Allie in the South of Spain

I have mentioned it before, our apartment is kind of small. As we move more and more stuff in, we are forced to try and find places to put it all while trying to maintain a certain sense of organization. Here are some of the ways we are making that happen. Anyone who knows me knows that I swear by my Joy Mangano Huggable Hangers from HSN. They are seriously amazing. What are they and why the heck are they so special? Well, they are thin hangers with a velvety covering that honest to God help me fit more clothes into my closet. Plus they live up to their claim that things do NOT fall off of them. I can cram a ton of clothes into a smaller space since all my hangers are the same small size, no bulky plastic for this girl. I have been growing my collection for a while and have even shared some with Jose. I could rave about them all day but here is a picture to show you what I mean: I also am loving the IKEA pants holder that we bought. Mine holds both pants and ski...

I have given up sweets for Lent. Boooooooo. Jose decided to join in and give them up as well. Thank goodness because I couldn't handle it without him. We are keeping each other accountable. (Plus I couldn't stand it if I had to watch him enjoy a sweet everyday when I couldn't). This is actually the first year I have chosen to give something up for Lent and have actively stuck with this promise. Why sweets, you might ask? Well, because... Jose and I both have a sweet tooth. After dinner we would regularly eat a mini-Reese's from our stash. Our Movie Fridays often involve gummy candies. At work I spend the day with a group of women who always have cookies or chocolate around. I have been to a birthday party with a triple chocolate, peanut butter and Snickers cake. This weekend we went out with some friends and they ordered a brownie dessert with vanilla ice cream after the meal. And can we talk about the churros that are popping up everywhere I look? We are surrounde...

Today while walking Cooper, Jose and I had a discussion about what animals say here in Spain after hearing a rooster crowing off in the distance. Did you know they say something different in Spanish? I had never really thought about it. It completely changes the Old MacDonald song. My kids are going to be a mess when they go to preschool, singing about a woof, woof here and a quack, quack there. Here is the list: Cow: Muuuuuuu                                              (English: Moooooo) Horse: Hiiiii hiiiii                                       ...

This has been a seemingly never-ending moving process. It just keeps going on and on and on and on. I am trying to look at it positively (besides having a wonderful new place to live) since anyone who has moved before knows how much of a pain it can be. I can honestly say I have learned a few things while moving. First, Jose and I have WAY too much stuff. Way too many clothes, too many books, too many things. We are discovering things we forgot we even had as we pack up our old apartment. If we haven't seen it in so long that we could live without it we have decided to get rid of it. This goes for clothes, old notes and papers from school, kitchen stuff, etc. We need to simplify, something we are just realizing now. I have never been a person who accumulated a lot of things. In fact I have moved so many times since graduating high school (averaging once or twice a year) that I was never able to have that much stuff. A move overseas would logically reduce my crap even more but ap...

I just wanted to take a moment today to post some more updates and photos of what we have been working on around our apartment. Last weekend was a busy one since we got our closets set up (except the doors), the new bed put together and things organized. We still have a LONG way to go. We are alternating between moving things from the old apartment and getting them put away here. We kind of have a goal in mind of being pretty well set up by March. We'll see. It might be wishful thinking since this has been the slowest move of all time I am guessing. Here is the bed (minus a headboard). We still aren't sure exactly what we will do for a headboard but I will post when we figure it out. On the opposite wall we have our closet which still needs the doors (though it has one), a project we are planning on finishing today. IKEA offers a lot of great storage solutions and our clothes are fitting pretty well so far. Next we have our bookshelves in the living/diningroom. The...

Second graders at my school were recently working on farm animal English vocabulary and they made these super cute sheep to decorate the hallways. All they needed was a few cotton balls, a sheep head design (which was provided for them but that could also be drawn), a black crayon and scissors.      They cut out the sheep's head and then traced their four fingers (basically their hand but not including their thumb, like you were showing the number four on your hand) and colored it in with their crayon. Then they cut it out and glued on the sheep's head. After they added cotton to make the wool. Adorable. And original since each girl's hand is slightly different.  

Jose and I decided we wanted to spend our first night in our new apartment on Valentine's Day. We worked really hard to get the essentials into our place to make this happen (and it did)! Since we are basically broke at this point, we had a quiet pasta dinner cooked in our new kitchen to celebrate the holiday. Besides that no gifts or flowers or anything out of the ordinary. Though nothing is really finished and we are still living out of boxes, we slept here the past few nights. As anyone who has moved into a new place knows, it takes a while to adjust to the new sounds you experience. Here in general the noise is not bad as we have only a couple neighbors thus far. We mostly hear the big fountain outside on the street which is pretty calming and makes for nice background noise. Cooper, however, has taken it upon himself to bark any time he hears the elevator. He is having a hard time adjusting it seems and with his giant over-sized ears he can hear the elevator begin ...

I've been talking about it for days and without further ado here are some pictures of our finished kitchen. Remember what it looked like before: Drum roll please... Ta da! Like magic we have cabinets and countertops and a sink and hidden appliances. Here is the other side: Sorry about the angles but it is a tight space and hard to get good shots. Here are a few more. Enjoy!     We can't wait to get in there and actually cook something. Eventually we will add some open shelving to the walls and other accessories but for now we are just happy to have another thing done. And on to the next!   

