El Dia de San Valentín

We celebrated St. Valentine's Day early in Spain with making/decorating sugar cookies and Valentine cards.

My super cute roommate Lauren. (Muchas gracias to Lauren's mom for sending supplies and inspiring the idea for a V-day party!)

Lauren likes the color purple, saying "Oh Hey!," Kinder chocolate, "Arrested Development," and colorful scarves (scarfs?). She is a terrific running buddy and friend, and I am so glad that we are roommates here in Spain!

Kami displaying the cream cheese icing for the cookies. She was our cookie critic (her mom is the genius behind Flour Girls and Dough Boys), and Kami was right about the cookies tasting a little "off," but I blame it on the foreign appliances.

We used melted chocolate for decorating also.

Shopping for the sugar cookie ingredients at Carre Four was quite a trip. It took us forever to find powdered sugar and it came in tubes a quarter of the size of a regular bag you find in the states. This (above photo) was the closest thing to vanilla extract that we could find. It was kind of like vanilla-flavored sugar crystals. One vanilla bean cost almost 5 euros here!

Sierra with her Valentine's heart for a certain special someone.

Sami and Megan celebrating the holiday with some splashes of red!

In the kitchen with Kiley.

Chelsea and Alina with the finished product. Tasty, no?



¿Va a ser mi Valentín?

. . . . . .

For the actual day of St. Valentine we slept in late because we had been discoteca hopping the night before. After getting ready for the day we headed off to Madrid to spend the day at el Parque del Buen Retiro. It felt just like spring! We played some frisbee, ate some lunch, walked through the park, and lounged around on the grass. We were among hundreds of Spaniards enjoying the weekend/holiday/nice weather at the park.

Something else that some us did was rent a row boat to take out on the pond in the park. It was really relaxing.

I was in the boat with Tim and Mark. Got to love these two!

They let me have a go at it.

There was a puppet guy doing a show with to Frank Sinatra music.