Christmas at the Beach

After the crazy birthday party on Saturday I was happy that there was a relaxing Sunday waiting for me. I slept in, had breakfast in my bed and watched some crapy TV series about renovating houses, buying houses, mariages and wedding dresses. In Spanish TV you will mainly find American TV series, such as "Love it or List it", "Castle", "CSI Miami" or similar things that are synchronised badly. But I have to say that the fact that I didn't have any internet in my appartment and therefore, my only lazy freetime activity was watching Spanish TV, had helped me a lot to improve my Spanish skills. At the beginning it was difficult to understand the plot, but TV series like the ones I mentioned above aren't that complicated and with subtitles it became better every evening. After a while it was quite normal for me to watch TV in Spanish, even if I missed some German TV series that started during my semester abroad. 

After breakfast I cleaned my appartment a bit and tried to plan my food for the remaining 5 days before I would fly home for christmas. I wanted to use all the fresh and already opened foodstuffs before my flight - I would only be away for about 10 days, but I preferred to know that there would not be any insects in my kitchen during my absence. So I wrecked my brain about possible food for lunchtime and the evenings and made a list what I had to buy to cook these things. After that I relaxed again for a while, before I finally took a shower, changed my clothes and went to the beach. It was a wonderful day again, so I just sat down on my towel in the black sand and watched the surfers that were trying to catch waves in the sea. For me it was a kind of therapy to listen to the sound of waves and feel the sand under my feet. I could have stayed there for hours - but unfortunately I forgot my sunscreen at home and didn't want to end up as tomato. As blonde person that happens quickly! 

As all the lazy sundays that day passed by quickly, and suddenly it was 6pm and I had to prepare my food for the next day and for the evening. That was one aspect I hated the most about my internship - I had to cook every evening. I know, there's nothing bad about cooking and it's not that I hate cooking. But as it wasn't my kitchen and I didn't have a lot of equipment there (and for 6 months I didn't want to invest a lot of money in buying things that I would have to leave there), so I couldn't do a lot of different dishes. They were rice with vegetables, fish, chicken, pasta with tomato sauce and cheese or with shrimps, salad with different components or wraps with salad, vegetables and chicken. Doesn't sound bad, I know, but after 6 months you can't see any of those dishes anymore. But for that limited period of time it was okay - I didn't want to spend too much time with cooking but I also didn't want to have fast food and pizza every day. 

I was incredibly happy that I only had three days to work until the christmas holidays - it hadn't become any more interesting during the last week, and I already knew what we would do during those three days: chatting, watching cute animal videos, eating aaand chatting. But I also had finished studying for the first AdWords exam, so I would take 2 hours of time in order to try to pass the first test. It consisted of 100 multiple choice questions and you have 120 minutes to do it. The week before I had watched several YouTube Videos of people who had filmed their screen doing older exams and I tried to answer the questions. As I hadn't been so bad, I wanted to try it before christmas. It was free and if you don't pass you can try it another time after 7 days. As often as you want. 

So it was monday again and one of our colleagues was so annoying because of the upcoming holidays. He seemed to be more excited than a little child during the time before christmas and the other intern and me were just annoyed. As already known, we chatted and watched cute animals most of the time. Sometimes another colleague came to give us a small task, but it was never more than 15-30 minutes of work while they were almost dying because of their stress level. Tuesday and Wednesday were passing by as monday - boring, much too long and without any important task. I finally passed the first AdWords exam and was quite proud of myself. I hoped that I would pass the second one after the holidays as well - I would be the first intern to acheive that! On wednesday we suddenly had a "very important task" for one colleague which was a lot of boring work that mostly consisted of typing and copy + paste. But at least we had something to do, I couldn't see any more cute animals in that moment. After our annoying colleague had asked several times if it wasn't possible to leave the office earlier because he had finished all the tasks (we would have been able to leave 2 weeks before then) at 3pm (3 hours before we were usually finishing work) our boss finally agreed that we could leave if we had finished everything. The other intern and me went to the small restaurant in the same commercial centre and had a burger in order to celebrate our holidays - we had been dreaming of that moment during the whole day. After our late second lunch we left work together and made plans for the next day. It was christmas and because of our inflexible boss it hadn't been possible for us to fly home the 23rd, and the next flight was the 25th. So we wanted to spend that day together in order not to feel so alone. We had also asked the other girls in our Whatsapp group but suddenly they didn't have money to go to a restaurant and wanted to cook in their shared appartment. We weren't happy about that at all, but we couldn't say "hey we don't care, let's go to a restaurant", so we just agreed and planned to go to the beach before. 

