Road to Almería

I’m going to take you back 3 years to when I was first applying to come to Spain. Filling out the application and having to decide on the top 3 places I would like to be placed was incredibly difficult. I thought about Salamanca which is where I studied abroad but ultimately decided to try something completely different. I wanted to live in a big city so I requested Cataluña, Andalucía and Aragon, hoping to be placed in Barcelona. In the end I consider myself very lucky not to have been in Barcelona because their language assistants didn’t get paid until January!

I remember the day I received my placement letter perfectly. All that month I spent most of my time sitting by the window waiting to see the mail man come. As soon as I saw him round the corner I would run out the door to see if he had my letter. The day it arrived I remember dropping everything to read it in the street. It was like being accepted to college all over again! It had some general information and midway through it had the address of my school written like this:

CEIP Concordia
C/Italíca S/N.
(04110) Campohermoso (Almería)

At this point I had no idea how to read a Spanish address so I didn’t know if the town was Campohermoso or Almería. The first thing I did when I got back inside was to do a Google search for Almería. You cannot imagine my excitement when I saw the little red dot pointing to the southern coast of Spain. Thoughts of becoming a beach bum began to race through my head.

I later found some very limited information on Campohermoso, turns out it is a farming town where most of Spain’s cucumbers, melons and the famous Raf tomatoes come from. Luckily, I was able to live in Almería just a 7 minute walk to the beach! It was great; I had really nice roommates, great coworkers and lived in a perfect little beach town.

Always a beautiful sunset on the beach!

I’m Back!

After a break of a little over a month I am excited to be back in the game! I decided to stop with the blog for a little bit because I needed to study for my Arabic final exam and also things at work were getting pretty busy. Now that things are calmed down I am excited to be able to share some stories with you. The first one I have coming up is about the town I first lived in when I moved to Spain. Stay tuned!