Making Moroccan

Hola, it's Meghann! Hope you had a fantastico weekend. While Graham was out playing golf yesterday, I was in Vejer de la Frontera taking a Moroccan cooking class. Vejer is a lovely, pequeño pueblo blanco about 45 minutes from Puerto. It was inhabited by the Moors for centuries and like many towns in southern Spain, that influence is still reflected in the architecture, culture, and food. Which is why spending my Sunday making Moroccan food while sipping mint tea without having left Spain made perfect sense. 

Off to the races!

Tomorrow is the running of the Belmont Stakes and I'll Have Another, the horse that won in the Kentucky Derby and Preakness, could be the first Triple Crown winner in 34 years. We normally watch the races (Graham's parents even have an annual Derby Party and we had a Preakness Party last year) but due to the time difference and traveling, we weren't able to watch the previous 2 races this year. 

Update: Turns out there will be no Triple Crown contender after all, I'll Have Another was scratched due to an injury. 

We did go to some races here in España last summer. During 2 weeks in August there are horse races on the beach in Sanlucar de Barrameda, which is a town just north of Puerto. Despite the casual atmosphere of the playa, the races are a big event. The horses are both local and from various European countries, and there are cash prizes for the winners. The first time we went, we watched from the beach, while enjoying some tintos de verano with friends.

Wednesday Noche: Bowling and Shwarma

Most of you probably don't know (because we've never mentioned it in the 10 months that we've been living and blogging in España, best bloggers ever, send us our award already) that we go out with a group of friends pretty regularly on Wednesday nights for dinner. Since so many people travel on the weekends and stay fairly busy in general, it's normally a good dia to get together and breaks up the work (or stay-at-home, in Meghann's case) week. Usually dinner is traditional Spanish food, but for last night's get-together one of our amigas had the brilliant idea to mix it up a little. So, we went out for bowling and Greek/Lebanese food!

Weekend Update

This weekend wasn't quite as exciting as the last one, probably because it was just a plain old 2-dayer. Here are some snaps of what we were up to:

Ruins, Romans, and the Rock

In our (super trendy, Instagram photo-filled) weekend recap post, we mentioned that we opted for a couple day trips instead of a vacation over the Memorial Day holiday. On Sunday we drove norte of Sevilla to Mérida, a town in Extremadura that used to be occupied by the Romans. By "used to be" we mean circa 2000 years ago, which seems pretty impressive to us. Graham is fairly certain this was his first time seeing Roman ruins, since there's a serious lack of them on the other side of the Atlantic. The whole town of Mérida is full of Roman ruins - an amphitheater (what we consider a "coliseum", where the gladiators fought), theater, circus (for chariot races), aqueducts, bridge, forum, temple of Diana, and many other buildings and houses.