En Vivo Blog

Also, check out our exchange student blog.

it's filenvivo.blogspot.com.

This is where you'll really be able to learn about ministry events and the team members. There will also be links to other team members' personal blogs that you can check out if you have a lot of free time!

Enjoy!

A little piece of home

To start this, I just want to say thanks to all of you who have given me any mail or other encouraging comment on facebook, etc. from home. That's an awesome piece of home-- just knowing that people care. To also go along with the title of this blog, I (well, all of the exchange students, I think) are starting to feel a little bit like Salamanca and En Vivo are home. Well, home until May, at least. Things are starting to become normal, and life's less and less unfamiliar. We now know that the grocery store has 2 floors, and even what we can buy on each floor. We even found a fresh market really close to our house that sells fresh meats, fruits, and veggies. We now know that our hot water heater cannot do 2 things at once, or even close after one another. We also know that it's not a good idea to leave clothes on the clothesline unattended-- even if it doesn't look like it will rain (because snow can and will come even when it looks sunny...). Today was actually the first time I have succeeded in drying my clothes on the clothesline, actually)

Before I came to Spain, I had always heard that Spaniards are generally reluctant to go out of their comfort zones-- mix social groups, try something new, etc. That's still what a lot of people say, I've heard it from my Spanish professors, former exchange students, and even some of the permanent En Vivo team. However, I feel like I've met quite a few people at the En Vivo campus house that came only because they saw a flyer in their residence hall or facultad building (school building divided up by major). These unexpected visitors are even some of my favorites to talk to! The Lord truly does work in mysterious ways!

As is traditional, here are some differences between my Spanish home and American home:

1. Yogurt is an acceptable dessert, especially for lunches.

2. When you go to the store to buy milk and eggs, neither are refrigerated. The milk is pasturized differently, and eggs don't actually have to be refrigerated for short periods of time. That's probably how they keep prices low-- by eliminating the refrigeration costs.

3. Sometimes, plane tickets are cheaper than a bus or train ticket to the same destination. Weird...

Are we human, or are we dancer?

This week was the first completely jam-packed week of En Vivo! Mondays, my job is to make cookies to give out to our first-time visitors at our Tuesday lunch called Tertulia. It's pretty exciting because one of the first timers to Tertulia returned to come to Café Inglés on Wednesday, and to En Vivo Bible study on Thursday night, and she's going to come by the house on Monday to help me make cookies for next week's first timers! It's so exciting to see that new people feel so welcome and loved in this place, and that we get the privilege to show them how much they are loved, both by us, and by Christ.

Bible Study was great this week, I loved worshiping in Spanish, and watching some of the students' reactions to worship and to the charla (literally, a talk or chat, but here it's like a sermon-like talk). My favorite student's reaction was a girl named Espe. Espe has been to every event at the ministry so far this semester, and has been involved for some time, I believe. On Thursday night, she had her digital camera out , and put it on video mode and recorded the entire night's activities—the worship, the funny skit, the charla, and the fun pop songs that get played at the beginning of he evening. Her earnest desire to remember everything that was said that night was amazing to me, and quite refreshing, really. Praise God for students like that!

Class this week was actually fun! We had a substitute one day, who is a lot more organized than our regular teacher, so I feel like I was actually able to learn a bit about the Subjunctive tense that day. And we played Scattegories in Spanish on Friday. My team almost won!!

More observations:

1-Hot chocolate is different here. The chocolate that you get with churros con chocolate is thick like brownie mix, and delicious. They also have something called Cola-Cao. It's more like American hot cocoa mix, but more delicous, and is always made with milk.

2- Siesta. This is a time of day, from about 2-5 where people generally go home for lunch with their family, take a short nap and relax. In theory, this is a great idea. However, in practice, it means that basically when I have free time, all the stores in town are closed (class in the morning and En Vivo activities almost every night). I do like the Spanish approach to life, though: live life slowly, and enjoy it!

the title of this blog is a line from one of the pop songs we sang thursday night at en vivo. no one actually knows what it means, but it's been stuck in my head all week

Off to a good start

Last night was the second Cafe Ingles event. It was really cool to get to talk to so many Spaniards in English and Spanish. Oh, by the way, the house flooded last night because of all the rain in the street. That was a fun clean-up project... Really put the Semester off to a good start!

And we got a new refrigerator in our apartment-- one that works! So exciting!

Some observations on Spain:

1- There are very few convince foods to be found here. No one bakes with cake mixes or frozen biscuit dough, or even condensed soup. In retrospect, it's probably a good thing for their health-- they probably consume a lot smaller quantity of sodium and preservatives, but it makes it harder to cook things that I'm familiar with.

