An OTTERLY fantastic blog post.

Oh hey.

This week Paddy's day celebrations meant lots of beer and lots of pizza followed by lots of judgement in my lecture the following day. Essay writing all week, then myself and Ruby decided to be very organised and proof read and submit our essays the night before the deadline, the long and short of the story is we accidentally submitted our essays on each others portal accounts. After panic emailing every member of staff at the university working in the language department and those with Spanish sounding names just for good measure it was sorted. However not after I expect the language department had a jolly old chortle at our general incompetence. 

Then we embarked on another night out where I made friends with Señor Jagermeister again, forgetting he is the kind of backstabbing friend that punishes you for the entire next day.

Jager face

Today is World Water Day, fun fact. We celebrated by walking to the bus station and getting soaked from head to toe in the pouring rain. We caught the bus to Gijon and visited the aquarium which was, I may add, fintastic*. We were probably more excitable than the majority of the children in there, because it was incredible. My personal highlight of the day was an otter. He was probably the happiest animal I have ever seen in my life and all he was doing was diving into the water and swimming. Let us learn from the otter: happiness is that simple. I did video the aforementioned otter, but fear I cannot show it to anyone as I don't wish to put you through the torture of hearing me repeat the phrase 'I wish I was an otter' 10 times, but you should know, I do. 

We're both over the age of 20.

In culture embracing fashion we went for lunch/dinner at an American diner. It being 5 o'clock which is an unheard of time in Spain to eat, the diner was dead, but we gorged on all the deep fried food in the world and generally loved life. Following the usual 'trying to catch the waiters attention to ask for the bill but being too British to be forward' debacle we were on our merry way back to Oviedo. 

Otterly Fantastic day**

*see what I did there? 
** I know, it's tough being this comically blessed

YELLYFISH. 

YELLYFISH

fish.

Brits abroad.

Madrid and other shennanigans

So apologies again avid blog readers but I have been busy procrastinating and eventually writing my essay.

I've been doing my usual shenanigans of uni, sunbathing, running and swimming and have now signed up to a 10k* so have even more motivation to keep the running going. The weather (I'm British and what) has been pretty good since I've got back, well except today where it has thrown it down for the whole day but well, can't win them all. 

World's smallest lift, worlds greatest faces.

Last weekend I made the not so long but long enough journey to Madrid to meet up with some fellow year-abroaders. Now at this point I'm going to briefly complain about the Spanish transport system. So I live in Oviedo which is 446km (where would we be without google maps?) from Madrid, this is roughly the same distance from Newcastle to London. However, to take the train this distance takes the same amount of time and is more expensive than taking the bus. The quickest route is to fly. This is the madness I deal with on a daily basis. So due to the lack of high speed trains to the capital I opted for the bus which took around 5 and half hours. But what a fancy bus it was, each passanger equipped with their own personal buspad** loaded with all the American films dubbed in Spanish that you could wish for and the journey was quite pretty driving through the mountains of Asturias. It was fairly uneventful except when it reached a service station and everyone got off, I however, didn't realise this was what was happening and stayed sat on the bus until the stare the driver was holding with me became uncomfortable and I decided to leave. Then the bus pulled away, with my bag on it. After a short panic that we might be changing buses and I'd end up in Madrid with not even a spare pair of pants the bus refuelled and returned and we carried on the journey. 

Myself and Olivia were eventually reunited in a metro station in the centre of Madrid and made our way to the hostel. When we got to the hostel all was quiet and the cupboard labelled 'reception' was shut. I panicked, Olivia took charge and pressed the intercom and a lovely Spanish lady came, chatted to us about her English speaking sons and showed us to our room. We headed to KFC, caught up on everything that had happened to us in the last 2 months and slept. Success. 

