Diciembre

Hello! I guess it has been a while since my last blog update!
We are continuing to enjoy our time here in Granada (despite contending with a seasonal cold or two...) and I wanted to update you all with a few highlights of this month :)

Las Alpujarras
We went on a little bike trip to the Alpujarras (a mountain range nearby) at the invitation of a new friend, Fran, who is a journalist in Madrid. He was in the midst of filming a cycle-tourism pilot tv show, and wanted to have a few companions along. (Our tandem might make an appearance in the pilot, who knows?)

Our destination was Pampaneira. I had been there once before, but had gone by bus. And let me say, it was MUCH more fun to go by bicycle. The roads in the Alpujarras are very steep and they slowly wind up the sides of the valleys to reach little villages that are perched high on the edges of the valley. In a bus this is a perfect storm for the worst motion-sickness you can ever experience.... (see: switchbacks and pinturns for 2 hours) but on a bike it is fantastic! Yes, it was still steep, but as the road is right on the edge of the valley the incredible views more than make up for it. And even the roads themselves were in perfect condition. It was as if they had been paved just before our visit, plus at this time of year there is very little traffic :)

Audition News

Some other exciting news is that Nathan had success with an audition for a choir project in Germany! The news came on Nathan's birthday, which was fun :) It is a three week project that starts at the end of February. The rehearsals will be in English and German so he will also have the chance to practice a little of his German as well :) He is definitely looking forward to the project.

Villancicos

Every year my friend/colleague Joaquín hosts a Christmas party for children. All of his friends who have kids come together and hear a creative re-telling of the Christmas story, followed by Christmas carols and lots of food and candy. Even though we don´t have children, we were invited :)

It was very cool to listen to the Christmas story with all the drama and mystery that Joaquín and several other parents wove into it. The only light was by candlelight, there were sound affects, music, and pictures projected on the wall at key moments. The 15 or so little ones seated on the floor were mesmerized (well, other than for a few VERY young ones who were more intent on putting keys, instruments, and anything else they could find into their mouths rather than listening to a story).

The Christmas carol portion of the evening was fascinating, as the ¨villancicos¨ that they have here are very different from what we usually sing in Canada. There are a few that overlap, but not many, and even the style of singing is quite different. We are, afterall, in the south of Spain, the heart of Flamenco country, and you can really hear how influential it is when people get together and sing! Not only do the villancicos have some of the same rhythm and harmonies, but the style of singing is also more like flamenco than anything else. One of my favorites was "Los peces en el rio" (you can listen to a version by the Gypsy Kings here, lyrics here). The Gypsy Kings version will give you a good taste of the flamenco-style singing I am talking about.

Posada Mexicana

One of our good friends, who also hosted the Día de los Muertos party in November, hosted a mexican posada party the other night. In Mexico there are 8 or 9 nights of these celebrations leading up to Christmas Eve. The evening starts off with a villancico of the dialogue between Joseph & Mary, and the Innkeeper (Please give us shelter - No I don´t have room - Please, my wife is pregnant - No, go away or I´ll beat you with a stick - Wait, you don´t understand, my wife is Mary and is going to give birth to the savior of the word - Oh! I didn´t realize! Of course, please come in!*) *Note: very loose translation...

The guests of the party divide into two groups to sing the song, and once everyone in the Joseph & Mary group have been invited in, everyone drinks ponche (which is like hot apple cider but with many different kinds of fruit) and eats snacks. And then it is time for the piñata/s!

When Luke and I spent a Christmas (way back when) in Mexico, we got to go to several posadas and they were absolutely one of my favorite highlights of our trip. And although that was a long time ago, I obviously still have strong memorizes as the instant someone yelled "Dale!" (hit it!) I suddenly remembered the song you're supposed to sing while someone tries to hit the piñata. Loli laughed when she heard me singing it because she had forgotten to teach that to everyone before starting. With the singing, yelling of instructions, and sticks and piñata flailing about in the air, it was just the right amount of chaos :)

Christmas Plans

We are very fortunate to have many invitations to various dinners over the holidays. For Christmas Eve we will be spending the evening with several other students who are also not home for the holidays. Christmas Day we have been invited over to join in a friend's family dinner and then we have several other invitations for various occasions. The only downer is that we are both still fighting the tail end of a cold, and so also trying to get as much sleep as possible as well!

I hope you are all doing well. Wishing you many blessings of health, joy and peace during this beautiful time of year.

Blessings,

Candyce

Me cortaron mal el pelo

Today a collection of amusing moments:

Quality of Sound
We continue to be very dedicated to speaking in Spanish all the time, even with just each other. Sometimes this means it takes two or three tries to get our meaning across clearly, but after two months of practice we have made enormous progress so we know in the long-run it will be worth the effort. :)

However, our current level of fluency doesn´t always have the speed we would like. This can lead to some hilarious, if somewhat misadventurous moments. For example, today I was reviewing some vocabulary through Quizlet (an awesome online vocab study tool, btw) which has a particular tool that reads vocab out loud so that you can type what you hear. This was helpful for me, but distracting for Nathan.
No problem, I thought. I´ll wear headphones.
So I popped the headphones in, plugged them in and suddenly the next word resounded in my ears with such force that I almost fell off my chair.... I forgot that while my computer speakers are poor (and I therefore have the volume cranked all the way up, pretty much all the time), our headphones are actually of a fairly high caliber... And as such, the volume was about 9 settings too high...

Nathan, meanwhile, witnessed the whole event and tried to warn me, but in the few seconds he had between the plugging in of the headphones and the next vocab word sounding, the translation of ¨Wait! Turn the volume down first!¨ didn´t quite make it out in time...

Eventually we hope to reach a point where even in time sensitive situations we can find words quickly!

Haircut Research
Even after you can communicate fairly fluently on a basic level, there are always so many more specific words to learn. The other day I decided it was time to learn some hairdressing vocabulary (in preparation for a haircut). How does one say ¨sideswept bangs¨ for example? Or ¨textured layers¨? Having never had a haircut in Spain before, these words were not yet part of my vocabulary.

With an interest in avoiding a strange or random haircut due to miscommunication, I did some research and now have all the words I need (hopefully). Along the way, I also found an article that pointed me to this video, which I found quite hilarious. Hopefully I will end up better off than the singer did with his haircut.

Acento Andalu(z)
Last weekend Nathan went on a hike organized by the Campus Ministry group. It is always interesting to listen to the variety of accents in that group, as many students who participate are Erasmus students (which means they are on their required year abroad of their undergrad) from many different European countries. However, on this particular outing there were mostly local students, which meant the predominant accent was Andalusian.

The acento andaluz can be a bit hard to understand for foreigners. They speak very rapidly and they ¨eat¨ many of their consonants. This is especially true with ´s´, ´z´, and ´d´ and most endings of words. (For this reason, it is always referred to as ¨el acento andalu´, not ¨el acento andaluz¨ because that ´z´ is dropped)

Nathan, with his singer´s ear (and more importantly, his singer´s experience of studying, practicing, and mimicking vowels in many different languages), got to listen to and practice the acento andalu all day. At the end of the hike he was taking a photo of the whole group and counted out ¨Uno, Do, Tre¨ (instead of uno, dos, tres) and the priest who organized the group proclaimed with much laughter (and some pride) that Nathan now speaks Andalu! ;)

While the locals are very proud of their Andalusian accent, within the global community of Spanish speakers it is not exactly the most posh of accents :) We´ve been joking that we might need to spend some time soon in a different part of Spain before Nathan´s accent becomes irrevocably andalu  ;)