Best Weekend in a Long Time

I had the entire weekend off which was really fun. I usually will end up babysitting one night each weekend, but it wasn't necessary this time. On Saturday, I was invited to a BBQ with  some other Au Pairs, and we just had a great time eating tons of awesome meat and talking for hours and hours.  They gave me this stuff that looked like a black meat with rice kind of mixed in it inside a casing. I asked what it was, and they wouldn't tell me until I was finished. It tasted really strange. It wasn't terrible, but I didn't really like it. Turns out, it was coagulated blood! YUCK! I'm really glad they didn't tell me until I was done.  I met a ton of new people there and it felt good to hang out and relax. Unfortunately they all spoke English, so I didn't get to practice my Spanish. I'm still working on getting more exposure.

Today, my new friends Anja, a Slovenian Au Pair, and Michelle, another American Au Pair, decided to go hiking to the top of the mountain. I've never been hiking so I didn't really know what I was getting myself into. Anja and I were complaining and breathing heavily before we were even out of site of the beginning of the trail.  We had lunch on the way, but we had no clue where we were going.  Michelle's "dad," Jose, explained how to get there in Spanish and Anja is the only one who can understand well enough, but apparently we should have had more people listening because we got very lost. At least we just kept trucking up the mountain, but what was supposed to be and easy trail turned out to be almost straight up.  We were basically on a cow's only trail because it was so steep and didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular just up. It was the most exhausting, terrible, fun, exciting adventure! We did manage to find our way to a proper trail on the way up marked by a white and red spot on a rock which was really exciting.  We got to relax at the peak for awhile before heading down.  At this point, what we thought was going to take two or three hours total had already taken 2.5 just to get to the top.  The way down should've been a breeze right? Wrong.  We somehow managed to get way more lost than the way up.  We just kept finding random trails taking us down, but when we finally got down we realized we were on the wrong side of this dam, but, determined not to have to retrace our steps by walking back up the mountain we decided to find an alternative. This led to crawling through picker-bushes and climbing down 10 ft sheer walls. I jumped and nearly broke my ankle at the end of this one.  Needless to say, we find our way back at the end of a 5 hour date pretty exhausted.  We were really proud of our wilderness survival skills. (Hud, if I would've had your machete, my life would've been a lot easier.)

So, we get back from all this excitement ready to just sit around and do nothing. I took the girls to my house for a break before they walked home, and I wanted to introduce them to Sally and William. When we got there, the kids were playing outside. The house is in a walled space as most places are in Spain, and Sally was excited to see us so she was standing on the top of the wall talking and telling us about her day as we headed up the stair to see her. Right as we were getting to the top, the dog hit her from behind and pushed her off the wall. I heard Anja gasp and I turned around just in time to see this poor little girl hit the stone floor ten feet below.  She was screaming and I scooped her up and ran inside. It looked like she had fallen on her side. I knew her head and neck didn't hit, but I was shocked she didn't break her ribs.  After several minutes of crying, she bounced back and went outside to play.  My friends and I all sat on a bench for about 20 minutes exhausted and in shock.  We were all just glad she was alright. She only has, in her words, "a sore bum" and a little bruise on her ankle.  She's a tough little kid.

I'm ready to start a new week. :)