I have found a very interesting market thing in Moral and thus far I think it happens every Thursday by the Plaza de Toros. They have fruit and veggie stands and shoes and clothes and candy and toys. Its like a very mini Rastro. I am suprised that Moral has these types of things going on because it is still very small. Despite the small size there are now three supermarkets in the town. One at the top, one in the ´center´and one at the bottom. Just so that you don´t have to drive more than 5min to get to one...
Yesterday I FINALLY started the process to get the NIE, or the residency card for foreigners. I had called to make an appointment and the program had sent out and email saying they were going to organize a group appointment and we were supposed to fill out a spreadsheet and email it back. I did so and then didn´t hear anything else about it despite emailing the woman in charge until I was getting drinks with a friend and she asked me if my school had given me a paper about the NIE. Aparently the program has been having meetings to set up the NIE and they were doing it by school? Or maybe there is not order to how they are doing it expect that all of my friends had found out about this appointment so I was kinda freaking out because my school didn´t say anything about it even after I asked the secretary if he had heard anything. So I skipped work yesterday to attend the noon meeting which was actually the first step in getting the NIE. We filled papers and turned them in and now we wait 15 days for the next step and then another 15 for the final step. (at least, this is how its supposed to work because when I was asking the woman there about the process she kept saying, well its SUPPOSED to work like this...yay for Spanish Beaurocracy, right?) The other assistant from my school called me to tell me that the secretary had something faxed to him and that we were going to have the meeting at 3.30 that afternoon, so in the end I would have had an appointment anyway, but with the track record of the program, I´m glad I just went to the first one I could.
After the meeting Alissa and I wandered around Madrid for, basically 4-5 hours. I took her to barrio Salamanca which is kinda where I was before. Its the higher end of Madrid with a lot of nice buildings and shops. She kept saying how it felt like she was in a completely different city. It is very different from the center and the places where there are lots of students and tourists and also very different from the outskirts of the capital. We randomly found a fruitstand that is aparently very famous. It had all sorts of fruits and veggies including nice looking lychee that cost 33cents a pop and mushrooms and two fruits I´ve never heard of before called a pepquino and a Nispero. I Google searched the pepquino and it is aparently a small melon. They look like bitsized watermelons, kinda like the watermelon candies you can buy at a store but smaller.
(the first image gives you a sense of the size, the pepquiño is in a cocktail glass with some olives)
The other one that I´ve never seen is the Nispero,
Theirs came from Chile but I think they also sell it a lot in Japan. You end up seeing a lot of things if you just wander around. Apart from the massive amounts of exhaust I inhaled, it was a very interesting day.
Still plugging away at school and hoping to get some private lessons. I´m going to post some ads soon and I have some friends who will pass my name along if they encounter anyone who wants Enlgish classes. Next week I go ´home´to LA to be in my friend Lisal´s wedding. I will also take advantage of the opportunity to collect some important things from home (mainly peanutbutter).
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