We have finally made it to the kitchen installation phase of our 3 month-long odyssey to get into our new apartment. We've had a few setbacks that you can read about in older posts but we are finally getting down to the last few essential things before our place will be habitable. We created a list of must-haves before actually moving in full time and they included: a bed (which arrived today), a couch (which we ordered going on 7 weeks ago and are still waiting for), and the kitchen which will hopefully be completed today. Remember the boxes: Well by the end of the day they had become this:     And this:    Though you can't see it in these pictures (since I took them in the afternoon while there was still light) we ended the day with countertops and a sink as well. Today the guy will install our appliances and put the doors on everything. It should be in enough time to cook a Valentine's Day dinner in our new kitchen : )

Since my last post Jose and I have been busy putting together everything we bought at IKEA on Friday. We started with three bookshelves and then moved on to our giant wardrobe/closet things. These two projects took us all weekend basically. Check out our beast of a closet. You can't tell so much in this picture but it is taking up an entire wall in our bedroom. Jose (and I, but more him) have a lot of clothes. Soon this bad boy will be full.   Just when we had wrestled the majority of the cardboard boxes out of the apartment (because anyone who has bought and assembled from IKEA knows that you will end up with an abundance of cardboard that is a bitch to pitch), the delivery men arrived with everything for our kitchen. Which meant, you guessed it, more boxes. Here they are taking over our livingroom (say hi to the new shelves!). It's hard to believe that all of this is going to soon become my kitchen but it's true. The guy is working on it as we speak. I ca...

I have mentioned before that Spain is not the most politically correct place and I have another example to share today. On Friday we bought a package of Conguitos candy which are basically chocolate covered peanuts. Because they are brown someone had the bright idea to have their spokesthing be little brown people. The name Conguitos means little people from the Congo. You get the picture. Obviously this is not something you would see in the U.S. I do have to say though that they were pretty yummy. Are there any other racist candies out there?

Jose and I have had a very busy week working on the new apartment. On Thursday a friend of his from work lent him a big van (one reminiscent of the one dubbed the Garber mobile back in the 90's) and we spent the afternoon moving the few things we wanted out of the old place and into the new. Remember, right now we are in a fourth floor walk up so there were a lot of stairs climbed that day. Thank you to Jose's two friends who lent us a hand. On Friday we headed to IKEA right after work to make the bulk of our furniture purchases. We were on a mission, had already made a game plan and were out of there in about 3 hours. We ended up leaving with four of those trolley things and a TON of boxes. Since no one has big cars here we decided to spring for transport since there was no way we were getting those boxes home ourselves. Best 60 euros ever spent. Yesterday we went to our new apartment and began to try to organize everything we had moved on Thursday since we had basically ...

So the trash collectors' strike has been going on for more than a week now. Things are getting (and have been) disgusting. You can't walk anywhere without seeing, stepping over, smelling and basically being attacked by trash. In my last post I said I wasn't sure why this strike was happening but since then I have done some research. Turns out waaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy back in April of 2012 (you know, like eons ago) an accord was reached between Lipisam (the rubbish company) and the local government in which Lipisam workers would have a 5% reduction in salary and would agree to work 37.5 hours each week. These types of salary reductions are pretty common here if it means no lay-offs (you sacrifice a bit to keep working, not ideal but you still have a jobski). And imagine working so many hours a week. UNHEARD OF!?!?!?!  Again, this agreement was reached fairly recently. However, since then there has been a change in politics in the local government (to another political ...

Jose and I have a weekly ritual on Fridays which started when we decided we needed to try to save money and stop going out to eat as often: Movie Friday. We are huge nerds and totally look forward to this blissful night spent lounging around in our jammies. When Jose picks me up from work with the weekend about to begin the first thing out of his mouth is, "Movie Friday!" It is a mantra that gets us through the week. 4 days to Movie Friday, 3 days, 2 days... Movie Friday consists of crashing on our couch, cooking a pizza in our oven, popping popcorn, having a cocktail and watching a movie we have downloaded. It is a simple tradition but we love it. Sometimes we throw in a Wii game or two. Sometimes we don't even make it through an entire movie without falling asleep. What I love about this evening is that there are no expectations, just relaxation. It is a great way to unwind. As you can see, Movie Friday is sort of like a grown-up sleepover. We eat junk food...

Going on 5 days now there has been a strike of trash collectors here in Seville. They are only offering minimum services which does NOT include trash pick-up at least in my neighborhood. We don´t live in the cleanest, most well kept area to begin with so you can imagine how it is getting. Gross. I have mentioned it before, but I will say it again. Spanish people love themselves a strike. I don´t even pretend to know what they are fighting for or against in this case. Trash people admittedly don´t have the best job in the world, but it is a job. As someone who dealt with trash on a daily basis during the summer for years I think I have enough experience to base my opinion (the other half of this job was cleaning bathrooms). My mother always told me, a job is a job. Here in Spain there are a lot of people not working and this is not by choice. Again, I am not saying these people striking don´t have the right to do so but it seems to me that there are probably other people willing ...