Everything happens for a reason

The rest of this week was pretty average at school. I am still confused why I am a class with second graders that is arts and crafts where they are given a project to work on and I sit there while they do it, but oh well. Anyway, I found out that I do have to go to school on Monday even though most auxiliares have off. The government in Bormujos did not approve for us to have Oct 31st off, so we will be celebrating Halloween that day. The students are really excited for the Halloween games and carnival!

Today, Bridget and I were going to go to Ronda which is a beautiful city that is south of Sevilla. It is one of "los pueblos blancos" which means "white villages" where all of the buildings are white and beautiful. There is a lot of walking around and huge mountains/valleys to see. We got to the bus station about a half hour before the bus was due to leave and the ticket stand was closed. So, we walked to the bus and asked people if we had to buy tickets on board and they said they already had tickets and the bus was completely full. We waited while the bus loaded to see if there were going to be any open spots, but there were not. So when we walked back into the station, we decided to see if the ticket stand was open to buy tickets for tomorrow.

Instead of heading home, we decided to take the TUSSAM (tram) into the city. It is basically a glorified people mover that is really unnecessary, but it was a good experience. Then we got a coffee at Starbucks (even though it was SUPER expensive). We decided to go into the Archivo de Indias which is the building in Seville that houses all of the documents about explorers journeys around the world. We were reading about the Nao Victoria which was the first ship to travel around the world and bring back cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves to Spain when an older Spanish man came over and started sharing all of his knowledge about the history of the building. He walked us through the entire building and was explaining everything to us. We learned that all of the mahogany paneling was brought over from the Caribbean, that the documents are actually housed in an adjacent building to preserve them and that there are over 60,000 documents housed there about the finding of America and journeys around the world. So, although our original plans did not work out, we ended up having an amazing time learning more about our city!