I have news! Exciting news! *drum roll* In February, I'll be going away for 7 months, to Andalucía, Spain. I'm going to work there as a volunteer on an ecological farm. With horses! I want to improve my Spanish and you know, do something useful for the world, and this is a good way to do it. And I'll get to learn how to ride horses, which is a pretty big plus. :)

The farm I'll be staying at is called Camino Verde, and it's a horse farm that grows its own horse feed and offers rides through the Sierra Nevada National Park for tourists. I'll be doing all sorts of work, both on the land and taking care of the horses.
And when there are rides, I'll be cooking for the tourists. They have picnics in the national park, and I'll probably be the one to drive the food over there too, in a four wheel drive, which is totally awesome.
The last thing I'm gonna be doing over there is homeschooling their kids (aged 6, 9 and 13), which is also very exciting, but kinda scary too, since I don't have any experience whatsoever with kids and/or teaching.

I already bought all sorts of shiny new things for the trip, like a new backpack, new shoes, and a very pretty new laptop. It's one of those netbooks that only weigh 2 pounds, it's tiny (& cute!). And of course I bought a lot of new clothes, because a girl needs new clothes when she's going away for so long, right? And while it's gonna be very hot in the summer, right now there's still a lot of snow in the mountains. So I needed to buy fleece sweaters, and new jeans. Really!

Now all I need to do is find a place to stay in Málaga for a couple of days, because that's where I'll be arriving and I won't be able to catch a train to the actual farm until the next day, or maybe even later. I've signed up with the couchsurfing network, but actually emailing people to ask them if I can stay there is scary. So I've been procrastinating like crazy. Someone tell me to do it, please. Thanks!