Week number two...

A week filled with more random fiestas, hangovers in class, sunbathing on the beach, fanta limon and too many salami and cheese sandwiches. It is all so simple but just so good! Thursday night we had a lovely ‘family dinner’ at Jeanne’s. The food was good and it was a great night. However, red wine in ring of fire is just not a good idea!

I love Malaga

Hangover in class.

'Ratchet' fish day

Family dinner at Jeanne's

I had to return home on the Friday because of the news I was given about my Dad. Unsurprisingly, it was the most horrendous day of my life. I paid £350 for a cramped monarch flight and had to wait 6 hours before I could get on it, it was just a disaster. Regardless, I needed to be home so Charlee took me to the airport and I got home safely.

Because of this, I obviously have had to miss a few weeks of my year abroad experience. I will be returning next weekend and am really looking forward to seeing all the friends I’d made, and basically just try to get back to normal in my new life and enjoy my year, just as my Dad would want me to!

So for now, that’s it… I will make sure that upon my return I actually try to do my blog posts as they happen!

Hasta pronto! Muchos besos x 

A 21st to remember!

8 days in and it was my birthday. Craziest birthday ever! Strangely enough, my birthday is a public holiday in Spain, which instantly put a spanner in the works for the plans we had made for the day! I was originally planning to go to the internet café next to our apartment, but that was shut due to the holiday, annoying. So, I celebrated in the morning by taking a trip by myself to McDonalds where I sat outside by the port, stealing the wifi and having a cheeky Skype call with my family back home. The plan was then to go shopping, which also fell through due to the silly festival, so instead Charlee and I went for a coffee before going to meet the others to go to the beach! Charlee and Chelsey sang happy birthday to me with a pan au chocolat ‘birthday cake’, which was the cutest thing ever!

We sat at the beach all day, Brad bought 3 bottles of champagne which was amazing! Caleb joined us, who always was celebrating his birthday that day. We all went for dinner, went back and got ready to fiesta big time. We had drinks at ours before heading over to Ektors where I was given a whole bottle of champagne, and shots, and cocktails. In fact, I’m not even that sure what I drunk! I know we went to London club and somewhere else afterwards. Sara made me drink tequila which I haven’t done since the first night of freshers, and I hadn’t done it for a reason!! However, despite my normal ‘TC’ whilst drinking, it actually did not occur on my birthday…massive HOORAY. After the night, we went for pizza at 6am, something that is just so acceptable in Spain. A whole pizza for three euros is an absolute bargain! We all sat outside for a while before finally deciding it was time to go to bed around 7am, and just in time to see the sun rising from the balcony.

Champagne on the beach. Lovely!

Brits abroad, nearly all the Birmingham family!

Italian food, always my favourite,

The girls. So much love for them <3

Birthday buddies :)

And that was it, birthday over… a successful birthday I would say!

Loving the 'Siesta Fiesta' lifestyle

The next few days were spent exploring the city, sunbathing on the beach a lot and eating out for every lunch and dinner. On Sunday, we finally bumped into Chelsey! We all went for tapas that night and had frozen yoghurt from Smooey, mine was covered in Ferrero Rocher pieces and strawberries, was a great discovery... Smooey is literally the best. 

Malaga crew with our first Smooeys

On the Monday, we went on the bus to uni for our welcome meeting. A meeting to literally tell us the same as what the welcome booklet had already said. Three hours of sunshine wasted! We did however meet a few of the Erasmus people, and found out that we will be spending our Erasmus year with mainly Germans, and a handful of every other European country. We also introduced ourselves to some Germans, and a lovely French girl who didn’t speak English. My level of Spanish really got put to the test in that situation. We all went for our first Spanish Taco Bell as a group, thoroughly enjoyable, however not quite the standard of the American Taco Bell!

Taco Bell, happy days!

We got back to our hotel to get ready for our meeting with our landlord but as we got all our money out of the safe, 400 euros was missing. Certainly not ideal considering how much we needed for our deposit. 150 was mine, and 250 Charlee’s and whoever took it was very clever by taking it from different envelopes, and leaving bankcards, jewellery and a further 2000 euros all in place. In that situation you can only point the finger at the hotel staff, the only people with access to the room, and access to the locked safe the money was in. Another test of Spanish was explaining what had happened to the hotel receptionist who obviously didn’t believe us, we argued with him for a good while, I cracked out the Callaghan-Smith ‘I’m not taking any of your c-rap’ attitude and finally managed to speak to the manager on the phone. We then had a lovely trip to the police station. This was where having the ability to speak Spanish meant we were actually taken seriously. Half an hour later, we each had individual crime reports, bingo! Something worth a mention here is how incredibly good looking the Spanish police are, it’s almost like it is in their job description to be exceptionally guapo. Mr policia who took our statements was an absolute hottie.

The next day we had our Spanish classification exam, Spanish exams are so different to English. We were literally left in a room with no supervisor, with the ability to share answers and talk, yet surprisingly we actually all kept dead silent and completed our tests individually.

That evening was the first ‘proper’ Spanish club night out. We started by a bottle of champagne before we left, and then found everyone at the cathedral. There was a massive Erasmus crowd, and this is where we met the Americans for the first time. We finally had the opportunity to chat to people and make some friends! We went on to some clubs that played typically Spanish music and a little bit of English chart, it was great. One of the highlights of this night was the Norwegians who took a shine to me and Charlee, and bought us roses! Never been given flowers before, so I obviously hung on to them all night long!

