Merry Christmas! :)

Christmas time has always been my favorite holiday of the year. I'm not religious, but there is something about the smell, the Christmas lights, the food and decorating the tree together with my family that makes this season special. This year it has been especially nice, because I've taken part in the Christmas preparations in Spain, but I got to spend Christmas at home with my friends and family in Hungary. (And as a bonus I passed by Brussels too to see a friend and the Christmas tree on Grand Place :))

So with these photos below I wish you all a very merry Christmas! :)

Christmas "tree" in Puerta del Sol, Madrid

Christmas market in Plaza Mayor 

Christmas tree in Grand Place, Brussels

Lights in Grand Place 

Christmas lights in Budapest

Christmas market in Vörösmarty tér, Budapest

The family Christmas tree at home :)

November activities

November has been the busiest month since I'm here! Don't take me wrong, this is not a complaint - on the contrary, I enjoyed it a lot. :) I already wrote about our "fame" and about my travel to Lisbon, but many other things happened too.

We had 2 more of the intercultural chat series: one about music and dances, the other about what makes us ashamed and proud of our countries. Unfortunately not so many people came as for the previous occasions, but we still had a great time.

Besides we started to make a "YouthPass wall" in the shop, where we put photos and adverts of all the events we organized since we're here. It will make the place look better and also will help us remember more the activities in the end when we will have to write the YouthPass, hehe. :)

I also started a Christmas decoration workshop: we have been promoting it for a while already, but there wasn't much interest, so I was very happy when someone finally signed up. :) We began by making Christmas decoration with quilling and already finished the first piece. Furthermore the lady attending liked very much this technique, so next week we'll create some more things. :)

Speaking of creativity, I started workshops with Helena's and Mabel's children too once a week. I have to say this is a big challenge, as I'm usually not good with kids - or well, at least I haven't worked with them yet that much. So far we did origami stars (which turned into flowers in the end as the girls were really creative :) and this week I showed them some quilling; they enjoyed that too. Next week I want to do some Christmas stuff already, let's see where their creativity brings us! :)

And last but not least last weekend I had another trip: this time to Valladolid. Helena and her family planned to go there and they offered a seat in the car, so I thought why not. :) I found a cool host, Alberto, on CouchSurfing who showed me around a bit, took me to eat some local tapas and even introduced me to some of his friends, with whom we ended up going out on Saturday night, so I had a great time. :) The trip to Valladolid and back was fun too, we played games in the car, which were super entertaining, although I was the weakest link who constantly broke the fluency of the game, as my Spanish vocabulary is not that extensive yet. :)

Plaza Mayor

Autumn colors in Campo Grande 

Royal peacocks in the park :)

Enjoying the sunshine after a day of constant rain

San Pablo church

Beautiful interior in Museo Nacional de Escultura 

Christmas lights in Plaza Mayor

Lisbon

Last weekend I finally had my first international trip since I’m here: I visited Lisbon! :) It has been on my “bucket list” for quite a while, but from Hungary tickets were always too expensive; so when I saw last month that from here I could get cheap train tickets I decided that it’s time to go. :) The original idea was to visit a friend of mine who lives there, but unfortunately he had to go on a business trip, so in the end I couldn’t meet him. :(

Nevertheless I had a great time, thanks to my CouchSurfing host Bruno. He not only took me around the city, but we went to Sintra, Cabo da Roca and Cascais too. I also had the chance to have lunch with his family which was a really great experience; I could literally get a taste of the local culture. :)

Torre de Belém

Praca de Comercio

View of Lisbon from the castle 

The same view an hour later :)

The castle

Street art 

Sintra 

Quinta da Regaleira in Sintra

Amazing view on the ocean from Cabo da Roca, the Westernmost point of Europe

On my last day I took a free walking tour as well in Lisbon (this is something I do in almost every city I visit). It was really cool, our guide Cuco was very funny and the group was also so nice that in the end we decided to have lunch together. Speaking of food, the "national fish" in Portugal is the codfish - they have around 1000 different ways of preparing it. I tried only 3, but they were all delicious. :)

Rossio square with typical Portuguese pavement

The famous tram 28 :)

Cuco explaining how lazy people were to remove decorations after the last festival. :)

Random street - down and up :)

Sunset view from one of Lisbon's viewpoints

Week of fame

Last week we had our week of fame. :) No, this doesn't mean fancy red carpet events, paparazzi or getting rich (at least not in terms of money), but we did get an invitation to the local radio for an interview. 

