A Day in the Mountains

   First, I'll start off by saying that it has been WAY too long since my last post and so much has happened. I've decided it makes more sence to break my post into a few smaller ones. So I guess I'll back track to what happened first since my last post. Well, on November 27th (almost a month ago) the AFS Madrid group, including myself, went on a beautiful beautiful BEAUTIFUL hike through Sierra Madrid. I felt like we were in the middle of a small village miles and miles away from city life when in fact we were only about a 30 minute bus ride from the center of Madrid.
After a bus ride consisting of tons of little kids singing 'Waka Waka' we finally arrived to a small, yet spectacular little town. This place is not famous, or well-known, just another small Spanish Pueblo, and they are all full of character and beauty.

Right away we headed off to the mountain and starting hiking on up. Not even ten minutes into the walk, we met some friends along the way. Not human friends, but Cows, Longhorns, and mini horses just trotting along incredibly close to us. I actually stopped and pet the small lost horse.

        In the E-mail about the hike, we were told that there would be about fifteen centimeters of snow, so as you could imagine we were all dressed quite warmly. However, we did not see one snowflake.....at first.

After a while of snowless, but still beautiful walking, we sat for a lunch in the woods and then continued up for a nice surprise.



Lunch in the Woods



Once we reached higher and higher, we saw snow. Not only a little here and there but lots and lots of amazing, white, un-touched, fresh-fallen snow.



Kevin and I



Nene (Japan) Me (USA) Hilali/Ozen (Turkey)
speaking Spanish together here in Spain

After the hike, as we were making our way down, which is very dangerous and just as excited because of the slippery ice , the group unintentionally went in slightly different directions.

Ozen, Kevin, Nene, and I (all pictured above) got completely lost from the group during our descend. We ended up going in the wrong direction and we spent a good fifteen minutes just staring at a group of about thirty or fourty cows right in front of us. The scene looked just like something from a horror film. There was a small cottage or storage room made of wood and a old fence. The cows were not moving at all and it seemed as if they were statues, although their bells around there neck were ringing from the wind. On top of that, a few of the, appeared to be staring RIGHT at us, at our eyes. Well, after we let our imagination go wild with the haunted cows we continued on only to find out that we caused the the whole group to miss the bus until the next bus which came the hour after...oops.

P.S. more to come very very soon!

P.P.S Tonight is Christmas Eve, first ever!

P.P.P.S If any of you from Houston are reading this I love and miss you guys so much and think about you constanslty!