El Amor No Envejece

My lovely teacher Amor, who I work with at the high school, invited me and my roomates to her birthday party. How could we say no?

Samantha and I tend to accidently coordinate outfits, and I think it means we've been living together too long, Or perhaps for just the right amount of time. In case you can't tell, my shirt and her dress are the same print- different color. This is us on the Leon city bus for the very first time since we have lived here. That's 8 months with no bus which leads to the exictement shown by Julie in this next photo:

That kind of excitement can't be faked. Also, we were going to MonteLeon which is like a little mountain on the outskirts of the city. There was an awesome view from the bus that I didn't manage to get a picture of. We were the very last ones to get off so we didn't even get to push the STOP buttons, which indeed say STOP even though we are in Leon, Spain and most people don't speak English. However, Sam was standing in preparation to get off and with one turn she swung around the pole and nearly fell, accidently pushing the STOP button. So we did get to use it after all.

One of the things we were most excited for was to hear our other teacher, Antonio, sing some love songs for Amor's birthday. He beautifully prefaced every song with some very poetic thoughts. For example, before this one he said "There are very few things that are fundamental to our lives, things that really count. And I don’t know if we always realize that they count." He practiced his English pronunciation to prepare this song, which I loved. Excuse the fact that the video is sideways- I tried for 20 minutes to turn it and then decided to make better use of my time.

The party started out with some 80s Spanish music and finally turned into some more recognizable tunes. This in particular was a slow song, and I haven't danced like this since Junior year in high school, I think, so we were a bit awkward.

The Spaniards could always win in any dancing, drinking, staying up late competition. Here we are sitting around the dance floor taking a break because 2 in the morning is really early in Spain and it is definitely not time for them to stop dancing.

Here we have the birthday girl all in black looking younger than ever. They were working a Conga line during one of the last songs. We had been planning to catch the bus home so we went to kiss everyone at 1 to get the last bus leaving the town. They insisted "No- we are all leaving right now to go down into the city, so don't bother with the bus." We responded skeptically "You're leaving now?" And in the midst of dancing and changing the music they turned to us "Yes yes, right now." An hour and a half later we cleaned up the dance room and headed home.