Hey everyone! I'm so very sorry it's taken me so long to update the blog! It's meant to be a monthly thing at least but I realized the other day it's been way beyond a month since my first! Anyways, I'll give you a lowdown on what's been going on over here! This is a picture of me with one of my housemates Jose, very cool guy! He's the one from Andalucia who I don't really understand lol, but it's getting better! :-)

Ok, well I'm now very much settled in my flat which is cool. The guys I live with are brilliant and I have a real laugh with them, or maybe they're still laughing at me...we still, sorry I still misunderstand what they say at times which leads to very confusing and embarrassing moments -- mainly for me. Oh well, it's very humbling so must be good for me :-)

Work-wise is going pretty well now, thank you God! With private lessons, I managed to get one family with 3 kids who want 3 hours at a time (1 hour for each) twice a week! So that's 6 hours every week I'm there which is brilliant for private work, especially from just one family! The only pain is they live in the south of the city and I'm in the north-west so it takes me an hour to get there and an hour to get back every time but it's worth it for the 3 hours. So I do that every Tuesday and Thursday evening from 5.30-8.30pm. Then a funny story was that I got out the metro a month ago and this woman who must've heard me say something in english randomly approached me and asked me if I lived around the area (I was standing outside my flat at the time) and if I wanted a job! She runs this centre called the George Washington School of English (very American!) and she was desperate for more teachers and was willing to take me even with my complete lack of experience! Oh yeah, sorry I forgot to say that I've been to a few interviews for working in schools but they all say my lack of experience doesn't help so didn't get any of those jobs so someone saying to me experience didn't matter was great! Anyways, it's only part-time but it's more work! Every Monday and Wednesday I teach conversation English to 2 women at the centre from 9.30-10.30, then I go to a school and "teach" English (play games) with 4 year olds from 4.00-5.00pm, then I go to a family's house and teach two 10 year old twins conversation English for an hour then their younger 5 year old sister I have for half an hour from 6.00-7.30pm. It's a bit all over the place and sometimes difficult remembering what I have each day but I'm beginning to learn it! It's only 13 hours of work a week (still not working on Fridays) which isn't a huge amount but so much better than before -- no work at all!! So I'm extremely grateful for it and actually really enjoying it too!
Friends-wise I have met a few people now through this inter-cambio thing where you meet someone for an hour or 2 and speak half the time in Spanish and half the time in English. I regularly meet 3 of them every week and have a couple more sporadically. I wouldn't call them friends as of yet, still early days, but who knows :-) they're brilliant people and I love meeting up with them! To be honest, I would say it's actually the thing I love doing the most here. So I hope some real deep friendships can be formed this way.
In regards to church it's been a good month! We are now meeting weekly as a group, every Saturday night. We have a time of worship and a talk - going through the book of Nehemiah very slowly lol, but that's coz there's SO much in there for us to take hold of! Then we pray and then all eat together. It's really nice and feels very communal and also now that we're all getting stuck into life here and having our own lives more, it's great to catch up and see what's going on, encourage one another and grow together! Kevin has just come back from a week away in Mexico which I will hear about tomorrow but by all accounts went extremely well! It's great too coz he went to Guadalajara where most of you may remember I went to 6 years ago and lived for just under a year? So Kevin met a lot of my old friends which is brilliant yet weird at the same time...so he went to the Newfrontier led camp called Fiesta and made some good contacts over there! Reason being is that since they're a Newfrontier church in a Spanish environment, they can help us out as well as maybe send some people over?! Who knows, but it's great! Also, for the next 10 days a couple called Mike and Jess Shore are over here with us. They're a couple who started a church a very long time ago in northern Portugal and have seen it grow amazingly! I met them earlier this year when I went out to Portugal for the weekend. So they're here with us to encourage us, see how it's going and more importantly see how we're doing as they know exactly what we're going through and will experience. So it's also a great opportunity for me to grill them about anything and everything. So this weekend we're having meetings together Saturday and Sunday morning then mid-week next week as well as private time with them sometime during the week which I'm very much looking forward to then more meeting next weekend. So prayer for this time would be very much appreciated!
Sorry, this is turning into a pretty big essay! But before I finish, as jealous as I was about Kevin going off to Mexico - I've ALWAYS wanted to go back there -- I did have a pretty good time while he was gone, hee hee! My housemate Jose came back for lunch on Tuesday and asked me if I was free that night. He had been given 2 free tickets to see Real Madrid playing in the Champions League that night and did I wanna go?! Well, naturally I thought about this for a loooong time...not. So amazingly I got to go to my very first Spanish footy match and not just any match but at the Bernabeu for free! And our seats were pretty awesome and so was the game! They won 6-2 so was all good :-) the funny thing was in typical Spanish fashion we arrived 15 minutes late and had already missed 3 goals lol. But at least there were plenty more that night! Here are some of the pics I got:

So was a pretty cool night! Anyways, I'm sure that'll do for now! As a church plant, I think things are going very well. We're all getting stuck into the culture, language, friendships and work. It's very very trying at times and you feel like you're going backwards occasionally when you thought you were going forwards! But it's all a learning curve and we know whose in control :-) thankfully not us! Anyways, prayer for us would be awesome. I need more work as what I have is great but it's not enough to live on. Prayer for friendships would be cool too, that maybe the connections I've made can grow into something more. And more importantly, please pray for a great response from Kevin's trip to Mexico, either in regards to people showing an interest in moving here or that they'll just support us in any way they can!
Oh and lastly, sorry!!! I'm actually coming back for Christmas so I'll be around from the 20th of December! I know it's family time, hence why I'm coming back, but it would be great to see you and if you do want to grab me while I'm back just let me know :-) as always, I love hearing from you so stay in touch!