Soon to be Stateside

After much ado, we have booked our tickets back to the US for a visit in January. We will spend about a week in NY and then head to Florida to visit family and take care of the final processing for Matthias’ green card (yay!) We fly into NYC on the 9th of January, when we will head up to the “Casa de Rose” in Highland Falls to get some warm clothes. We will probably be back in NYC on the 12th or 13th, and then fly to Florida on the 17th or 18th, where we’ll stay for about a month. Definitely looking forward to seeing people and visiting our favorite haunts!

For now, we are getting ready for a visit from Matthias’ family – his mother, father and grandmother – over the holidays. We plan to travel with them to Gibraltar – where I’m sure Matthias’ mother wants to practice her English – across the strait to Morocco for the day, and to Cádiz and surrounding villages. Then we’ll have dinner in our apartment on Christmas (because most of the restaurants will be closed.) We already bought some nice seafood at the market in Cádiz for Matthias to cook.

We enjoyed our little trip to Cádiz a few days ago. It has a beautiful old town with narrow winding streets, and is said to be one of the oldest cities in Western Europe (the Phoenicians were here some time before the Romans….) There are a couple of photos on the web album (link on the left side of this page.)

Since the lease for our apartment is up on January 4th, and we don’t leave Spain until the 9th, we are planning a little trip to Morocco after the new year. We haven’t figured out the details yet, but we’ll probably head to Fez, which I’ve heard is a very nice city, and not too long of a train ride from Tangier (where the ferry goes.) If anyone has any information about Morocco or Fez, please send it my way.
That’s all for now. Best wishes for a happy and healthy holiday season!

More Photos

Just a quick note to share some pictures taken in and around Tarifa. I'm now using a new online album...let me know what you think. The link is below, and on the left of this page.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jrosenyc/Tarifa

The Graduate

All is well in Tarifa. Went to class for the last time today (I enrolled for four weeks of class – can’t believe it went by so quickly!) The class was really fantastic – great teachers and fun conversations – in addition to the language, I learned quite a bit about Spanish history and culture. It helped that it’s the low season now…for the last three weeks, there was only one other person in my class, and (as I believe I mentioned before) he’s quite young and didn’t show up for a lot of the lessons. Therefore, although I paid for standard group classes, I ended up getting a lot of private lessons. Met some nice people, too. A bunch of us went out to dinner this week (see photo).

Uh oh, I’m really struggling to write this thing, which I think means I better start practicing English again!

Matthias is away this week; he had to go to Germany to take care of some family business. I’m meeting him tomorrow in Malaga, where we plan to visit the surrounding area and go back to El Pimpi for seafood. Malaga is about 2.5 hours away by bus, so we’re planning to spend the night.

I suppose I don’t have many “adventures” to write about, except that today I did have a run-in with the authorities. Okay, it wasn’t a run-in…they came to rescue me from my balcony. Okay again, not really a rescue, it’s just that I went out to bring in the laundry and – without thinking – closed the glass doors, which lock automatically. What made the situation somewhat of an emergency was that I had some water and pasta boiling on the stove. I yelled for help, but there was no one around, really! Fortunately (por suerte!) I had my mobile phone in my pocket, and was able to call Bastian, my classmate. He got the police, who got the bomberos (firefighters), who came and let me in. What I sight I must have been, standing there on the balcony like some imprisoned princess! It could have been worse, though. At least I was fully dressed, and the apartment wasn’t a mess. But I did burn the saucepan beyond repair.

But then there is some good news. We received word that Matthias’ green card (the 10-year version) has been approved. The annoying thing is that they need him to appear in person in Tampa to obtain the new card. While we were planning to visit next winter/spring anyway, this means that we need to go earlier – in January. Of course we’re excited to see everyone, but reasonably-priced flights are proving difficult to find, and even the expensive flights have three or more connections. Nonetheless, we plan to be in Florida in January and then come up to NY for a week or so in February. Of course, I’ll provide details when I have them.

That’s all for this installment. Time to go to the nearby bar/café where I can use the Internet to check for flights, copy this text to the blog, and, well, have the obligatory glass of wine….