8pm. Which is fair, we're uncool for wanting to eat at 6pm. But we hadn't eaten since our American Airlines dinners, so cut us a break, Bilbao. As awkward as our situation is, it's an adventure and is something I will look back upon fondly, even though all I want now is the apartment I'm supposed to be paying una brazo y una pierna for.

Pictures will come as soon as the shock wears off,
Kelsey