Thee creeminal…needed thee noodells?

This week was a reaaaaally light week because a bunch of my students went on vacation or cancelled classes for various reasons. It was pretty odd.

The title comes from my 11-year-old student. We were practicing the past tense, so I designed a CSI situation where he had to figure out what happened and then give a report. He loved it. Halting English is actually perfect for detective games, I discovered, because it gives the speaker the air of a self-important detective who thinks each of his words. are. deathly. important. Anyway, the crime involved some lady stealing all the noodles from a restaurant. As you know, noodle is one of the funniest words in the English language, so with his Spanish accent and me making the storyline ridiculous, well, we were both laughing pretty hard.

The weekend was a decently social-y weekend, and I enjoyed myself a lot. Thursday, I went with Astin to her language exchange (half the time in Spanish and half in English) and we had good times. The girl, Irene, taught us some new words, of which my favorite is perroflauta. Perro is the word for dog and flauta for flute, so it’s the new word to talk about the hippie-type people who always go around with their dogs and flutes/recorders.

On Friday I went out with a few friends to TGIFriday’s. (Anne I know you wet your pants a little bit just then.) It wasn’t too shabby and I got to meet some new people. Afterward to Boñar for a cheap dinner and then on to another place to relax and talk. I learned that my apartment is actually pretty close to a lot of things I usually take the metro to. Hmph.

On Saturday, I got up early and made pancakes-to-go for a road trip to Cuenca. Cristina invited me on their shindig, and it was the first time I’ve been in a car in a while. It was good times. We had some classic old-school jams going on (what is a road trip without Sir Mixalot?). And we stopped at Ciudad Encantada first. C.E. is this place with all these weird rock formations made from different types of erosion. Pretty cool. It was the bomb to be up in the mountains with trees and blue sky, etc. Plus, one of the girls is from Oregon, has Chacos, and works at a summer camp. That is what I call, “Instant BFF Potion #6”. Okay, maybe not BFF, but we had fun.  We had some lunch in Cuenca and then went to see the Casas Colgadas “Hanging Houses.” They’re houses built into a cliff. So you walk out onto a bridge and you can see these houses kind of hanging over the edge of a cliff. I think one of them has a restaurant and a museum. We debated on going to Chinchón on the way back, but decided to head straight for Madrid. It was dark by that time, and I believe it’s the first time I’ve seen the stars in about 5 months. Weird.

All in all, it was a good week/weekend. Even if thee creeminal needed thee noodells.