<3

The next few days were spent going to class and afterwards going to the beach! El Palo is a beautiful beach, and we have a little grass mound which we’ve now made Erasmus hill. Everyday after class, you take a two minute walk to the little mound on the beach and have a cheeky siesta and tanning multitasking session. The evenings we spent with family dinners and tapas outings, and drinks in Plaza de la Merced, followed by late night walks to the beach front with bottles of vodka to share. We started our own Botellon as all the other Erasmus kids were off to bed, the English and the Irish (and the one American) kept the party going.

Blue sky and soft sand. Amazing!

The lifestyle here really is incredible; siesta followed by fiesta is a winner for anyone. The food is cheap, the drinks are cheap and the people are just so, so nice. I know I'm going to love it here!

Day 1 - Departure Day!

The build up had been going on for weeks and weeks, and when it finally came to the week of my departure my fear really kicked in. Of course, I left my packing until the day before, which unfortunately for me meant I didn’t get to spend my last evening at home watching Eastenders with Mum and Dad, and having an early night for my flight that was going to be at a ridiculous time the next morning. Instead, I frantically packed all day long, deciding whether 4 bikinis, 6 pairs of sandals and 50 pairs of knickers were all an acceptable amount to take. My sister obviously advised me not to take so much, but I’d paid for the extra bag, so screw it, they all came with me. I ended up getting to bed just before midnight, and as a result had a full 3 hours sleep.

It is certainly true that a lack of sleep makes you more emotional, especially when combined with leaving home for the year. Crying therefore made up a large part of my morning, (not to mention the entire week of goodbyes before). Emotional wreck. So anyway, Charlotte and Nan took me to the airport, checked me in and waved me off as I cried my way through security. But once I was through, it was just me and hundreds of happy holidaymakers. I did my normal airport routine, visit the bookshop to get a book, a trip to boots to check for bargains, and a visit to smiths to get some Magazines, a drink and some chewing gum. I also had some breakfast, which was incredibly strange as for the first time, I was the loner who was all alone in the restaurant.  So whilst I ate my very plain toast (all I could stomach), I sat ‘earwigging’ to the couple next to me, they were actually incredibly cute and quite funny considering they were 50 odd and the man had a hideous goatee on his face.

The plane journey was different. It started off with an emergency stop half way up the runway, followed by the two hour delay resulting from the electrical failure. Safe to say this made me much more nervous, and for the first time ever I did not enjoy take off. Once in the air, my neighbours started talking to me as they saw I was upset. Ironically, the girl next to me was called Lily as well. However, the fact she had a incredibly sparkly Jimmy Choo handbag, a snazzy pair of Nike high top wedges (didn’t even know this type of footwear existed) and was off on a long girly weekend to ‘Marbs’ to stay in her Fathers holiday home for the 4^th time this year, meant this Lily was in a very different place of mind to me. Apart from the fact they were so posh, they were actually really nice, and we stayed together until Baggage reclaim.

Walking through the arrivals terminal and being greeted by absolutely ZERO phone signal was not cool, certainly not an enjoyable hour of my life whilst I felt isolated in a city I didn’t know, unable to text the person I was meeting. Luckily, Brad and the addition of James were at the carousel waiting for their bags too, and I was greeted me with a big hug and excited grins. We shared a taxi to our respective hotels, James and I sat in the back in silence for the entirety of the journey, listening to Brad blabber on in Spanish to the taxi driver, speaking Spanish seemed like it just wasn’t going to happen, until I managed to find a ‘gracias’ when he dropped us off. Success!

After checking in, we quickly got changed and went off on our travels into the centre. We quickly met Charlee and Ann and wandered off to get some lunch, at one of many tapas bars, bienvenida a espana! James and Nick joined us, and the boys shortly after went off to explore other parts of the city, whilst we tried to get our flat sorted. We walked to the port whilst we were waiting, which is really beautiful. The entire city at this point, I was already in love with, every part is just beautiful.  

Walk along the seafront. Hello blue sky!

In the afternoon we looked at a few flats and found one we absolutely loved, so arranged move in on the following Monday. I suffered the entire first day with occasional prods of nervousness in my belly, but carried on as best as I could without any more tears! We started the evening with our first paella, and my first seafood paella ever. The plan was to fall in love with seafood in Spain, however we were all very disappointed by it, and the lack of seafood and excess of hair actually in it!

Sad faces all around at the Paella here!

So, we spent the rest of the evening drinking mojitos and daiquiris, and all the other cocktails and shots that Ektor threw at us! We met a few Spanish people and were constantly laughing at Brad’s drunken antics. It got to about 3am, and after 24 hours awake we decided it was time for bed!

Strawberry Daiquiris, Ektor style!

All in all, despite the nerves, it was a good first day until 4am when my hotel room phone rung. I got dressed in a hurry, choosing the strangest combination of clothes and went down to find Brad in reception. First night, and already time for mugging number one.  I was then up for another hour helping him explain what happened (in spanglish, obviously), checking him back into his hotel room, and figuring out what he’d had stolen.

After that I had the fear of Malaga for about half an hour or so, before I finally fell asleep.

What a day.