Photos and Fun Facts

My humble abode:

This is the living room. It's like page 256 of the IKEA catalogue!

The tiny kitchen. The washing machine is also in the kitchen, and no one in Spain has a dryer. I'm getting accustomed to crunchy towels. Carmen also makes my breakfast and dinner for me every day, it's part of the "deal". Usually for breakfast I get a dish of cereal with warm milk or a pastry with a piece of fruit. Pretty standard, minus the fact that the milk is warm. I'm getting used to it though. The other day she didn't heat it up for me and I automatically started doing it myself, despite the fact that I've been bitching about wanting ice cold milk. I guess I'm getting used to Spanish food.
For dinner she makes soups, pasta, fish, and LOTS of potatoes. I'm going to be a potato flake by the time I get home. I should become a body builder with all this carb loading I'm doing. But seriously, the food is good. Usually we eat around 9 or 9:30.
Oh, and Spaniards are very into courses. We eat the soup, she clears the plates, we eat the pasta, she clears those plates, then we eat the fish. Which seems very formal to me, and thus paradoxical because all this pomp and circumstance occurs while we watch the evening news on TV.
She also informs me when she is doing a load of darks or lights and I then give her my laudry to do for me.
It's an adjustment because I've been cooking for myself and doing my own laundry since I was like, 15 (thanks for teaching me to be independant, Mom!), so having someone else do those things for me is really different. But Carmen is really sweet, I'm glad I got lucky (no, not in that sense), and am staying with such a nice family. Carmen doesn't speak any english, which is good because it's really helping me with my Spanish. She does speak French, but unforunately that doesn't really help me. The son, Esteban speaks some english. He's also really nice, but kind of shy. He's in his room studying a lot, or out at school or fencing. Carmen and I were talking this morning and she alluded that she would like me to help Esteban come out of his shell. So cute! I told her I'd be happy to have him come out with some of my American friends, or I can go out with his Spanish friends. He's only 18, and a typical 18 year old in a lot of ways: Carmen tells him to eat more dinner because he's too thin and he calls her "bruja" (witch), meanwhile my head is moving like I'm watching a tennis match while I mediate their table banter. I guess some things are the same in every country.
The snowy view from the living room window.

This is the view from the front door of the apartment. Look out for slippery sidewalks!

This is a lovely plaza a couple blocks away from the house, near lots of little restaurants.

These green crosses for the Farmacias are everywhere, usually one on every block. This one was taken around the corner from my house. Ain't no Walgreens in Spain! The Farmacias are tiny, and usually only carry toiletries like shampoo and Band-Aids. If you want any kind of medicince, even just Advil for a headache, you tell the pharmacist what your symptoms are and then they choose it for you. You don't need a perscription for anything in Spain. Imagine.

I started classes yesterday. We had to take a placement test, which was kind of a joke because there were only some grammar questions and we had to write a paragraph or two in Spanish. Placing about 150 people based on such a brief test is pretty rediculous, thus, lots of us are in the wrong class. I got placed in 4.2, which is advanced intermediate, but it's WAY too easy for me. Luckily the Universidad Complutense understands that lots are people are placed innapropriately and so there's lots of shifting around in the first week.

There are lots of people from all over the world in our classes, which is pretty awesome. I've met people from Camaroon, Japan, France, China, and Italy, to name a few. Funnily enough, the language we all pretty much have in common is. . . . . English. Lots of people speak much better English than they do Spanish, so I'm using more English than I would prefer, but I think that will change when I get placed into the higher class.

This weekend me and Summer and Molly (pictured below-my partners in crime), are going to the charming ancient city of Segovia.
Til then,
Emily