Wednesday January 16, 2008
The Night of my Birthday: So last night was a success. But before we could even get out the door, our host mom gave us the maternal “mom talk” about being safe and not drinking too much. We all found this quite amusing and heart warming as well. She has definitely become our Spanish mom for the next 4 months. Encarna is pretty much amazing and gave me close to the same speech that I think my mom would have given me. About 18 of my classmates and I went to the bar/café called Republica for my birthday. We sat down, talked and had a few drinks outside on the patio. It was fun to actually hang out with my classmates outside of a school environment. They are all pretty cool people and we are all getting along really well. I had a glass of Spanish wine to celebrate the birthday, I’m sure it would have been a much different night at home with all of my close friends but the people here were really good at making me feel at home about the whole situation. I think the hardest part about yesterday was probably getting all of the messages from home from everyone who cares about me. You don’t really notice that everything is different (especially when you are trying to avoid it and put it out of your mine), and everyone is gone until you check your e-mail and read messages from home. Don’t get me wrong, I loved them all, but I wasn’t the easiest thing to do. When we were at Republica the bartender gave me a kiss on the cheek for my birthday and then another guy danced flamenco for me. He tried to dance with me and to teach me, but yea…that was an interesting experience. I don’t exactly know how to flamenco so I think it turned out looking somewhat like a mimic of what he was doing slash a country ho-down. None-the-less, I don’t know how many people can say that they danced the flamenco with a native Spaniard on their 21st birthday in Spain. It will be something that I will never forget, also because we luckily got it on film. After taking a couple of pictures and finishing talking we came home to end January 15th on a good note.
Wednesday January 16, 2008: This morning we woke up and went to class, again. It’s starting to get old already and it’s only the third day of classes. The classes here are pretty challenging and I’m almost on Spanish override. It has come to the point where I’ve started speaking Spanish mixed with English all the time, and I cant write in English to save my life anymore. So now I successfully stink at two languages, ahh yea, so hopefully that will get better. After class Sam and I stopped at an Internet café to check our e-mail, which was nice. There were lots of birthday messages to read and new e-mails, which got me through the day. I feel bad because I can’t always respond or respond much at that, but I love readying the e-mails. They are definitely worth paying and going out of my way to find an Internet café for. We came home and Encarna made us “papas con carne” again, and it was amazing. This time she fried and egg and put it in the broth. I took a picture of it for my photo project for one of my many Spanish classes here. It’s under the category “my favorite Spanish dish.” Encarna sat with us at lunch, which was nice because she’s is really interesting and it’s good to get more practice in with a native speaker. She told us about a festival that they have at the end of February and about going to the beaches around here. We found out that she even has a beach house near Cadiz, in a small town on the cost! She teacher so she said in the summer she leaves the day after she is done teaching and comes back two months later when she has to start teaching again. She even said that if we wanted to travel there she would call up some of her friends and we could go and rent the house or a house of one of her friends for really cheap. Needless to say, she is a sweet lady. After lunch we took really long siestas and then got up afterwards and started in on the homework for the day. I have a lot due for tomorrow, but somehow I got it all accomplished. When Rocio came home for dinner at 9:30pm we were all about ready to eat our arms, so we went in to the kitchen to see if she needed help with anything. I brought my computer out into the kitchen to show her my music and to see what she liked. We are going to trade c.d.’s soon so I wanted to know what she likes. She wants me to burn her a mix c.d. and a copy of the Journey album, which is just hilarious to me, because apparently she lost her copy. I told her about the flamenco dancer last night, so she is going to burn me a copy of some of her flamenco music. So it think it’s a fair trade! Dinner was really good, we had deep fat fried chicken cordon bleu and fresh green beans cooked with different spices and bacon. Hopefully when I am 27, like Rocio, I can cook somewhere near as well as Rocio because she’s good at what she does. After dinner was more homework. I think that we were all a little tense today, especially towards the end of the day. We are all starting to get past the “honeymoon” stage, where everything in Spain is amazing and we are just happy to be here and are moving into the missing things at home and more stressed stage, needless to say a lot of people were emotional and moody today, including myself. In random news…an update on the creeper status: Not a day goes by when I walk to class and don’t get looked at, spoken to or waved at. It’s starting to become funnier and less scary as the days past, which I think is a good thing. Also, buy stock or a company that invests in the break pad industry for cars in Spain because the people here must go through those things as if it is their job. They really like to drive fast and then slam on their breaks for pedestrians, who have the ride (or walk) away. Just a little word to the wise.
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