Language fun

For three weeks we are privileged to have with us two girls who are the daughters of an Irish mother and an Australian father. The girls don't have particularly strong accents, but in the last 48 hours we have had fun noting the differences in vocabulary. For example:

One of them came down to breakfast this morning and asked, "Where can I find the cuttle-ree?" "The what?" I said? "Cuttle-ree." "Oh, cutlery! Silverware, you mean."

Yesterday one of them had a headache and asked for the Mah-trin, (Motrin).

"Capsicum" is their word for red bell pepper. "Bikkie" is cookie.

I love listening to them. And I think it's awesome that we are a minority in our home right now with 2 Irish/Australians, a Columbian and a Philipino.

Good times. :)

10 ways to pray for us

This is a video done by Jacob Bock, a veteran missionary here in Madrid, whose kids have attended ECA. He tells 10 ways to pray for missionaries and we wanted to post it to ask you to pray this way for us and for others.

Camarma en fiestas

David and Rachel went to a "bull fight" Friday night. In a traditional bull fight, the bull is killed by the matador during the fight. In the event that we attended, however, there were 12 recortadores who perform acrobatics around the bull. Here are a couple of five second videos to give you an idea of what it was like:

Obviously, this can be rather dangerous. One of the recortadores tripped when running from the bull, which gave Rachel a fright. The bull roughed him up a good bit, but the others rescued him and he walked away!

One other note of interest - the guy who was walking around selling raffle tickets for the leg of ham that he was carrying. It was raffled off near the end of the evening.

Multi-lingual

One interesting thing we have noticed is the multi-language labeling on food products here. Because Europe has so many languages represented in such a small area, food distributors just

print them all, I guess.

Can anyone tell me what languages these are?

Here I'm guessing italian, Dutch, English and Greek?

Sometimes they make it easy.

When we were originally headed to Spain, one misconception that we regularly had to counter was that we would be eating lots of Mexican style food here in Spain. This is not the case. We did enjoy lunch at an outdoor table in the main plaza here in town today. We ordered our drinks and asked for a menu. The waitress brought us our drinks with a free appetizer to go with them - potato chips topped with what seemed to be cold pickled strips of fish. It was actually not too bad, and we all ate several pieces of the fish except for Rachel who wouldn't touch it. In any case, Spanish food is a far cry from Mexican.

First Day of School

Thursday was the first day of school at ECA and Rachel's first official day of school ever. Here she is with the ECA Headmaster, Mr. Musser.

And with her teacher, Miss Santie.

We began the day with an all-school assembly. Pictured above are high school worship leaders and Mr. Musser, giving the introduction.

Rachel sitting next to fellow classmate, Katja, whose parents have served in the Netherlands for the last several years.

During lunchtime, David snuck down and got this picture of her class. There are 5 students in her class. 4 girls and 1 boy.

A family picture just for fun.

And here is a picture of David's 6th grade classroom, with desks for all six of his students.

Everyday Sights

(click on any of these pictures to enlarge them)

Last Saturday we ventured into Madrid on a mission to find an electronics store David had looked up online. I took the camera along to document the "everyday things," we typically see on a trip like this. Typically, we drive about 30 minutes to the nearest Metro/Subway station and ride the rest of the way on it.

There is a point in the center of Madrid (which is also the center of Spain) called Kilometro Cero (Kilometer Zero) and from that point, there are 5 main highways that reach out across the rest of the country. From our house, we take the A2 past the airport into the city.

Sign urging caution because of a high concentration of accidents in the area.

Typical grouping of red brick apartments. This style is all around Madrid.

When we first visited Spain, we were amazed at how much graffiti there was everywhere.

Now we hardly notice it.


Once we were in the city, we passed a bookstore with these cookbooks on display.

I was amused by the American cookbook. :)

R & M standing in front of one of the many garden/water features downtown.


Near Kilometro Cero - the heart of downtown Madrid.


One of the many cheese and ham store windows.


The large things hanging from the top are legs of cured pork, and are one of the most popular Spanish cuts of meat. People buy them whole and serve them thinly sliced.

More pork. Spain has so many kinds of sausage and ham.

David and Rachel ducked into a souvenier store while Bop and I stayed outside.

The souvenier shop was next to this wedding dress shop.

This particular dress was 2,000 Euros, (about $3,000) and was so gorgeous!

Little Monkey...

and the drive home again. This is about 5 miles from our house.

Dry. Barren. Brown farmland.

But we are thankful for our lives here and enjoy the sunshine every day.

(We wouldn't mind a little rain, though...)