Alliterated breakfast

After churros, chocolate and coffee for an alliterated breakfast we headed to explore the rest of Madrid wandering round in the sunshine, seeing palaces and Morris dancers, eating wonderful salad, drinking wine, beer, speaking spanish and generally loving life. We also met up with one of my friends from school who is currently teaching in Madrid and shared some beverages, before meeting up with Sarah and Amy, two other year abroading language studying friends. We went to probably the greatest place in the world, I shall explain why. It's called '100 montaditos' and basically there's a list of 100 different fillings and you choose them and they put them in tiny baguettes. Sound too good to be true? Wait, it get's better. They do chocolate bread, with chocolate spread and M & Ms. So once I'd finally got over that dining experience and the fact that everyone in Spain seems to think my name is 'Paqui' we took the metro to Elle's flat. Note brief: 4 English girls speaking in a mixture of French and Spanish on the metro in Madrid causes a few select stares, but is such fun. We spent the night putting the world to rights before a scary and very early morning walk back to the hostel. By this point it was 5:30am and Olivia had to leave to the airport at 6am, sleep is for the weak. 

She left, I slept, then hopped back on my bus and slept some more. All in all a fantastic weekend, brilliant company and the weather wasn't too bad either!

This also marked the third leg of mine and Olivia's tour of the capital cities of Europe that we decided should probably happen, 3 down, 47 to go.

*have you stopped laughing yet?
**actual brand name

Reunited just means more selfies.

JARRAS.

JODER #beckyproblems

Chicas favoritas and also JARRAS.

Miel, Estoy en casa...

I'm going to start off by apologising for my lack of blogging, not that I expect it to have caused a huge void in your life, but just in case it has, I am sorry. 

The reason for this lack of blogging was that I was in England for a week and as much as I had a fun packed week full of all the England based fun ever, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't want to read about me walking my dog 4000 times and visiting a fair selection of the wetherspoon's in the North of England. 

Pablo, Aisling and Jo enjoying
the delights of cider street

I arrived back to Oviedo on Sunday after a night with Lenny Henry in Stansted's finest premier inn and a relatively uneventful journey. Settling back into life here was difficult at first, I had got used to being really busy at home and going about my usual English business and forgotton what it was like to not really have anything to do and everyone being so laid back and relaxed so felt very homesick at first. I've realised in my time away that I overthink everything and especially when I'm feeling homesick I think how long I've got left and dwell on things instead of thinking how I can productively use the time I have left. So this week I decided to email a few English teaching schools in Oviedo to ask for work experience, giving me something to fill my time doing. Hopefully I should hear something back from them soon! 

Riding side saddle...

Thankfully getting back into my somewhat sparse uni routine and keeping myself busy with procrastinating from assignments that I really should start has made me feel much better. On Monday I finally managed to officially register at University and was given my Virtual Campus login which naturally didn't work. I then headed to Carrefour and bought enough food to feed a family for 3 weeks, or me for one week. Tuesday I went back to the office to complain about the aforementioned login that didn't work before going to my 2 hour lecture. The topics of this lecture varied from the downfall of Portugal's colonies to Portuguese football players. All in all a varied lecture. I then came back to eat lunch then clean the kitchen before our Pancake night feast which we had invited everyone round for. Many pancakes were made, many pancakes were eaten, success. We then headed to an ERASMUS tapas night and drunk some terrible tasting wine before wandering to McDonald's and I sat on a horse statue. The sign of a good night.

Oviedo in all its sunny glory.

Wednesday I decided to use my day off uni to visit the uni gym and go swimming. A simple sounding task yes? Well, this is me and nothing is ever simple! I managed to walk to the Gym, which is about 30 minutes from our flat, without getting lost. I then couldn't find the right entrance or any sign of a swimming pool so sheepishly walked through what looked like an entrance to be greeted by a friendly Spanish lady who directed me to the swimming pool and told me how to buy a ticket from the machine. I then merrily made my way, ticket in hand, to the pool. The woman on reception took my ticket and my student card and then asked me if I had a 'candado'. I may well have had one, I had no clue what it was! After some confused looks on both parts, she showed me a padlock and I confessed that no, no I didn't have a 'candado'. I was then lent a candado and off I went, got changed and entered the pool area. Where a lifeguard came over and asked me if I had a 'gorro'. Now this time, thanks to his fantastic mime and my observation that everyone in the pool except me appeared to be wearing a swimming cap, I figured out what he meant I confessed once again that, no, I didn't have one and was leant one. The rest of the escapade went swimmingly if you'll pardon the pun. 

Today I hand wrote 4 pages of work for uni, only to later discover it had to be electronically submitted, meaning I now have to type up all my work. This I hasten to add is one of the only things that Spain has ever decided to do electronically. 

This weekend is Carnaval so a fun weekend of fun ahead!