Hello! I am writing today from our sunny living room, with the terrace doors open wide to let in the sunshine and warm spring air :) It seems spring has arrived and we have more of this delightful weather to look forward to!
It has been an exciting last few weeks! Namely, that Nathan heard back from another audition and has received an official invitation to do a project in April... in Chile! After mulling it over for about 2 seconds Nathan sent his acceptance and I bought my plane ticket. :) We didn´t think there would be a Chilean chapter in this Spanish adventure, but we are pretty stoked about the addition of Chile to this year´s plans! We will be in Chile for about 3 weeks before we will then head directly back to Spain! (We still have an epic bike trip around Spain planned for the summer, so we definitely have to come back for that...)
Germany Update
Nathan is still in Germany and is enjoying the Bach festival & choir project very much. He has had the chance to reunite with some World Youth Choir friends as well as meet many new musicians and conductors. Several of the choristers are also going to the project in Chile, so Nathan will get to sing with them again next month :)
The festival has published a few videos of the concerts on youtube. Click on the link below if you´d like to check out one of the concerts (around the 5 min. mark they zoom in on Nathan´s section):
Surfing
Another fun adventure that happened recently, is that I went surfing! I was invited to go on a girl´s weekend with some friends in the province of Cadiz, and with Nathan away in Germany it seemed like a good opportunity to try something new and keep myself busy :) The plan was to take 3 surfing lessons, 1 paddle surf lesson, and spend one afternoon on horseback at the beach. The horseback riding sounded amazing, the paddle surf sounded cool, but I must admit I was pretty nervous about the surfing. Strong waves are intimidating, and I´m not that great of a swimmer, but the weekend sounded like too much fun to pass up.
And I am glad I went! Seriously, surfing is awesome. In Zahares de los Atunes the waves aren´t huge, but they are strong enough to make surfing possible. And it turned out that we didn´t even need to be in deep water. Generally if you fell off your board, all you had to do was to stand up as we were usually in water no deeper than your waist.
Surfing is very physical exercise (mostly because you have to fight against the waves to get far enough out so that you can catch a wave at the right moment) and requires a lot of balance and focus. And maybe it´s my background in gymnastics, but I loved the balancing aspect. It is a really neat feeling when you are lying on your board, and then suddenly a wave lifts and pushes you forward. And in that moment of acceleration, all at once you push up, put your feet in place, and stand! Sometimes the sheer surprise and delight of being on your feet on top of a wave is distracting enough that you immediately tip and plunge back into the water (at least that definitely happened to me more than once ) but there are also those moments where you keep your focus, you are perfectly balanced and suddenly you feel like you are soaring! By the end of my first lesson I was standing up and was totally won over :) By the end of the weekend I was catching enough waves that the instructors told me I could officially call myself a surfista :)
The paddle surf and the horseback riding was also fun (it really is delightful to trot along the beach on horseback... as a bonus the afternoon was clear enough that we could see the hazy outline of the African coast!), but I was surprised that overall what I enjoyed most was the surfing. :)
And now a few photos to share with you:
And now a few photos to share with you:
Paddle Surf! I´m the one on the far left.
Horseback riding :)
The weekend included accommodations at a shared house so we had access to a kitchen and dining room too which was nice.
The photos are all by my friend Ana María Bola and she made the above collage as well :) It´s worth clicking on the collage to see it in its full size.
Love to you all!
Candyce
