The Forth Day

Monday January 14, 2008

 

Today we woke up and hurried to meet the rest of the classmates that live up near us to walk to class…for the first day of classes. We met in the plaza outside of our building to meet up with our teacher for conversation class, Yaye, so she could walk us up to our classroom. The room is pretty small but the first day of class wasn’t bad. I really like Yaye. She is nothing short of amazing. She’s originally from Seville and she is going to be a great resource for us all. For the last part of class Dr. Tracy took us to Santa Cruz, which is a small neighborhood that pretty much looks like a labyrinth and purposefully tried to get lost. We had a half hour to go through the neighborhood and to find our way back to La Hiralda. In that half hour I managed to step on a huge orange, I don’t know how I missed that one, and we found a lot of different places to get things for people from home. After that we came back home and had lunch, which was a typically Spanish lunch, “papas y carne”- which was a soup with potatoes, meat, and carrots. I took a nap for a while during siesta and then we met up again with our class in La Plaza Nueva. We went over our worries and fears for speaking with native speakers and buying things that we need with our classmates. Then Allison, Sam, and I went shopping and looking for coats and socks. We weren’t very successful but it’s a lot of fun just walking around and looking at the different clothes in all of the stores and just watching the Spanish people interact. We came back to our house for a while and asked Encarna where the closest supermarket was so we could go by snack food and Coke. Let’s be honest, it’s been almost 5 days and I haven’t had one. I think I deserve one already! So we set out for another adventure, this time to the supermarket. Food and drinks are a lot cheaper there than anywhere else. I ended up getting 2 liters of Coke and it was only 1.25 Euros, pretty darn good and basically the size of my head. We also got some caramel corn from Spain as well. Then we came home and had girl talk for a while, about boys and such. Yeah, we were “those girls” for a while. But it was good and reminded me of home a little. I haven’t had a lot of problems with thinking about home because we have been soo busy. There are times throughout the day when I sit back and think about home or see something that reminds me of home or someone. We had dinner at bout 9:30pm and it was homemade pizza with homemade soup, kind of like chicken noodle soup. I eat pretty much everything that they give us because it has been really good so far. For dessert I tried flan and it was all right, but I like the chocolate pudding better. Go figure. We had a really good conversation with Encarna tonight. She is hilarious and she told us all about her family and her love for anything chocolate and Coke. She told us that her ex-husband is a twin and told us some funny stories about that as well. It’s fun to sit around and talk to her about the things that are different in the Spain verses the United States. Tomorrow is my birthday and today Dr. Tracy made me go away from the group so they could make secret plans for a surprise for my birthday. I’m starting to get sad that I’m not going to be in the United States for my birthday but we are all planning on going out to different bars in the plaza close to our house so it should be a good time. Finally a time when we can all go out together and just hang out outside of class without getting starred at. There weren’t any major creepers today, so that is a good thing. Just a few guys that said, “Hello” and thought that they were suave. Tomorrow Sam and I start our service learning so that should be interesting; I’ll let you know how that one goes.