The start of the new year...

After break was over, January turned into a dull month. There wasn't much going on in Alicante, or Spain, in the way of holidays or festivals. I found myself stuck in the daily routine of school.

On a couple occasions, I went out on the weekends with my host brother Luis and his friends. Those nights were pretty cool. We went bowling, played some pool, and one night we shot some darts. I enjoyed hanging out with them. It's interesting, the differences between the kids my age. The kids my age in high school (17-18, high school seniors) seem to mostly be interested in going out to the clubs on the weekends, while the kids my age in college (~18, college freshmen) seem to like other things like bowling, pool, etc. instead of the noisy clubs (although they do enjoy clubbing too). I'm not sure if it's just the people that I've spent time with or if it's something more to do with the age groups. Not that I'm saying that I don't like hanging out with my classmates or going to the clubs, it's just that I don't really enjoy that as much, so it's fun on occasion, but not often.

Anyway, something that I did do in January/February was a personal defense course. My friend Sofia asked if I'd be interested in attending a 4-day personal defense course at the beach community center, which is right across the street from our school, over the next 3 Saturdays (I'd already missed the first one). I wasn't really doing much of anything, and it did sound interesting, so I said I was interested. Anyway, since it was the first time they'd offered this course, the final day was interesting. They handed out certificates to the members of the class, then took us up to the cafeteria to have a snack (they said we'd go up and have a Coke, and there were even some people from the press there! Since it was the inaugural course, it was a important to them to find out how it went, how we felt about it afterwards, etc. While I didn't get interviewed, I did show up in a picture on one of the online articles (and in a group photo in one of them)! It was pretty cool and I'm glad I did it.

Here's the link to the one of the two articles (and the one I show up in):

http://www.laverdad.es/alicante/20090208/alicante/artes-marciales-poco-coco-20090208.html

Clockwise from top left: The class, the "Coke" that they prepared for us, close-up of me in the online article, and the online article where I showed up.

Anyways, that's about it for January and the first couple weeks of February.

I finally caught up with myself (mostly, since this is technically overdue) on my blog, so there are some new entries that I wrote, but I back-dated them, so they showed up on the date when I SHOULD have written them. On the sidebar, there's a spot where it has the year with an arrow/triangle by it. Click the arrow to drop down the list of the months, and then the arrow by the month to see the entries for that month.

Here's the link to my blog about Christmas in Spain:
http://erikinalicante.blogspot.com/2009/01/christmasnew-yearskings.html

I want to apologize again for not keeping this as updated as I had been and for taking so long to finally write in it, but I also want to thank those of you who continue to follow my travels and adventures here in Spain.

Un abrazo,
Erik

Currently listening to:
Song: One of Those Days
Artist: Joshua Radin
Album: Simple Times