At home I just relaxed and thought a bit about my luggage for christmas - it wasn't that easy to make everything fit in a suitcase that was only allowed to have 8kg, but fortunately I had all my winter clothes at home and only had to bring some makeup, some underwear and the presents. And my winter jacket, shoes, pullover and accessoires my Dad had brought me during his visit in october - the time when I had thought that I would spend New Year's Eve in Paris. And they were so large and heavy that I almost needed my whole suitcase for that. I just hoped that they wouldn't control the weight too much - I would never ever have only 8kg! So after having figured out what to take and what to leave on the island, I just had a small dinner and stayed in my cosy bed for the rest of the evening. 

The next day I could finally open the last little door of my advent calendar - the thing that had accompanied me during the long lasting, boring December. It was more a psychological thing that helped me to see that time was passing even if I didn't feel it sometimes. And now it was empty and it was one day before my flight to Germany. The weather outside was warm and sunny and not one single cell inside my body was feeling like Christmas Eve. I finished my luggage, took a shower and cleaned the bathroom a bit. Then, I left the house and went to the place where I wanted to meet the other intern. We wanted to go to the beach and enjoy the incredible nice weather on that special day. It was so unreal to wear a bikini on the 24th of december! We started our 25 minutes way through the city centre and decided to have a Vietnamese sandwich before - we didn't know what the others would cook later in the evening, and she had wanted to try one of those sandwiches all the time. It was really delicious! Eating, we continued our way to Playa Jardìn and in that moment it was just such a different, but also wonderful Christmas Eve. Sunshine, beach, good food, and a good friend next to me that was loving cute little dogs as much as I did. 

We arrived at the beach and laid down in the sand. We didn't want to go into the water because it was quite cold and the waves were high. So we just relaxed in the sun, read our books and I called my boyfriend who was at the airport waiting for his flight to Algeria. I was still missing him more than a lot, but it had become easier for me to live with the situation, because I couldn't change anything and I could understand quite good that he wanted to see his family before he would start to work. So we were talking via telephone once or twice a week and I was looking forward to seeing him after my arrival back to Germany in February. I didn't know yet when I would see him and how/if it would work out, but I was optimistic that we would meet again and that it would become another wonderful time together. It was difficult, of course, but I didn't want to finish that - I was happy to have someone like him and even if we couldn't meet whenever we wanted to, the time we had together was always incredible beautiful. So I was happy to hear his voice while I was sitting at the beach and watching the sea. 

Unfortunately, time was passing much too fast and soon we had to leave the beach again, because we had to go to the other girls to have our Christmas Dinner. We packed our things and 10 minutes later we arrived at their house. As we would have preferred to go to a nice restaurant, we weren't happy about that arrangement, but we had had our sandwich and the girls had invested a lot of work and time to do the dinner, so we didn't want to ruin the whole atmosphere. They had prepared a nice salad with pomegranate and some chicken with pasta and tomato sauce and it looked quite good, even if the chicken wasn't ready yet, so we talked a bit and had a glass of wine before we sat down at the dinner table to eat the salad. After the chicken was finished (more than 1 hour later) we ate the second dish and had a lot of fun making jokes and talking about our funny colleague. Everyone was laughing about the histories about him and so we soon forgot that a restaurant would have been better. After a small dessert (cookies), we started to listen to music with their laptop and singing a bit while the three girls were getting ready to party - they wanted to meet other girls later and party in Santa Cruz (heey we don't have money blabla). The other intern and me didn't come with them, because we had our flight the next day, but we stayed with them until they had finished their outfits. I had to admit that it was quite a nice Christmas Eve - I had never passed that day without my family, so that 24th was a day of a lot of New Things for me. When I returned to my appartment, I called my Dad via Skype and they had been really afraid that I would have to pass that evening alone at home. We talked a bit and it was nice to hear from them, and finally I had a shower and fell into my bed. I was so excited about the next day that I could hardly sleep. 

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