oh how i love the holidays

Remember, a few posts ago, that I mentioned that Spanish people are crazy, staying up until early hours of the morning. The latest I had been out at that point was 4am…so we had to beat that record. We’ll get to exactly when I got home in just a minute. Let me first give you some background info on what happened…

See the wine barrels in the background?

I’m not sure how YOU celebrate your Christmas eve but here in Spain people go out to parties. Well this is kind of a new thing but none the less its what I did. First I went over to my ‘families house’ (my Spanish family) for dinner. We started dinner around 10pm…relatively normal Spanish dinner time. I left around 12:30am to go meet up with some friends and go to a party. Well we had a “botellon” at a friends house. Botellon is just basically a pre-party to hang out and have a few drinks before going to the actual party. SOOO after about 3 hours of that we finally headed over to the bodega (large building where they store wine kegs (or at least that’s what they look like) and also have parties from time to time. Its almost like an empty warehouse, but less scary looking. Anyhow we got to the party and it was full with probably over 1,000 people I’m sure… There were about 10 of us in our group and we all danced, talked and had some drinks until when? 10AM. YEP not a typo- 10AM. Definitely the latest I’ve ever stayed out in my life…and for a good reason. I spent 2 days recovering haha

 

A few days later was New Years eve. Let’s go over the tradition that they have here. First everyone has a big meal with their family (just like on Christmas eve) and then at midnight comes the fun. The 12 seconds right before the clock strikes everyone eats 12 grapes…one for each second. It becomes even more difficult when you’re trying to shoves grapes down your mouth and in the middle you start cracking up…yea I didn’t quite make it through all of mine but I’ll try again next year. We did have some champagne as well, a tradition I’m more familiar with for new years and apparently is a worldwide thing, well at least in the US and Spain.

After spending a few hours with my new family over here I had to head out to meet with some friends and go out for a new years party. Earlier, about 2 weeks before, we had purchased tickets to this party which was in the lobby of a really nice hotel in my town. We got to the party at around 1:30am and there were still a lot of people missing. The majority of people weren’t even there until 2 or 2:30am!
Well we danced the night/morning away with some drinks and a few snacks the staff was bringing around (sandwiches-yum)…until when? 8am. The party ended then so we had to leave…and at that point my feet were killing me, I could barely walk after dancing 7 hours in heels. We headed over to a bar close by for some CHURROS! I mean come on…did you think we’d just go home after the party? Haha well after the churros we all did head home, we all got a ride since pretty much none of the girls could walk in our shoes. Then again I spent the whole day recovering and trying to get my sleep schedule back on track.



Other than staying out ALL night and morning the last week or so has been pretty calm, a lot of relaxing, sleeping, eating and not exercising…just like a winter break should be. Soon I will need to get back into my schedule of pilates but not just yet…you know I wouldn’t want to be overly ambitious during my break :)