Hey ... we're still alive and live in Spain!

Hi everyone! Difficult to start a blog post after not writing one for 4 months! We apologize. Life caught up to us ;) A brief run down of events and lots of pictures to update what we've been up to.

In the beginning of July, Rob's parents came out to visit us for a week. We had so much fun together! We ate lots of tapas, did a lot of sightseeing, wine drinking, and even trivia with them! One of our favorites was having a great big picnic on the top of mountains at Montserrat, which is a monastery built on top of mountains because it you are closer to God. We didn't want our week to end with them. We have been missing both our families a lot lately and we like to look back through pictures of our vacations to have a good laugh.

Then, at the end of July, Erin's best friend Kelsey came to visit us! We also had a great time with her. Another very sad goodbye. Erin tried her best to persuade her to stay in Spain and teach English, but she had interviews in Chicago for teaching that she had to get back to. Kelsey was also here to celebrate Erin's 23rd birthday with her!!

During the month of August, it's a holiday all month long in Spain. Most companies take the whole month off of work. Such a different lifestyle than the U.S. They think we are crazy for not taking the whole month of August off for vacation. Erin still had some private classes and nannying, but about half the working time as before. And Rob's school was closed for the month so he definitely enjoyed having his month off of work! We were able to spend a lot of time with our good friends and enjoy the beautiful Barcelona summer weather. We spent a lot of time at the beach!

In September, we both went back to full time working, which is about 25-30 hours a week ;). Rob was very antsy after his long break to get back to work. He's teaching CAE classes this semester. This is an advanced English certificate class. It is a very high level English and can be quiet challenging to teach. Students often have very interesting and difficult questions to answer. Erin has a crazy schedule. She still is nannying in the mornings, then teaching one class in a school on Mondays and Wednesdays, and teaching English to two families children on Tuesdays and Thursdays. She is teaching some of her low level classes completely in Spanish. We both finally feel in a routine with teaching English, which is a good feeling. Teaching English as a second language is fun because it's always challenging and rewarding at the same time.

At the end of September, we went to Oktoberfest with our friend Beate who is from Germany, our friend Krista who is from Iowa and their friend Mike from San Francisco who was visiting. We stayed at Beate's family's house in a small town called Schrobenhausen, about an hour outside of Munich. It was an awesome experience being able to stay with her family. Her parents don't speak English, her sister and nieces do a little. So the only person speaking English was Beate and her brother-in-law. Needless to say, we had fun having Beate translate back and forth for us! Her parents live in a three story house with them on the first floor, her sister and brother-in-law on the third floor and their two children live on the second floor. And we all stayed in the basement! They have a beautiful house with a huge yard and garden. Her mom is an excellent cook and enjoyed cooking typical German food for us every day and night. We ate so many delicious, fresh pretzels, sausages, and of course drank a lot of German beer! We went to Oktoberfest on Friday with the four of us and Beate's cousin and her husband. We had a great time! Such a cool experience. We arrived at 10 in the morning and left around 11 o'clock at night. So we had a full day there! It's huge. The tents were so big and there are so many of them. There are about 15 tents with the biggest ones fitting thousands of people. The night before we left, Beate's mom and sister pulled out some traditional dirndle that Bavarian women wear and we decided to wear it to Oktoberfest. We fit in perfectly as about 90% of women were dressed in dirndles and the men wore lederhosens. Some highlights were: eating pork knuckles, sausage and sauerkraut, trying all different kinds of German beer, singing in German, and going on some crazy carnival rides. We also loved trying to pronunciation German words. Beate would say it first and then we would try our best at imitating her.

                 Rob's mom's maiden name is Schulte and we found a little shop named "Schultes"

 His name was "Jakob" and he was number 46. They show the name and count how many they have gone through.

*This last picture almost made us miss our flight. We took a little detour on Sunday to see the football of Stadium of Bayern Munich. We left the house a little late and hit a massive traffic jam. Luckily, the airport we flew out of was extremely tiny and we made it through security in time to reach the gate as our flight was boarding. 



Over the next three months, we plan on traveling throughout Spain. The tentative plan after that is to work until the end of December or January and then spend a few weeks traveling around the rest of Europe. That will bring us back home around the end of January or February.  We are both feeling ready to come back, but are trying to savor our last few months here. We are so lucky to be living this once in a lifetime opportunity and are enjoying it while it lasts.