Ash Wednesday, Valentine's Day, and a Protest

I'm doing another bus ride post. The blogger app has come quite in handy.

Let me pick up where I left off. On Wednesday, I went to an Ash Wednesday service. It was very good. It was interesting to see how similar it was to the ones back home. I noticed that this church said a version of "and also with you" in response to a variation of "God be with you," which made me excited because we always say that in the Presbyterian Church. We even did a passing of the peace! One difference I didn't expect was how they did the ashes. They made the cross on the top of my head, not my forehead. So that was different. All in all, however, it was very similar.

Thursday, of course, was Valentine's Day. It's only a big deal here for young lovers, so there really wasn't too much going during the day. My mom had sent me se Brave Valentine cards, so I brought them to class and shared them with my classmates, elementary school style. Everyone really liked them. I had to explain the concept to my teacher and some of my friends from other countries, but all in all they were a hit. I'm disappointed that they don't do post-Valentine candy sales. I really wanted to buy some. Oh well.

I had an extremely difficult grammar exam on Friday. The problem with my Spanish grammar is that I haven't learned new grammar since high school. Now I'm in a class where we're learning ALL the types of past tense (there are four), all the subjunctive tenses, the future tenses, and the conditional tenses along with what words you can use with certain expressions and trying to distinguish when to use the two different verbs for "to be." It hasn't been clicking for me until a few days ago when I realized the problem. Almost my entire class are not native English speakers. They're from all over the world. Therefore, the professor is teaching us Spanish grammar and explaining it I'm Spanish. My brain is just a little too set in English to learn grammar that way. So I went to learnspanish.com and taught myself the grammar, since they teach it for English people trying to learn Spanish. It magically made sense! So hopefully I did well on the exam.

The rest of Friday was pretty low key. I went on a long walk with Carmen and then relaxed for the rest of the evening. I got a notice for a package that my mom sent me and I tried to get it, but they told me I had to come back tomorrow to get it. The mail system is so strange. Why would they send you a package notification if they won't let you pick it up on the same day? Oh well. So I got it the next day.

Saturday, I went shopping with Carmen in the morning for a new bag. We didn't find one so I went out by myself after lunch. I went to a store that sold purses for 10€. I bought two and a wallet for 22€ in total. A bargain. Hopefully they hold up. Also, I bought ibuprofen (or ibuprofeno) for TWO EUROS!! It's a pack of 40 pills that are 600mg. So I bought a pack of prescription strength Advil for 2€. Crazy!

If you were wondering why I'd need ibuprofen, my bad hip has been acting up on me. I guess it's probably a combination of the uneven streets and the ice or something.

While I was downtown, I saw a protest going on. Spain has a really bad economy at the moment. A lot of protests happen, but this one was bigger. I'm including a couple pictures. They started in the city center, then moved to the giant traffic circle, blocking traffic and the buses. Lots of horns were honking. On the other hand, a lot random people started clapping. I watched it for a little while and then left because it was getting dark.

I am currently on my way to Bilbo, I mean Bilbao. It's a city to the east of Pamplona and has tons of cool stuff. There's a Guggenheim museum, which we might go to. If not, I'll go next weekend. I'm flying to Paris out of Bilbao, so I built some time into my trip to look around Bilbao. I'm glad my friends invited me to go this weekend because I'll be able to find my way around next weekend easier. I'm going to go ahead and figure out how to get to the airport and all that.

I will post soon about my day trip! I'll take some pictures as well.