2- Lights in the hallways of apartment buildings are not on all the time. They have switches in all the halls that when pushed, turn the lights on for two minutes or so, and then they go out again. I'm sure that keeping the lights on when not necessary saves the dueños (landlords) a lot of money on electrical bills.

3- Traffic rules and road construction are just different enough to be quite confusing. The highways here don't have exit ramps. Rather they have roundabouts, and the cars all go in the same direction, and exit the circle at the proper cross road. This makes it extremely difficult to sleep on the busses we take on our excursions with the language school. Also, the crosswalks aren't at the intersection of the roads, but back a little bit, so that there has to be a stoplight in the middle of a straight-a-way. That's one thing that I think makes much more sense that in America. Finally, the traffic signals make a beeping noise when it's time to walk. It's supposed to help blind people, but I've found it to be helpful when I zone out while waiting to cross the street.

4- A Spanish deck of cards is different than an American deck. The suits are: clubs, swords, cups, and coins. Also, the numbers go from 1-12. This might make it different to play any card game that I already know...

More observations to come!!

intercambios

I'm finally getting to be able to use some of my Spanish skills. The Spaniards are all pretty much done with finals and are starting up with their spring classes soon (or have already started them. I'm not sure that I really understand very well the Spanish University education system). Point is, that students are coming out of their study holes to come hang out at En Vivo, the CMF campus ministry here at University of Salamanca.
Last week, we hosted a finals breakfast type of event where we offered free pancakes and coffee to any and all hungry (or exhausted) university students seeking a break from studying. It was a really cool event for me because I ended up talking with one Spanish girl for about an hour! It was cool to run the gamut of conversation topics, and understand and be understood. I also got to join in on other conversations with some students who had never been to En Vivo before. Hopefully, they'll feel good about coming to one of the weekly events hosted by the ministry, and that we'll be able to build awesome friendships with some really cool Spanish students.
This weekend, Meredith and I were able to go on a day trip to Toledo. Toledo was beautiful,and we had beautiful weather (sunny, and up to 21 Celsius, although windy....). There was a lot of history in the city, it's where the painter El Greco lived when he moved to Spain. There was also a lot of patronage from the Royal family in the past, so the cathedral and monastery are gorgeous, and filled with extravagant symbolism that was mind-blowing to look at. Toledo is located in the province of Castilla y La Mancha, of Don Quixote fame. Meredith had the amazing idea to walk a bit out from the Plaza Mayor after our lunch break, and we ended up getting a fabulous view of La Mancha (the countryside). It was really cool to think that we were standing in some of the same places that inspired famous painters like El Greco and writers like Miguel de Cervantes.
This coming week, myself and all the other exchange students will be starting up our intercambios. An intercambio is a language partner, where they will help me speak better Spanish, and I will help them out with their English skills, all over coffee! Really, what could be better? Intercambios are also an important outreach tool for the En Vivo ministry, so I would really appreciate your prayers over my intercambio partners; that they would be willing to visit the campus house and get to know some of the amazing Spaniards and Americans that run the ministry.

Skiles in Spain

For those of you unfamiliar with Skiles walkway, it is one of the more heavily traversed walkways on Georgia Tech's campus, and is often lined with people passing out fliers or free snacks to advertise for their club's events. Well, that's what the exchange students have been doing all this week-- taking turns passing out free coffee and fliers to advertise for one of the events, Café Inglés, that happens weekly at the En Vivo campus ministry house. This is an awesome event because it's set up like a coffee house and all of the exchange students and ministry staff get to help people learn English. Anyways, apparently the concept of free food and drink is more than a little foreign to Spaniards. Almost all of the students were reluctant to even talk to us, much less take a free café con leche and a flier.

After the coffee passing-out, en vivo hosted a welcome-back party for some of the staff that had been gone the previous semester. This was the first event that the campus house hosted that the exchange students were a part of. It was really cool to get to talk to Spaniards. I've found that once I start talking to them, it's not too hard to keep up a conversation in Spanish!

first day of school....

So far, we've had two days of class. I have 4 hours of class from 9-1. It's not bad. I even understand everything that my professors are saying! The only thing is, is that I have 9 am's 5 days a week, and it's FREEZING cold here. Literally, it's like -2 degrees Celsius every day here.

So, another story about us getting lost... Today, we went to the Carrefour (like a Spanish Wal-Mart), and on our way back, we tried to take a bus back to our apartment, but alas we ended up on one that goes to an industrial park across the river from where we live. Luckily, the driver told us at the last stop before the industrial park which bus to get on. awesome. not at all... Oh, well. that's life. full of little adventures, that usually involve us being lost and carrying lots of stuff...