And here are just a couple of photos from a little while ago. I went out to dinner with some girls in my class (and some other ones too) for Paula's birthday.

Paula, the birthday girl, and Lara, who is my French class buddy. We pretty much sit there while I work and grumble about the teacher, who is hopeless.

This is Ana. She has the loveliest hair. :P

And this is Angy, who is one of the few people in my class who does Biology.

This is Gus (pronounced 'Goohs', if you want to be Castilian-Spanish-accurate). He's pretty cool. Not sure how long he's going to survive, though.

Today is the fiesta de Corpus Christi, which means I got to sleep in and have lunch at the bar. They were serving cangrejos de rio (crayfish, but in more Australian terms, a yabby), but one had escaped and was hanging around on the kitchen floor. I think everyone reckons I'm a bit weird because I insisted on bringing him home (even though Manuel-the-brother and Manuel-the-cousin were the ones who named him - apparently it's short for Gustav).

You haven't really heard from me much lately. This is mostly because I'm still going to school, getting home, going to the pool some days and classes on others and getting to bed by 10pm (otherwise I get super tired the next day), or because when I get to my computer, I either have nothing to say or too much and am too lazy to be bothered trying to get it all out. I'll probably regret this later when I want to look back and remember some of the fun things that went on here in Spain, but...you know me.

In June, classes are shorter so we get to go home sooner (too hot, is the reason: at 6pm it's still 32 degrees and it's not properly dark until a little bit after I go to bed, how sad). I'm liking this, but then I remember that there's so little time left in the school year. I'm a bit disappointed that come September I'll have different people in my class. I love sitting next to Lola and across the aisle from Sergio and laughing at stupid things and making fun of the boring lessons. I think I'll be asking if I can be in Lola's class when we start again in a few months.

Tuesday (the first) was also Manu's 16th birthday. I baked the Sarah Elix coronary-giving mud cake of awesome, which turned out not super but still decent. (Baking endeavours to date: 3. Plans include: good-luck cupcakes and/or cookies for exams and pavlova for Raquel's birthday.)



I've done a couple of touristy things in the past week - I went to see the Monet exhibition at the Thyssen and saw the permanent collection as well. It's a private art collection owned by the Baron and Baroness Thyssen-somethingorother and there are about seventy rooms. I stayed about six or seven hours in the end, because I couldn't very well pay to get in and not visit every one, but after the first floor I got quite tired and stopped looking for any deep arty meaning etc. in order to get through the whole place. I also stopped by the Caixa Forum, which has this cool statue of an elephant standing on its trunk and a vertical garden growing up a wall. There were these veggie animals that I thought my mum in particular would appreciate a photo of:







Summer is kind of fab in that I get three months of holidays. I'm planning to see Alexia for a bit, and travel with my Uncle Trev and Aunty Sue in Germany and Poland, but need to get permission first from JYC, my host exchange company. Fingers crossed.