Day 130 - Packing & Thanking Day :)
/Normally, at the end of each month I post a little language lesson with some of the useful words and phrases I learned over the month. We had previously done one for French and another for Catalan, but this month I decided to skip what would have been a post on Spanish. A lot of people already know a few words in Spanish, and if you know any of the other Roman languages you can generally figure out what's going on :) And to be honest, I didn't learn a whole lot in addition to what I already knew before. There were a lot of Spanish people who knew a few words of English, and I also know a few words of Spanish, so along with some body language, pointing, nodding, and smiling, it seemed to be sufficient for communicating this month.
Today, we practically spent the whole day packing. In addition to the normal routine, we also had to figure out what was going to come with us on the remainder of our trip, and what was going to be left behind. We really didn't come on this trip with a whole lot of stuff, and we really have not gotten very many new things either. However from the time we arrived in France until now, we did acquire quite a few nicknacks (see picture below right) because we traveled with a car and had enough room to carry things like beach toys, beach towels, etc. So a lot of those unfortunately had to stay.
Also, since for the next leg of our trip we will be moving around more frequently, it did not make sense to lug around too many toys. I already sent quite a few toys back to the States when my sister and parents visited us, but still we had more than we felt we needed. The kids won't really have enough time to play with everything, and to be honest there were a lot of things we brought that they just don't really play with in the first place. Additionally, they got a few new things for their birthdays which are coming with us, so we needed to make space.
Anyways, the point of all my rambling is that we are going to be traveling even lighter than we have been so far and that makes me happy :)
The kids were great at entertaining themselves the entire day, which was wonderful since this meant both my husband and I could pack, organize, and clean together. We are getting pretty efficient at this process, and the teamwork certainly helps.
We only left the house once the entire day, and that was only to take the garbage to the trash bins by the main road. We also stopped by the house of the old men who helped us find La Manzana (our house for the month) the first night we arrived in the dark, and couldn't find which way we had to go.
Kian had drawn two very nice pictures for them (can you believe I forgot to take a picture of his drawings?!) and we added a few pieces of chocolate and stopped by to thank them. Unfortunately, they were not home, but two ladies were there. Fortunately, I had thought ahead and translated a small paragraph explaining why we were stopping by, using Google Translate :) The ladies remembered the incident that occurred on Oct 1st and thanked us many times...while we thanked them :)
A great, productive, and thankful day was had by all!