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this post will contain a lot of pictures. i've been taking a lot of photos lately. i've been really trying to get back into the habit of taking pictures. here is the benefit, a journal entry filled with a photo-real representation of what my life has looked like for the last month or so. to begin with, i went hiking about the middle of february and never really put up pictures from it. i got tired of writing about hiking and didn't have the time or patience to post pics, so now i'm just going to display this one (at left) and tell you that amongst the getting stuck in the mud, losing the trail for most of the hike, climbing up a ravine, and not quite being sure if i would ever make it back to tajonar or if i'd have to have a helicoptor airlift me out, i did enjoy this view and the strangeness of walking through snow on the sunniest day of the month, the leftover precipitation hardened into ice and whiteness up there. the peak on the left is the hill i call "castle rock", as it has a rocky ledge that spirals up the side of it and ends with a pointed castle-type object at the summit. you can't see the details very well here, but every day when i drive home to tajonar, this peak is straight ahead and i always think about climbing it...some day i will. those pictures, i imagine, will be something else entirely.
and speaking of climbing mountains, i learned last night that patxi (pronounced "pahtchy" unless you're jessica, in which case it's "patsy"), the father of the family that jessica works for, has summitted mt everest! i couldn't believe it, and i decided he's a guy i want to be spending time with. and since we've segued onto the subject of jessica, i'll move forward with the photo adventure. lately there's been a trend happening involving jessica and cameras. now, jessica is from canada. but we forgive her. and she is usually very photogenic, but what fun would it be posting photos of someone being photogenic when you can capture their true selves like so:
left to right from top: jessica standing in anna's room (note the romanian flag on the wall); jessica laughing with coffee in her mouth at the coffee shop in multiva (you can see the t.v. behind her on which i watch music videos instead of studying spanish); jessica going crazy at same coffee shop (and there you can see the bar where i order my café con leche every day of the week); and finally, jessica in the veldts's living room, with lucas standing at the piano and amber sitting on the couch and jessica and i taking pictures of each other taking a picture of each other. one thing to note, is that jessica is wearing two different american eagle shirts in these pictures, which we like to give her a hard time about since she is canadian. and when i say about, i mean "aboot".
however, not all hope is lost for canadians. it seems that they (or at least this one does) like to go on fun short field trips in the middle of the night to the picnic spot off of NA231 to look at the full moon which was so bright i didn't even need my lights on to drive. we just passed tajonar and kept going, got out of the car at the picnic spot, discovered new settings on our cameras, and managed to capture the stunning beauty of the full moon (this was hours before the eclipse), as seen here:
then we spent about half an hour painting pictures with the full moon (1) and the city lights of one of the pueblos nearby (2):
four hours later, and halfway through Mermaids, we got back in the car and drove out to the same spot to see the lunar eclipse. i took pictures but they just look like little red dots, so i won't post them here. needless to say, it was a remarkable evening.
anna left yesterday to go back to the states and i'm pretty sad about it -- she and jessica and i have become really great friends, and anna and i have spent más o menos every day of the last month together. i feel like i've known her my entire life and we've only known each other for four weeks. i've written about the veldts already, so i won't talk much about her family, but i will say that the other day we were going to go out for coffee (not like we do that a lot or anything), and her dad said "where are you going to go?" and we said "the coffee shop in mutilva, as always" and he said "well you can't go there, joshua and i are going there. go to the other one". and we didn't know there was another one, but he sent us there anyway, and we went in and it sucked. because there was loud music, loud people, smoke, and to top it all off: they give you shots of pineapple juice with your coffee. what is this all about? why would you want pineapple juice with your coffee? we couldn't figure it out. we just sat there staring at it from time to time in a confused mess, until we finished our coffees and i finally drank my pineapple juice and anna swallowed about half of hers and no more because she hates pineapple juice. and even after drinking it we couldn't for the life of us understand WHY they had given us pineapple juice. so i took a picture to commemorate the occasion (at right, accompanied by anna's arm), and then we went outside and discovered that some ungodly force had created a storm outside and we walked the whole two blocks to the house and then i had to borrow pants because it had been raining so hard my cords were soaked up to the butt. how this happens, i don't know, but we were sure to thank luke when we got back, for sending us across the bridge to the Other Coffee Shop because he was too embarassed to admit that he knew us.
aside from that...i've learned the following things:
(1) that anna and jessica both hate math, and cringed to see my math notebook in my bag -- but then i talked to them about how math is really beautiful and wonderful and they said if i had been their math teacher in high school they might have actually liked and/or understood math (anna would add "almost" here); (2) that jessica's family doesn't have a regular calendar but the last page of the calendar where they sum up the year, so they just circle days and draw arrows with important dates and appointments, instead of just getting a real calendar; and (3,4) that when i pick up julen from school and i forget to bring a book, i get really bored and have to take pictures of my car.
i've also learned that andrea is the most photogenic kid in the entire world, and that four year olds with downs syndrome are particularly amazing. she will watch bob the builder and get up off the chair and act out the movements of the characters while reciting the lines, as they're happening. for example, she will get up and move her hips around in a circle to imitate the cement mixer truck. it's amazing that someone who can't communicate words with more than one syllable (she calls jessica "ca" and me "eh-ee" and a movie is "ee", etc) can actually memorize the entire five episode vhs of bob the builder with complete accuracy. totally incredible.
this picture was taken on lucas's birthday, just before or after we brought out the cake (lucas is a guy from brazil who is in jodi's spanish class at the university).
needless to say, andrea helped blow out the candles.
that pretty much sums up what i've been doing for the last month -- throw in a pelota match (which julen lost, so i didn't take pictures), a basketball game (darby lost, and i didn't even have my camera to capture it! just kidding...), and news that i get to co-lead a boys summer camp for a week in june and get paid a lot of money, and you pretty much have my feb/march summed up.
i'd like to say in closing that good friends are hard to come by, and when you find them you should not let them leave, but sometimes they have to go back to minnesota to work in an aluminum foundry and you just have to deal with it.
and, i look pretty good in pictures that are taken at 10am after waking up at 6am to drive to bilbao after only sleeping for four hours. the end.