Anna and I just got back from a week in Spain. The little French schoolchildren have their 1.5 week break for All-Saints Day, which coincides closely with Halloween. We would learn after our trip that French children are now prowling the neighborhoods in search of candy on the night of October 31st, much like their American counterparts. But I'm getting ahead of myself. My point was that after one week of teaching, Anna gets an almost two week break to do things like explore countries to the south of France.
This trip was important to me, because as most of you know, I lived in Spain around one and a half years ago. Our trip itinerary included (exclusively) Granada and Barcelona, both cities in which I'd spent considerable time, and cities of which I had very fond memories. So, the question is, are these towns going to be able to live up to my mental image of the way they used to be? Was I totally wrong about Spaniards being out so late, partying more, everything being cheaper in Spain, Barcelona being gorgeous, Granada being twisty and turny? Are these cities in reality just like Montpellier, France? Or are they boring after having seen a little bit more of the world? Kind of important to my internal sanity to establish some sort of answer to these questions.
To make a long story short, I was right. Spain is cheaper than France, and Barcelona is beautiful, and you can still get tapas for free in Granada, and the Alhambra really does kick ass, and the Sagrada Familia is still under construction, and a million other things that I remember still exist. My spanish came back, after a couple of awkward days of franglespañol being the only thing that would leave my mouth. I've not gone insane, and France really is a lot different from Spain, so I'm justified in being surprised by how my expectation of living here was so off base. That furthermore justifies why I had such a culture/life shock experience in the first (quite long) while here in France. This is good. It allows me to move on.
We took pictures. Go see them.