Blogging at a Spanish pace

There are so many blog posts I have started in my head over the last month, but A lot has happened, including, among other things, getting engaged to this guy! On the advice of a friend (who suggested I could then link this on my gchat status so people would stop asking me to repeat it – thanks Jeff!), I will offer a brief engagement story:

Before I left for Spain, I had made Mark promise to come visit me. I knew I likely wouldn’t be back for Christmas, and so we would go a whole 8 months without seeing each other if he couldn’t visit. He booked a flight as a Christmas present (wow!) and came over for 2 weeks at the end of February, right during the famous Cádiz Carnaval. After a horrific flight over in which he managed to lose his coat AND his luggage (the luggage came 2 days later, the coat was mailed to his U.S. address after several calls to the Lisbon airport, where few people speak English or even Spanish), and spent 12 more hours in airports than he had anticipated, we were all smiles at the Sevilla airport where I picked him up on Valentine’s Day! (It was also fun to watch the reunions of 3 other couples before Mark finally came out the door…talk about anticipation!). We enjoyed the Carnaval in Cádiz with Lauren and several CIEE friends, snapping photos of cute kids, crazy costumes and “chirigotas” (the singing groups that compete each year and walk or are driven on a tractor around the city during Carnaval). We had made plans to head to Munich to visit a couple of Mark’s friends, but before we left Mark said it would be nice to have a nice dinner out somewhere and maybe walk along the beach. On Tuesday February 24^th (which also happens to be my mom’s birthday – way to impress a future mother-in-law, ha ha), Mark had bought me a bouquet of flowers which I found upon my return home from work – this was my first clue that something was up. [Sidenote: He did this all on his own while I was at work – we had passed through the Plaza de las Flores several times in our trips around Cádiz, but he remembered where it was!] That evening we watched the sun set, stopped by the Cathedral of Cádiz, and went to dinner at El Aljibe (convincing Mark that the small “tapas” portions of food are filling if you get a bunch of them, however, was a no-go J). After dinner Mark suggested we walk back out to the beach...another clue that he might be up to something. I took off my shoes to walk across the sand, but it was a bit chilly, so we walked back out on the pier leading to the castle of San Sebastian. Midway out we decided to sit down for a bit on the pier, enjoying the sound of the evening waves rolling onto the shore, and the castle lit up at night. He then surprised me by saying he had some things he had written down about our relationship, and why he loved me, and after reading them he fished around in his wallet (taking a little longer than he anticipated), pulled out a (sapphire!) ring, got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. To which I responded “yeah!!!!” Here are a couple pictures from that night, and the rest of his time here: