One Month More

Today is November 14th. My finals are December 12th-14th. I'm leaving Spain on December 17th. Time is passing way too past.

I'm genuinely sad about having to leave my host mother. She is quite an incredible woman. I changed my flight plans to flight out of a nearer airport so she could accompany to the bus station and take a direct bus to the airport, instead of taking a six hour bus to Madrid and then having to get to airport with all my luggage. Both my moms are much happier with my flight change.

To add to the list of many things my host mom does for me, today I had another bad stomach ache and I've unfortunately been having a lot of these lately but my host mom has a bunch of home remedies to make me feel better. My favorite is an infusion of manzanilla, or chamomile, except it's a different blend of things here. My host mom brews it with another infusion, not entirely sure what the second one is. But it tastes good and works well. And I learned the difference between tea and an infusion. Tea must contain tea leaves. If its a bunch of plants but no tea leaves, it's an infusion. I think we just call that an herbal tea in the US.

Also I learned that if you have a stomach ache here, they say you have a sad stomach. That's so much more adorable than having a stomach ache.

I'm endlessly fascinated by home remedies and what people believe helps with common ailments. For example, today I asked for a light dinner that wouldn't upset my stomach further so I had a large cup of my host mom's homemade broth, a plate of finely sliced jamon de york, a piece of bread and an Actimel (a very thin yogurt similar to Middle Eastern kefir). Surprisingly satisfying and definitely helping. Now I'm sitting in the living room, sipping my manzanilla infusion and watching the news about today's strike  with my host mom. This woman takes seriously good care of me.

She's also pretty adorable. Today's a leftover day so originally for dinner I was going to have lentils with chorizo. My host mom had already made the chorizo earlier today and she didn't want it to go to waste so for dinner she had just the chorizo, because this particular variety is very fatty but goes really well with lentils. And she had queso for dessert of course. when the rest of the family saw her eating just the chorizo, they giggled and jokingly scolded her. She was like, I know, this is so good, it's a sin but it would be a bigger sin to let it go to waste. We giggled.

Queso for dessert is something I'm going to have to continue in the US and the Netherlands. I normally have a huge sweet tooth. Not here, oddly enough.