Leon Part 3

From there we thought that a park that we found on the map would be cool, so we set out In the direction that we thought it was, and after wandering around for a while we ran into some missionaries! It was kind of a shock for them I think, because when we saw them we all started yelling “ELDERS!!!” and walking towards them. I’m pretty sure that’s not something that happens to them every day. So we walked up to them ,and one of the was a native to Spain and so he only spoke Spanish which was fine, we are on a Spanish study abroad. But the other one was from Cali or something like that, so he thought he would talk to us in English, but that just made things even more awkward than the situation already was! So he was trying to speak to us in English, while the other one was speaking Spanish, and we were all just trying to find out how to get to the park, and really it was just one big mess! In the end we got about half Spanish, half English directions on how to get to this park and set out just about confused as we were before, but eventually we found it! It wasn’t amazing, not like some that I have seen in Alcazars and such, but we did see a couple getting a little too friendly and we had bets going on whether it was 2 girls, or a guy with long hair and a girl. The guy with the long hair and a girl won, and then we walked away and found one of the coolest jungle gyms that I have ever seen in my life! It was quite large and had 3 basic round sections to it, 2 on the bottom and 1 on the top, and then inside the whole thing were just a bunch of ropes that you could climb on and through and such. It was like a Spiderman thing! That took up a good half an hour of our time, just playing around on the jungle gym, and when we finally decided to share with the little kids, we got off and made plans to go to the river.
We had to ask someone how to get there, which turned out a lot better than the missionary experience did, and we found our way to the river! We couldn’t actually go down to it, we were a little too far up, and there was a concrete barrier. So we walked to the bridge, took some pictures with the concrete lions that were posing on the bridge, the only downside to that was that the one that Erika chose to take pictures with was missing the mouth part, which to me is the part that kinda makes the lion, ya know, but that’s alright.
Just up the street we found a hotel that our Spanish teacher told us was one of the most amazing hotels in Spain in her opinion. When we got there the outside was really gorgeous, so it was believable! It looked a lot like a palace, with a big, concrete courtyard in the front, with random little fountain that came right out of the ground and ran over one of the concrete squares like a spring out of the ground. And I am sure that the inside would have been just as cool, if we could have gone in! We walked in and there was a little foyer area, then big glass doors with a sign posted saying “this area is for paying customers only”. Apparently most of us missed the sign, because we just walked right through those big glass doors and in to the part where the check in desk was. I think just about everything stopped when we walked in, and we got some pretty weird stares which stopped us in our tracks and finally someone noticed yet another sign that they had posted after the doors saying the same thing, and we turned around and walked right back out. Talk about awkward! So we decided to walk down to the little church that was connected to the hotel that was supposed to have a museum in it too. And it did, the catch was, you had to walk down this long awkward hall way right next to the place where people are praying, and the only thing that separates you from them are columns, spaced too far apart for comfort. So as you are walking your footsteps are echoing, and you can see people stopping their prayers to look up and see what that sound is and then throwing out mean looks as they go back to praying. We even had to leave our hall way area and enter the actual praying area to get to the door that would then lead to the museum. I think we stayed a whole 5 minutes in the museum, 2 of the 5 being the time we spent talking to the lady who gave us our tickets and told us that the better part of the museum was on the other end of town. Good trick! So then we had to walk back through the same hallway with the same loud echoing footsteps and odd looks from people and we practically ran out the door at the end so that we could escape everything! It was intense!
After that we had to go and meet someone at the market again, and at 12 in the after noon is when that place really comes to life! We almost had to do the whole primary, lets all hold hand and walk in a line so that nobody gets lost thing, so that seriously no one would get lost! It was a stroke of luck that we saw John-Charles buying some fruit, otherwise there would have been no way that we would have found him! After everyone had bought what they wanted, and we followed a nice old man to a bread shop, it was time to head back to the bus. So we would our way through the streets and found the place where the bus was supposed to be to pick us up, but there was no bus to be seen! Well… that’s a lie. There were busses to be seen , but they were not our bus! There was a group of girls sitting on the grass next to the parking lot that were from our group, se we walked up to them to see what was going on, and apparently Prof. Shumway had taken the bus to go and pick up his family at the hotel and would be right back. That “right back” turned into about 45 minutes, so we had the entire group there including the ones that are normally late, sleeping on the grass and waiting for our professor and our bus to come back and get us. When it finally did we all climbed in and got settled down for another long drive home!
We did stop at a place called Coco castle on the way home, which was pretty cool. Its one of the oldest castles that we have seen, dating back to the 1300’s or 1400’s. We only had half an hour there, 10 minutes of it trying to find a place to use the bathroom, so we ran around on the inside for a while, seeing what there is to see, then got back on the bus for the last leg of the trip! We made it home around 10 or so that night, just in time for dinner! Haha! It was a good trip!