My EVS in Andalusia 6

The next morning, on the 19th of December, I woke up to a wonderful birthday breakfast with fruit salad, yoghurt, cereals, egg sandwiches and Turkish coffee, prepared by Canan and Renata. In the afternoon, a Spanish friend brought me a delicious chocolate cake and in the evening we watched Harry Potter 1 with Feryal (the other Turkish volunteer), eating home-made chips and drinking Jägermeister (which I got as a present) and Martini. It was a very nice birthday, with sunshine instead of snow and people singing Christmas carols in t-shirt outside.

Despite of not having any Christmas or winter feelings, Purchena was getting ready for the “Felices Fiestas”, the Christmas holidays, step by step.

Renata and I were asked by the employees of the town hall to organize the making of ornamentation and, subsequently, the decoration of the only fir-like tree in Purchena. I spent six endless hours desperately trying to build a 26-jagged (ended up being 18-jagged) star for the top of the tree with outrageously impractical waterproof material, while Renata was building little stars and a snowman made of about 1000 plastic cups.

A couple of days later, we got rather enraged with the employees who didn’t understand our lack of time and made us wait again and again for the decoration on place. When they finally came to help us, they showed a very Spanish way of being unorganized. Not only did they have too few tinsels, so we were sent back to buy more, they also did not have any ladder to reach to the upper parts of the tree. However, our irritation was soon settled by the creative solution of our Spanish friends: they called a construction worker who was working nearby and asked him to use his excavator. In the following minutes an elderly member of the town hall was lifted up and down in the excavator´s shovel, fixing our stars and tinsels all around the tree. At the end it was not that bad looking.

In our Spanish classes we continue having a good lot of fun with the English participants and the famous British sense of humour. The last time, before the holidays, they brought us freshly baked mince pies and I gave them German Christmas cookies to try. At the end, I showed them “Dinner for one”, the old black and white English sketch all Germans have the tradition to watch on New Year´s Eve. If you have never watched it, I can only recommend you to do so. Skip the German part at the beginning and enjoy! “The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie? The same procedure as every year, James!”