WE'RE ENGAGED!!!!

Hopefully all of you reading this by now have been told the news that we are engaged! We couldn't be happier! Erin was just starting to think it wouldn't happen during the remaining time in Spain when Rob surprised her on our five year anniversary. Erin was out meeting a friend on Friday afternoon. When she got home and was walking up those lovely 100 stairs to the apartment, she got a phone call from Rob asking to come up on their rooftop terrace because he needed to show her something. As mentioned before, Erin had thought Rob was going to wait until they were back home in the U.S. so she was not expecting anything. However, when she got that phone call, she froze on the stairs. She knew and was secretly hoping it was this but told herself not to get her hopes up because maybe it was just a surprise for their five year anniversary. Heart racing, Erin ran up the stairs to get to the terrace to see Rob waiting all dressed up and a picnic set up next to him with a bottle of cava (Spanish champagne) and glasses. She quickly walked to Rob where he stood nervously. After about 30 seconds of a speech, Rob got down on one knee and asked Erin to marry her in Spanish!! (Quieres casarte conmigo?) and she said YES! Then they opened the bottle of champagne and toasted on the terrace with the sunset. Then, later that night, we went to our first Barca football game! Barca played Espanyol which is the same city rivalry team. It would be like the Chicago White Sox playing the Chicago Cubs in baseball. Barca won 2-1! We had a lot of fun. 

Since then, we've been spending time with our friends a lot. Our friend Katie threw us a surprise engagement party at her apartment. Her apartment was all decorated with balloons and hearts. It was such a nice surprise! We are so lucky to have made such good friends here. And she cooked dinner for us. We absolutely loved it!

 

Barcelona looks beautiful at night around Christmas time.  Almost every street has lights lined up across the top of the street. It's so nice to see everywhere decorated for La Navidad. There are little outside markets all over Barcelona as well selling Christmas stuff. Erin has been having conversation classes with a Spanish woman here named Lorena. Her Spanish has improved drastically.

Last weekend, Lorena invited us to a town called Vic with her husband. Vic is about an hour north of Barcelona and is a very Catalan town. Last weekend, Vic had their Medieval Christmas Market throughout their whole town. It was so cool. Erin spoke Spanish the entire day with Lorena and Lorena's husband. Rob also got to practice some of his Spanish skills. There were a lot of different stands throughout the town of Bic. Many cheese, meat, and cake stands selling typical Catalan fuet and sausage (Butifarra de Bic) and a special pastry called Coca. It's kind of like a bread or Danish with lots of sugar and a spice called anís on top. All of it was very delicious. There are also many beautiful churches in the small town. There is a part next to one of the churches that has Medieval walls/ ruins from the Romans. There are many shops that sell antique items as well as Medieval items. There's lots of music being played throughout the streets. There is also an area that is Arabia due to the Moor/Arabic influence who controlled Spain after the Romans. We watched an Arabic dance and had a really nice minty tea typical from Arabia. They have a center plaza with a big blue Christmas tree. In another plaza they have burros (donkeys) for children to ride in a big circle around the plaza. Overall it was a really fun day.

 

 

 

We are starting to prepare ourselves for our big Eurotrip in February now. The plan is to go to the south of Spain the first week of February. We are going to Malaga and Granada. Both are beautiful cities in Spain that are very different from the Barcelona (north of Spain). Then we return to Barca for a few days before heading to Munich, Germany for our friend Beate's birthday. We wanted to spend time with Beate and her family again as well as spend some time in Munich. When we visited for Oktoberfest, we didn't have much time to explore Munich.

Then from Munich, we plan to start our EuroRail trip traveling through about 10 different cities! We are so so excited. We will be traveling for 21 days and then return to Barcelona the end of February to spend a few last days with our friends and saying our goodbyes. Then off home to the good 'ole US of A!! We really miss all our friends and family and are very excited to see them when we return (around the first week of March). We will be posting a lot during our EuroRail trip about all the different cities we are in.

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.