Semana Santa en Jerez de la Frontera from Steven Hansen on Vimeo.

Steve laughs from Tim Boisvert on Vimeo.

Friday:Leave Jerez around 9.  Pass through Arcos.  Stop in Ronda, see the cool bridge.  Drive through the mtns.  See Gibraltar from a distance.  Drive through Marbella.  Stop at a Mercadona for Napolitanas and other snacks.  Drive to Granada.  Get lost trying to find hostel.  See the Alhambra.  Eat dinner at a restaurant-takes forever.  Grab ice cream at old place.  Sleep in nice Hostel

Saturday:Leave Granada.  Drive to Alicante, lunch at beach restaurant.  Drank nutty horchatas and giant banana split. Drive to Valencia.  Fallas festival with hugepaper-maché statues all around.  Find a hostel.  Hotel Venecia.  Sight seeing the cathedral and roman towers.  Parade.  Churros con Chocolate.  Restaurant on pier for Paella and fish, and a lemon slushie.   See giant statue of Gulliver.   Watch soccer game.  Sleep

Sunday:Drive past the cool buildings in Valencia Art city center, etc.  Head to Tim’s friends house in Vilafranca.  Stop at gas station for gas and lunch/treats.  See cool roman aquaduct.  Stop in Tarragona.  See other Roman buildings/amphitheater.  Go to Tim’s friends house.  Talk.  Eat food.  Play video games.  Watch motorcycle races.  Head to Barcelona.  Go through tunnels.  Try to find a room.   Stay in a Hostel with shared bathrooms.  Tim in own room.  Sleep

Monday :Tim up first.  Showers in gross hostel shower that wouldn’t drain.  Walk around Barcelona rambla.  See Cathedral.  Eat breakfast.  Tim eats a bikini. Walk around more.  Pick up car and drive around Barcelona.  Cool buildings.  Water works building that looks like a hug bullet standing up and colored windows.  Goudi park.   Head to  Zaragoza.  Stop at Mercadona for treats and nourishments.  Watermelon.  Stop for gas, stinky place.  Go to bathroom and pick up a sandwich.  Stop in Zaragoza and look at cool cathedral.  And cool water fall.  Steve’s laugh.  Parking pass ticket.  Head to Madrid.  Check into hostel, Triana.  Go out to eat dinner in cool restaurant, underground in the Plaza Mayor.  Head back to hostel and sleep.  

Tuesday:Walk to Pans & Company and eat breakfast.  Fresh orange juice.  Drive to Mercadona get Tim some stuff to take home.  Head to airport.  Drop Tim off.  Find car rental place.  Take subway to train station.  Wait at train station.  Take Ave from Madrid to Sevilla.  Take regular train to Jerez.  Take Taxi home.

Today it finally rained in Spain. The weather forecast we looked at on the internet last week predicted rain all week. Maybe it just came a week late. We will see what happens. We are enjoying a nice relaxing Sunday with out anything too important to be doing.

We have the internet all setup now.  We decided to go with a company called ONO.  I am actually very impressed by their service so far.  After I signed the paper with them in the store, they told me it would be three business days and then it would be installed.  The 2nd day they called and sent a SMS verifing that we would be home when they came to install the next day between 9 and 12 in the morning.  They were here before 10 and were done in about an hour.  Besides having to drill a hole through the cement/brick wall, I thought the installation went quite well.  They advertised a speed of 25 megabits and after a couple of speed test I am getting over 12 megabits per second.  Which I consider to be quite good for a consumer level connection considering at home our good fiber optic connection only brings around 6-8 megabits.  The upload speed however has been very restricted and I will never get more then a 1 megabit upload connection.  Anyway, just thought I would share.

Ok just to be clear, we are 8 hours ahead. If it is 6:00 AM in Utah, it is 2:00 PM here in Jerez de la Frontera. Our home/office number will work just fine here (once the internet is setup on Wednesday), so just let us know if you don´t already have that number.

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The jet lag as been horrible, after our incredible long trip to get here (a day and a half on plane and another half a day in the car from Madrid to Jerez). We couldn´t sleep last night and then we ended up sleeping in untill 3 PM. Oh well, we finally found a place that will hook the internet pretty soon for us. We are going with ONO. They do have a cancellation fee that will be a bit of a problem, but the other company we were trying to go with Jazztel required a bank account. The bank Santander won´t open an account for us unless we have a better reason for being here then just to be a tourist. I told them that we were studying the culture, but they said they wanted some class record or something. The nice thing that we would have gotten with Jazztel is a setup without contract. You can cancel for for free at anytime. But they also told us they couldn´t guarantee anything would be setup for 35 days. We didn´t have the time to wait for that. ONO promised it would be setup in 3 days.

So we hopefully got everything packed that we will need in Spain. We drove around and did some errands. It is probably going to end up being a problem to get the internet setup in Spain. I am kind of worried about that. I tried to call a couple of the internet companies with Skype but they Skype doesn´t let you call many of the business area code numbers in Spain (can´t call 900,901, or 902 numbers). Anyway, we will be up late tonight packing after we get home from a dinner with a bunch of friends at the fabrica de pizza.