I'm already behind

I am already behind on the blog.  We are pretty busy and I have not knitted much, but everyone here wears scarves constantly so I have decided to knit some for my new church friends who help me with my Spanish or other problems, like I had to ask a woman at church which laundry detergent was best, because my clothes were looking pretty dingy, through my limited Spanish and lots of hand signals and women's intuition she figured out what I needed and wrote down some names for me of products that would help.  The other laundry problem I have and have not solved yet is lint.  Without a dryer, there is no lint collecting and so all of our clothes have a little bit on lint on them, UGH, it drives me crazy and when you dry off after your shower your towel leaves towel lint on you.  I told Dwight I wanted to buy a hand vacuum to vacuum off all the lint.??????       I am still working on the cooking and baking.  I have not tried cookies yet, but maybe soon.  I made a pineapple upside-down cake and made enchilladas today.   They do not have much in the way of spice here so I always have my eyes open when we go into a new store.  I found cumin but not chili powder.  We thought we found a good price on watermelon but we misunderstood and ended up paying 7,45 Euros for a very small melon that's about 10.50$.  No more watermelons.  But you can buy 1 kilo of strawberries for 1,55 Euros or kiwi by the kilo for about the same price.  We eat bananas from the Canary Islands they are smaller but very nice flavor.  They have a whole aisle in the store for Yoq0urt my new favorite flavors are coconut and banana.  They also have lots of potted desserts in the dairy isle. Like flans and pot du cremes, custards etc. in little glass or pottery jars.  They are cheap and most of the ones we have tried are good.  Milk is all irradiated and is just on the shelf in cartons.  But I did find powdered whole milk which I have been using to make our hot chocolate.  It is the best.
I have been teaching English for 3 weeks now.   We have covered the Alphabet, vowels sounds, Family relations, Questions words, getting to know someone, pronouns, personal descriptions. We play lots of games  to get people to talk without feeling intimidated.  This week we are going to start verbs. ( verbs in English are so much easier than Spanish it should be no problem.  We are also going to work on going shopping ( food names).  We went to Santiago De Compostela twice in the last 2 weeks, first was to learn how to use the Church's polycom system-so that we can have meeting with other parts of Spain even the Canary Islands.  A member of the Church who lives in Santiago showed us around the Cathedral dedicated to St. James the Apostle.  Whose bones were miraculously found in Spain in the 8th century (I think).  Anyway the cathedral was beautiful and we spent about 2 hours touring, and watching all the pilgrims on foot or bicycle come to the Cathedral.

This is a picture of the incensor that would swin

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 in the nave of of the church so the pilgrams could be fumigated

This is the rope it takes 8 priests to handle the swinging of the incensor in a 30 m arch

 

 

 

 

Here we are with a traditional bagpipe player going back to the celtic roots of these people.

  We went to a town called Lugo which has an intact Roman wall on Sunday to visit the congregation there.  Most of the members are from the Dominican Republic with a few native Spanairds.  Everyone was very nice to us. It was Mother's day in Spain here last  Sunday, and the Primary(children group)  came into the women's meeting to sing for the Mom's and then present them with a paper flower that they had made.  One little boy, saw that I didn't get a flower and that his younger brother had already given his Mom a flower and so he came up to me and presented me the flower.   I was so touched, what a thoughtful young man at maybe 9 or 10, to think of an old lady like me. I am posting some pics of the last week or so with some commentary.