A Spanish Thanksgiving

Better late than never, yeah?

What you just read may sound a little funny and that’s perfectly normal. In England, the Brits use “yeah” like we Americans use “right” or “okay” or “mhm”.

For instance, when the representative from the energy company is asking me for my phone number, it goes a little something like this:

(The representative): Lovely, Mrs. Walker. Now can I get your phone number?

(Me or Mrs. Walker): Yes sir. It’s 07445… [The pause you give someone when they’re copying down information.]

(The representative): Yeah?

(Me): [I then read the rest of my phone number.]

(The representative): Cheers.

And as for “cheers”, it means “thanks”.

Just a little British culture for y’all.

Anyways, I’m just now posting about our trip we took to Alicante, Spain for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Mark and I decided to go to the sun as the sun has been alluding us for the month and a half that we’ve been here in England.

That’s the thing about leaving home. You never notice how much you get used to something until you move and then it’s suddenly gone.

I love Texas – the hot, dry, and sunny place that it is. I also love England – the cold, wet, and dark place that it is. Both are great for different reasons. (I’ve been told that the sun comes out more in different times of the year but I’m not quite convinced yet.)

This happened to be the view from our cozy one bedroom flat that overlooked THE ocean. (My geography isn’t so great and I can’t remember which ocean that is. To be honest, I didn’t know England was an island either until right before I moved here.)

Our trip to Spain was like any other trip we’ve taken before, I slept a lot. That’s the funny thing about Lupus – no matter how far/much you travel, it’s that once piece of luggage that you wish would get lost but it never does.

So while I slept in/took naps, Mark would walk to different cafes to get his morning coffee and go hang out at the beach.

When I managed to wake up, we did see/do some amazing things.

My favorite part of the trip was by far eating. It wasn’t the food because I’m relatively picky. Rather, it was the way the little restaurants would have tables lined up on the sidewalks in front the building. The nicer venues would have the tables preset as well as umbrellas for shade and heated lamps for the chillier evenings.

By the way, it must be a thing in England/Europe to have amazing, delectable Belgium waffles drizzled in chocolate and/or Carmel served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

My second favorite part was Santa Barbara Castle. No, I didn’t manage to get a picture of the castle itself but I did get pictures of different aspects of the castle. Castles over here are yuge.

This is the view from the wall. You can look out and see the city, beach, and harbour…. Harbor. Ooops – I’ve already begun to spell various words like the Brits.

On one of the inner walls, there was this image of a sad man crying I guess….? I don’t know. Most of the information about the castle was in Spanish so I didn’t get his story, if there was one.

The Spanish flag atop the tallest point of the castle. What you don’t see are all a lot of wires, boxes, and other “stuff” that was at the base of the flag. Thank goodness for “cropping”.

There were also these large, massive cannons that lined the wall of the tallest point.

I THINK this could have been the moat but I wasn’t quite sure what the Spanish version of “moat” was so I assumed this was part of it.

Mark and I are slowly getting better are our selfie-taking skills. I did get brave enough to ask a local to take our picture in my broken Spanish. While the picture wasn’t that great, she did say I had “perfecto” pronunciation. All of my time on DuoLingo has paid off after all!

Everything in England and Europe seems to be old and this tree is no exception. It had the biggest root system I’ve ever seen. Maybe there trees like this in America, just not Texas.

This is what most of our trip looked like: me leaning against something so I could conserve energy. However, I wasn’t posing or smiling most of the time – I was merely being the typical tourist here.

We did go to an cat-infested island off the shores of Spain about an hour by boat from Alicante. Yes, there were about 35-40 cats roaming the tiny island. These cats looked mangy and some even had chunks of their ears MISSING. Weird. I’m not sure what that was about. Besides the cats, it’s not much to blog home about.

Overall, we had an amazing trip that consisted of eating at beautiful venues, walking around the local neighborhood, shopping, napping, and relaxing trips to the beach.

However, I was definitely glad to come back to our new home.