Today I had the opportunity to meet with Jaime Jr, a 17-year-old Spanish amigo whose parents think that he needs to improve his english. It was pretty fun to work with him and his little brother Federico, or Fede for short. It turns out that their english is pretty limited, but we can still find fun things to do. They are nice guys. The family lives in a two-floor apartment next to the store that their dad works at. It was really hard to know how to prepare because I had no idea how much English the guys would be able to speak. Now I know. 16 euros is not a bad bonus. I might have done that for free anyways...

This weekend our group of Calvin kids went to Javea and Valencia, a quaint earthy village and beautiful big city, respectively. Javea is on the other side of Montgo, which is a mountain that sits behind Denia. Denia is between Montgo and the ocean. The local "Javean" city council had a few representatives that met our group at the town hall and gave us all bags with all of their turist propaganda. They did let us climb up to the roof of their local 14th-century church and explore the place. What a great view; from their you can see miles of Mediterranean coast, the entire village of Javea, and the clouds of mist created by waves crashing against the rocky shore in the distance... Montgo is about 2300 feet above level, and this coming weekend a few of us are planning on climbing it. We'll see how that goes. Valencia was amazing; we saw all the major sites, including a baptism at the cathedral. It was an odd mix of reverent catholic liturgical tradition and turists taking photos of everything. I personally found it really awkward to take photos while I was in the cathedral but I sneaked a few, especially of the ceiling, which had an amazing painting the spanned the whole interior of the dome. Later on in Valencia we went to the Oceanografico, which, I was told, is the largest "Shedd Aquarium" type of site in Europe. (Shedd Aquarium is bigger)