13/2/2013

    So nothing terribly exciting has happened since my last post.  It's been a slow, rainy week.  Carnival ended in Bilbao yesterday with the ceremonial burning of the giant sardine.  It's a paper mache sardine of course, but apparently there is a big religious ceremony that goes along with the burning.  I didn't go because I wasn't feeling well at all yesterday, but friends had posted pictures on Facebook of the ceremony and it looked pretty cool.

    Yesterday, my host-dad Perrico cooked Chinese food for lunch! I needed that so bad.  It was all homemade, even the egg roll.  Perrico said that Chinese restaurants here charge around 30 euros per plate of food!  On Sunday night, our family ate food from a restaurant for the first time since I've been here, even though it was just take-out.  We had Doner Kabobs which are my new favorite thing.  They are Turkish and are a lot like Greek gyros, but with lamb instead of the beef that we eat in the United States.  It was also the first time that we had eaten anything spicy since I've been here and I could tell it was way beyond what my host-parents are used to since most of the food here is bland.  Another kid in my class said that there are restaurants serving them all over Europe, but we definitely need to start getting them in America!

    Here are some of the (crappy) pictures I took at Carnival!

Top two pictures are a street performing crew.  They were
doing some type of traditional Spanish dancing.
The men had bells attached to their pant legs and
with every step they jingled like they had a band following them. 

This is the view of the carnival right by the ria on Saturday night in Casco Viejo.