Home, Home, Home

Well, we arrived back in Aber on Tuesday afternoon and have been cleaning and doing laundry since, this is the first chance I have had to sit down and work on photo organization and such. We had a great time, but are glad to be home. We were away the perfect length of time, not so long that we were sick of it but enough that we were glad to be home. So here is a run down on the trip.

Tuesday the 18 we woke up at 1am Aber time and quickly got dressed, finished packing, and loaded the car. We live in the middle of no where, well actually further than no where, like crazy far out in Wales. The nearest airport in three hours away, so to make it to a 7 am flight we had to leave early. So at 7 am we flew from Birmingham to Almaria Spain. Almaria is on the southern tip of Spain, on the Mediterranean side. We arrived in the Almaria airport and proceeded to the bus stop. Our hotel was located in Aguadulce which is about 15 miles from the airport. After two bus rides and a small walk we arrived at our beautiful beach side hotel.


During check in, we discovered that our passports were missing. We are usually very vigilant about keeping them safe but somehow we miss placed them. Not good. Mine and Anya's are USA passports, and Adam's is Canadian, but our visas for our stay in the UK are inside them, plus I did not bring any ID with me except for my passport. We also have all kinds of immigration things going on which would be extremely hard to explain to nice embassy people. We quickly went up to our room and said a quick prayer, then Adam ran off to see if he could find them. The last bus station we had been to was the place to look. Adam had taken out all the passports as ID when he changed money at a bank. He went and searched the bus station while I put Anya down for a nap. Two hours later he returned with no passports. He had searched the station, and asked at all the info desks and such but no luck. He was unable to search the bank however as they were closed for siesta. We tried to relax the rest of the afternoon and decided to go back to the bank the next morning.

Wednesday morning we ate breakfast and made our way back to Almeria to ask at the bank if they had seen our passports. The second we walked in the bank manager pulled our passport case out of drawer. Adam had left them on a desk. The manager noticed the second Adam left but we were gone on the next bus so fast that he could not catch us. Hurray for miracles! We were so worried that our little trip was going to be ruined but thankfully it all worked out and we could start having fun.
Our hotel was half board, so breakfast and dinner were provided which worked out great because then we could find super yummy lunch in town. We had high hopes of finding some Lebanese for Moroccan food, but no luck. We have a hard time finding when the best time to eat lunch is in Spain. Everything closes for 3 or 4 hours in the afternoon for siesta and they eat dinner really late so many times we ended up wanting lunch when everything was already closed. Our other problem was that Thursday and Friday were really big holidays so everything was closed all day. We did find some Argentine food and a great roasted chicken place so eating still turned out OK, even though I did not get my falafel.
Lots of people ask us what kind of traveler Anya is. She loves to travel. Trains, planes, busses are super fun to her. She loves people to look and that give her lots of attention. Often she loves to stand on our laps and look at all the people around her, or play peekaboo with people between seats. She got tons of attention at the hotel also, the wait staff at the hotel loved her. There were tons of old ladies from France, Germany, and Spain who would come and talk to her all the time, which she loves. She was however happy to be home. As soon as we walked into our flat she got all excited and started looking around at our stuff.

This is the view from our balcony, great huh?

Adam and Anya on the beach in front of our hotel.


Relaxing by the beach.



Miss Anya loves strawberries. We found this giant box of beautiful strawberries for super cheap, they were sooooo tasty we gobbled them up in no time.

Adam with a giant cool tree, there were entire boulevards full of trees like this one.


This is one of many shots of a giant Arab ruin which is located in Almaria. It was an early fortress dating back to 955, super cool. It is high up on a hill and you can see the entire town and the Med forever. It had beautiful gardens and water ways all the way through. If you click on this photo it should connect you to my flickr page where there are more of the Alcazaba.


Me and Anya chilling.

Some cool foliage.


There were tons of beautiful flowers all over the place, including my second favorite, the African Daisy. We wanted to get pictures of Anya sitting in the flowers but she would have none of it. We settled for sitting on my knee looking at them.

Anya loves to fly!

Yea for babybel keeping a baby quiet and happy.

Off to Spain

Adam has a 3 1/2 week Easter break which began on Friday. We wanted to get away to some warm weather (not that it is really cold, but my tan has faded and I need a good touch up) but we needed to wait to make a decision until we received our next three months pay. It came in on friday so we have been searching for last minute deals since. Today we chose a resort and town and we are off early tuesday morning. We have to leave here at 2 am to make it to Birmingham for a 7 am flight, although this is not ideal, by 11 am we will be in warm southern Spain sitting on the beach! Here are some cutness pictures of Anya. She started to put her arms up in the air on Saturday, it is really cute and funny and she loves to try to get my plants.

8 Months old!

Our little monkey is 8 months old today. She is so much fun right now, we love having her around. Anya is total social butterfly and loves to have people around. Last night we had a whole bunch of masters students over for dinner (the come over every Thursday) and she spent the entire night being passed around from person to person, kissing, hugging and smiling at everyone. She loves to have kids from the branch over for sleepovers and to visit with random people in the street. She has two teeth (they have been there for over a month but it is hard to get a picture of them) and likes to eat sometimes. She hates pureed baby food and would much rather eat slightly mashed food from our plates her favorite being butter chicken, or other various rice and sauce Indian dishes, potatoes, carrots, peas, grapes, apples, strawberries, oatmeal, and bread products. She weighs in at a low 16 and 1/2 pounds and she can move pretty fast now. She crawls all over the apartment, following me around until she finds something interesting to climb on, her favorite being the edge of the couch and dining chairs and she has mastered getting off of the couch with out disaster. She also knows where her toys are kept and therefore pulls the basket out and all over the living room floor three or four times a day. I was going to take her out today to take pictures with the spring flowers but she was not feeling great so we will have to try that tomorrow. I do however have plenty of pictures from the last week to share.



On this day, she was not feeling so great so she snuggled down and watched Cars.

Book Tag

From Holly:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find sentences 5,6, and 7, and post them.
4. Tag five people.

"But the Coordinator for the Improvement of the Status of Women reported to the General Assembly in 1987 that women from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa comprised a far smaller proportion of the officials from those regions than was equitable. Whereas 31.0 per cent of all geographically appointed officials from Asian and Pacific countries were women, only 5.4 per cent of all geographically appointed officials from Eastern Europe were women. Second, those Eastern European, Middle Eastern and African women who where appointed were most likely to fill service and administration posts, not posts responsible for technical projects or with policy-making authority."

This excerpt is from a book I just bought, "Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics." So far it is a fantastic book, but I am only a little way in, and yes I am reading it for fun.

I tag- Liz, Liz, Catherine, and Kip


By the way, is this exercise supposed to say something deep and meaningful about me as a person, or is it to show that three sentences taken from the middle of a book can give a good representation of that book? I am just wondering.