casacollins

Hi!

Things are rolling right along here. We went over to see a new friend in our neighborhood on Sunday and had a great time. The wife/mom is British and the dad is Spanish, but teaches English at the university of Granada! Their daughters go to Granada College and one is in Reed's grade! They're very nice and have lifted the veils of ignorance off of our non-Spanish speaking fog! In the meantime, a friend of theirs shared these photos of our neighborhood with them and they decided to spread the wealth--lucky us!

The first photo is our neighborhood/urbanization/subdivision/development, Parque del Cubillas. Our house is a third of the way down the middle (main) road. Take a right and we're 4 houses down.

The second is our school and fields on the left side of the photo. Cubillas is on the right. Not a far walk at all!

The third shows our house the best. See the greenest pool in the middle of the photo? Our house is the white one with the orange ceramic tile roof. Where's Waldo? Actually you'll find him in our garden in the lower right hand corner of that greenish pool.

The fourth is a great shot of the whole area. There's been a bad drought here--worst in 15 years so the water in the resevoir has receded a lot. You can see a shooting range in the woods (orangeish fields) and a boat dock where people go sailing, wakeboarding, skiing, the works! Granada College is on the left side about halfway up the photo.

The last pic is another great view of the whole area. The trees in the fields are mostly olives and some almonds.

These pics were taken for some new development that is coming in a few years. Development is rampant and poorly planned according to Tony, the Spanish friend who gave us these photos. I don't think there's much activism here and who knows how this beautiful countryside is going to survive development.

In other news, school has started! The kids are in school from 9:20 to 5:00 every day. All three kids. Today I told Mark that I feel like a retiree! Actually, the class part of school seems to be good on this the second day. It's the lunch that's killing them. Apparently the older kids have to eat their entire 3 course, home made, Spanish meal. Yesterday they had gazpacho as their first course! Tomorrow it's lentils and seafood stew. Lydia got out the dictionary to translate the menu and exclaimed that the featured dish tomorrow is eel. I'm hoping there was a type-o. Yowza. Anyway they'll have roast chicken, fries and ice cream on Friday. They are required to eat the whole meal and do not get recess until they're done. Somehow we missed those details in the orientation for new, clueless parents. Meanwhile at home, I'm trying to stay calm and tell them how this is all new and takes some adjusting and it will all be fine and hang in there and at first everything is different, blah, blah, blah. They'll be fine, right? Right!

Tomorrow we head back to the car dealer (our 4th trip) to finally, hopefully buy a car. It's a used VW Golf. Who knows what year or how many miles...we haven't gotten to the number section in our book yet! No really, it seems great and will meet our needs just fine. After spending a half hour trying to figure out stuff at the bank today we think we'll have everything together tomorrow to finally buy the darn thing! It's deisel so we hope to be savvy consumers.

I can't really go on writing without a comment about Katrina. That disaster has been all over the news here. It's very strange to be so far away yet still feel a connection to that news. We watch the news (in Spanish!) when we can and Mark keeps up with stuff on the internet, but it is weird to be so far removed. It's been interesting to read people's e-mails to us about that.

Okay, all for now.

Hasta Luego!