¡Hola amigos!
On our last day in Madrid, we couldn’t leave without visiting the Reina Sofia Museum to see Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece, Guernica. The students roamed around the museum with the leaders on a scavenger hunt to find a painting assigned to them by Natalie, plus a few others with specific features for bonus points. The Picasso work was definitely the showstopper. We followed up the Reina Sofia with lunch outdoors at a nearby restaurant to see the flow of people through the cosmopolitan city before we departed for the more easygoing Albacete.
In Albacete, our albaceteño leader, Paco, greeted us and took us to a concert of traditional Manchego music performed by a local albaceteño orchestra. After an hour of music, we soothed our grumbling stomachs with tapas from a restaurant just steps from our hotel. Over dinner, Paco teased our students with details about their Spanish counterparts, whom they were anxious to meet.
Miranda, Dana, and Maya at the concert
The next morning, a bus filled with nervous and excited Spanish teenagers pulled up near the hotel and waited for their American brothers and sisters to board. The bus took us to a nearby tennis club, where all the teens played games and swam in the pool as they got to know one another. They also collaborated on their first joint language lesson, for which they were required to help each other complete a page of food vocabulary in English and Spanish.
A la piscina!
Hermano Alvaro with his partner Nathaniel and Hermana Ana with her partner Andrew
Some of the girls playing cards with their new hermanas
Once all the games were played and lunch was enjoyed, we bused back to Albacete for workshops on fruit and fish at a local grocery store. Both workshops were incredibly informative. The fruit workshop included a tasting of the supermarket’s fruit offerings, while the fish workshop put some of the teens in close proximity with some of the more unique Spanish delicacies.
Fine, we won’t be serving pulpo for dinner.
The workshops helped the teens start thinking about their next assignment. They broke off into teams of four (two sets of American-Spanish pairs), came up with four tapas to make per team (for the next day’s lunch!), then shopped for ingredients in the supermarket. The only rule was that they were not allowed to cook for their tapas and had to use all ingredients as they were bought. Once all the teams had their tapas planned, we all headed over to 100 Montaditos for dinner.
Hermana Blanca, Sophia, Hermana Elena, and Maya enjoying dinner
There’s still more fun from La Mancha to come! Que guay!
– Natalie, Graciano, y Joe