Veggie day!

So every wednesday is veggie day, where joel, amanda and I go to one of the local vegetable warehouses where all the vegetables are sorted, cleaned and etc. Every wednesday, working with the food bank, they give the extra vegetable, that they weren't able to sell, to local groups and organizations who work with the food bank to get food to those in need. The whole reason there are so many refugees here is because of the work offered in the green houses here. This area of Spain provides all of Europe around 75% of all its vegetables. These vegetables require a lot of manual labor before they end up in someone's salad in germany, so the Africans come here in hopes of getting a job at one of the green houses. This area is also known as the "sea of plastic" because right outside the city the area is filled with hundreds of greenhouses. These greenhouses do not so much look like fancy green glass buildings, as I had expected, but more so like plastic tents. My point of this long explanation: there are LOTS of vegetables here.

But  anyways, we pick up the extra vegetables every wednesday, take them back to our place and bag them up for all the people we give them to. We give some to our neighbors and local "friends," to the women who come to the women's class and etc. We also give some to the woman who live in the brothel around the corner, another long story I may tell another day. It was cool to meet the other local organizations that are helping people on this area and I must say a few of them where quite characters.

a few things I have learned in Spain thus far summarized:
-milk does not come refrigerated here (yes, this freaked me out)
-neither do eggs
-everything closes from 2-5. When I say everything, I mean EVERYTHING. so don't have an emergency of any sort during this time
-as in America, pedestrians have the right-of-way, but here the Spaniards fully claim this right. They claim this right so far that they will jump out into moving traffic with their baby stroller in tow.
- lunch is like 3 hours long.
- they don't eat peanut butter
-or pancakes
-there are a lot of Chinese food restaurants here, I've already eaten at 3 and I've been here barely a week.
- the store around the street makes fresh bread twice a day for 48 cents (I may come home a few or a lot pounds heavier).
-Spaniards have no sense of time and are always late.
-and they do not like to plan ahead, and when they do the plans are always changed last minute. ( this has been a learning experience and is teaching me to be more flexible (ha!))
-and last (for now, I'm sure Spain has much more to teach me) of all I have learned that the Southern Spanish coast is BEAUTIFUL.
I love it here.