So last Wednesday we went and had a very nice chat about what we do here at Ecocompartimos, what is Erasmus+ and EVS, what kind of programs we organize, how we feel here in Spain, how do we spend our time and so on. I've never ever had such an experience before (certainly not in Spanish), so I was a little nervous in the beginning, but the girl interviewing us was so nice and had such good questions, that it turned out to be a very good experience. :) I also hope that it will help us in making our activities at least a little bit better known here in Illescas.

If you're interested you can listen to it here. (only available in Spanish)

Dilya and me waiting for the interview to start

Together with Helena, we are ready to talk :)

After the interview when we got back to the shop we had another nice surprise: we are featured in the local newspaper too! :) We sent them the article weeks ago, but had no idea if they were to publish it or not... finally they did, so we had another round of "publicity" for our activities. :)

THE article :)

The girls excited about the article :)

PS: On a different topic, I finished my first piece made of mosaic, here it is:

:)

Activities in October

I think there are 2 basic criteria to measure if you’re “at home” in a new place:

• You bump into people you know on the street randomly.
• People ask for directions from you. (For me this actually means that I look “local enough”. :))

Well this is of course nothing scientific or very serious, just something I “measure” for myself for fun, and I’m proud to say, that after 2 months here I managed to fulfill both. Okay, it was not so hard as this is a small town, but still. :)

All kidding aside, I started to feel more at home now here in Illescas. I enrolled to a zumba class (those of you who don’t know me, I started zumba 4 years ago and still love it, so this was an important step :)) and I also joined a mosaic class. The latter was quite an impulse decision, but as I have a curiosity for creative things (and this year is about trying new things), I thought why not. And so far I like it a lot, though I haven’t finished my first piece yet.

In October I had quite some other activities: last Friday I went to an open Latin dance class (already for the second time). This was something I wanted to try for a long time and I’m happy I finally did, because it was really great. :) We were taught bachata: first the basic steps and then we got into couples and did some turns too besides just stepping from left to right. As we were rotating, everyone got to dance with everyone, which was really good, because we had a mixed level of knowledge, so like this I felt less embarrassed of messing up the moves from time to time. :)

I also participated in a “pasacalle” (parade) a couple of weeks ago: a group of actors dressed up in traditional costumes and told us legends from Toledo as a part of the El Greco year (in 2014 there are all kinds of festivities for El Greco here). They played music too and showed us some dances as we went around the town with them; it was very nice (and easy to understand :)).

And for the first time in my life I went to a fashion show to the neighboring town with some friends, it was really good. :)

At Ecocompartimos we have also a lot of activities going on: in October we started English conversation classes on Mondays (after a month we have more and more people coming :)) and we organized 2 more sessions of the “intercultural meeting” series I mentioned earlier: one of them was about typical food of different countries and the other was about typical dresses.

Both were really good, for the gastronomical one we all prepared something, so we had a bite of many countries: Spain, Morocco, Russia, Romania and of course Hungary.

Learning things about Morocco

And about Spain too :)

The feast

Then for the one with the dresses unfortunately I didn’t have anything Hungarian to put on, but I showed some pictures and 2 of the participants dressed up in typical Spanish dresses. We had a great time. :)

With the Spanish ladies :)

I enjoy these talks a lot as we always learn many new things about each country and have great discussions. In November we'll have 2 more sessions: one about music and another is about things in our countries that we are proud of or ashamed of. I'm looking forward to them. :)