Back to Spanish school, the gym and my new Synagogue! - Monday, June 27 through Sunday, July 3rd, 2016

After taking a couple of weeks of Spanish school we were starting to learn and absorb more Spanish.  We have also started to TiVo kids movies, like Cars and Finding Nemo along with movies like Erin Brockovich and for Beth Princess Diaries in Spanish with Spanish subtitles.  The challenge is, unlike kids, it's been difficult to commit the time to watch them over and over and over again.  But slowly, poco a poco, little by little we have been learning.

That said taking two weeks to go to Kenya set us back quite a bit. Thus this week was really like a review week.   Fortunately for our previous teacher, and us, she took a job at another school where she could have more consistent work.  Our school Pick Up Valencia is small and sometimes they do not even have any students.  It was fortunate for us because our new teacher, this week, went back over the basics and focused on pronunciations and helping us to try to put sentences together.  As it turned out they had no other students this week so our 9 to 12 classes, Monday through Friday, was a "private class" for us only!

Friends and family have asked us how's our Spanish. Our brains think we should be learning faster and more then we have but we have to be patient with ourselves as it takes time!!!  For the record Beth is learning more, but I can pronounce the words better...so we make good partners.

As I mentioned in my previous blog post, this week we scheduled and went to work out at the gym (Personal Gym Valencia), with our personal trainer on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  We understand about 50% of what he says.  We also think he thinks we are younger, stronger than we are either that or he is just pushing us to see where we are.  I can tell you this our muscles have been sore since we started working out....but we are loving it! 

On Friday night, July 1st we were invited to visit the Synagogue that our friends Roz and Steven are members.  It is called Kol Aviv Koraj.  Now I need to be clear this is a synagogue but not in the way may of us think of a synagogue.  It is a one room flat.

The history of Jews in Spain is such that today there are very few Jews in Spain and it seems that they keep EVERYTHING a secret.  You can not find a location of a synagogue, when I called their phone numbers and wrote emails to the listed contacts I never received any responses.  Here is bit of the information on the Wikipedia link I pasted above about the Jews history in Spain:

"Spanish Jews once constituted one of the largest and most prosperous Jewish communities in the World.  This period ended definitively with the anti-Jewish riots of 1392 and Alhambra decree of 1492, as a result of which the majority of Jews in Spain (between 200,000 and 250,000) converted to Catholicism and those remaining (between 40,000 and 100,000) were forced into exile. An estimated 13,000 to 50,000 Jews live in Spain today"

Given this history I can appreciate why they are extremely small communities and very secretive.

In any case this community is much more like what I am used to back home.  With the exception that there are like only about 20 or so people.  Plus our friends invited us on a night when the Temple had a special guest Cantor, Jack Mendelson and his wife Fredda Mendelson to lead the services.  It was a wonderful evening and I think I am going to join this temple.  We even made it into their newsletter.

On Sunday, we went to see our friend Jorge play in the Championship game of his tennis tournament.  He won the first set, however his competitor started to slow the game down.  He took long breaks as Jorge stood and waited to start the next set.  He also slowed the game down by hitting a lot of lob shots over Jorge's head.  Unfortunately, while Jorge played well he lost the next two sets and the match.  We were sad that he lost, but happy that he made it to the finals!