Tonight, my host padre Carlos is making homemade pizza!!! The house smells AMAZING, he's cooking onions right now. I'm stoked.
We had an orientation and took a bus ride around the city center yesterday, which was a BAD idea. I was literally like holding my eyelids open. AWFUL. I wish we could have done the tour like a week from now cuz I would have LOVED to see everything, we passed everything, but I kept nodding off...jet lag hit me hard during the meeting. :-\
Went and took our placement test at 8am this morning, and I drank my first cup of Spanish cafe con leche:
And this is my roommate Emily:
Hopefully I did well on the test; I have to place in advanced to get credit for my major. I can always challenge if i place close enough, but hopefully they'll just put me in. I did fine in my oral examen, I'm pretty sure...the written stuff was kind of odd, but I ROCKED the first page...questions like de donde eres, y describa tu casa. I'm like, Heck Yes, I know this! Then I turned the page over and it was a bunch of subjunctive and conditional stuff, and i was like :-\ So, fingers crossed that I did ok.
The view from my university:
The cafeteria is so weird! You have to like go to a ticket machine to order your food, they have every option with a button next to it, you push the button, pay, and then it prints you a ticket that you give to the people behind the counter. So cool, but kind of a pain when a bunch of people are gathered around it and you can't read it.
Finished orientation there, and we went to the ISA office to have our second half of orientation and eat lunch. Now, the staff in there seems SO nice and so friendly and helpful and everything, but we had a 2 hour meeting for what could have taken literally 20 minutes. Well, probably even less, because I felt like 75% of the info was stuff we'd covered in our university orientation earlier that day or had been in the packet. The guy Carlos, who ran the meetings, reminds me so much of Chase...he is seriously like Chase in 10 years in Spain. I like him a lot, he just talks so much and has a story for everything.
After we took THEIR placement test, my roomie and a few of her friends from her home university went on a hunt for a straightening iron for her. That was a bit of an adventura, we decided to go to El Cortes Ingles, which reminds me of Macy's in New York City; it's a HUGE department store with everything, and it's kind of spread out around el Puerta del Sol en different stores. We asked the first lady in the make up department, and she told us to go to a different store; we couldn't figure out where she was talking about, so we went back to the main escalator and went all the way up to the hair salon, where the woman was telling us where we could find a great straightener for 189 euro (almost $240!) in a different store and she spent a good 5 minutes explaining it in detail; we decided to try the make up department one more time and lo and behold, we found them in the back. We were all just like REALLY!? You couldn't have told us this in the first place!? And we know the first lady understood what we were talking about. Oh, language.
Lunch wasn't much food, so we all went to find tapas. At this point, I was super cranky and tired and I wasn't talking cuz I knew it would just come across as cranky...we found one, the waiter was so nice...I ordered tosta con salmon y queso crema (toasted bread with salmon and cream cheese):
And waiter liked our table so much, he bought us shots of Bailey's...at 7pm...:
Here's the street we had tapas on:
I got my cell phone today! I practiced exactly what I would need to say so I would say it right, and everything went super smoothly. In retrospect, I wish I'd done the ISA phone just because it sounds easier and from everything I've heard, everyone has had a really good experience with them, but I felt pretty awesome getting exactly what I needed using my Spanish. Of course, when he started asking me other questions, I was like, abuuuuuuh?? Lol.
And here I am, standing in front the fountain at Puerto del Sol:
There was a protest going on in el Puerto, they were essentially wanting the government to pay for respectable burials for all the soldiers who were killed under Franco's rule and thrown into mass gravesites. The newspaper reporter who came and talked to us told us that there were apparently 140,000 soldiers in need of proper burials. So sad, and very interesting. I hope the government does help pay:
And here is the sign for Avenue Q, which is happening literally a block away. I think Mamma Mia is coming next:
And here is my bed, and the view from my room:
Now I'm off to get hopefully 7 hours of sleep...going to go out tomorrow night for the first time. We'll see how it all goes!
Hasta luega,
Heather
YAY!!!! It is beautiful over there! And I want almost everything you ate! When Steve and I ate Spanish food, he ate a bunny rabbit. Let us know if you eat Thumper! ♥
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