so... classes. half the classes i'm taking are different than the ones i planned on taking when i came over here. really, half only means two classes, but saying 'half' makes it sound like a bigger deal :) basically, they changed schedules at the last minute and i missed almost all of my classes last week. but i did find myself in a thursday section of the class i'd planned on taking monday, even though i meant to be in a different class, and now i'm taking the thursday one instead. that prof only wants one 1 pg paper a week, as opposed to a 20 page paper at the end. yep.
so now it's :
-economics of european integration - MT 11-1 in english... and almost all my dutch friends are in there, so that makes it quite a bit more enjoyable...
-marketing research - MT 1-3 which, it turns out, is in spanish. thought it was in english, but oh well. yesterday was my first day to go to the class because of them moving the time last week, and today i met two really nice spanish girls who seem to be alright with kind of adopting me... they're letting me be in their group for writing our research paper at the end, which is great! i figure i'll just do a lot more of the research and pre-writing preparation than everyone else, and let them actually write the paper so the spanish doesn't sound like an elementary school kid
-media, receivers, and users - T 11-3 in spanish. deals with communication mediums, mostly in journalism i think. i went to the class' monday section last week and the professor was really nice about the fact that i only understood about half of what he said, but he referenced spanish literature a lot, i would've had to write a 20 page paper, and the class ended up conflicting with both my monday classes. so, thursday it is. this prof, a woman, seems a lot more interested in turning us into journalists, which means that each weeks writing assignment will be more like article-length... which is quite a bit more manageable for me!
-magazine design - T 4-8 in spanish. yes, that's right, i have 8 hours of class in spanish on thursday, with only a 1 hour break. oh well, it's just the way it worked out. this prof seems nice too, though maybe more of a hardliner than the others. luckily it's a design class, so i don't think i'll have to do as much writing. he talks really quickly, though, so the lecture part of the class could get interesting. and by interesting i mean difficult. there are two other foreign girls in the class, a french girl and a brazilian girl, so it will be really nice having other people around who don't understand everything.
i was in a stat class TF 9-11 in english (well, sort of), which is a really sucky schedule. i did NOT want class on friday, because even though it's early, i'd still miss it every time i went on a trip with school. also, the class was statistics 2, which to them means econometrics. so a difficult next step to a course i took 4 years ago, and with a prof that barely spoke english. i feel bad for kids here who take courses in english in an effort to learn the language better... if this guy didn't know the phrase 'i mean', he would have talked half as much. also, instead of 'women and men' he said 'womans and mans' mhmm. so i dropped that class :)
actually, i guess since i didn't turn in my schedule until today (which, by the way, was a whole 6 days early. and i have until march 2nd to change my schedule. this place is crazy...) i was never in the class. regardless, i'm pretty happy with the way things are now. mondays and tuesday are nice leisurely days to go to class and finish homework before having a skype date or two and going to bed. wednesday i have no class at all, so it will be interesting to see how i choose to fill that time. after the library/bookstore finally gets its act together and i have textbooks, i'll be sleeping in, reading and getting ahead on homework before jetting off for the weekend. thursday is a loooooong day, and i think all but 5 or so fridays for the whole rest of my time here already have travel plans or are designated as the start of a travel weekend.
mmm traveling. this weekend is granada, then london, then a girls' retreat with the church here (ok, so not traveling, but still), then an open weekend i'll probably spend in madrid (fancy that...), then mommy's here! i'm really looking forward to her visit... any familiar face would be fantastic now, but it being my mommy will make it even better.
as far as social time goes, i might go out a little bit during the week, but not too terribly much. by 'out' i mean out to dinner with people, or a Bible study or something... this staying up late business that most everyone here is so into is just way too much for me. it just has no appeal, so i'm not going to bother. i can hang out with my school friends that do that during our trips instead, and i've met some very sweet girls from the church i'll be going to here, and i'm looking forward to hanging out with them more.
it's kind of a ridiculous chain of e-mails that brings me to actually meeting these girls... i e-mailed a woman whose address i'd gotten from a program evaluation that a former A&M student who went to uc3 filled out. she gave me the church website, i e-mailed the college pastor. he passed my e-mail on to a girl named april, and i ended up meeting her and 5 other girls for dinner that night. we went and ate bocadillos (little sandwiches) and then had churros con chocolate, which are amazing. mmm chocolate and fried stuff...
that was friday night, and after leaving the church girls i went to a party at the dutch boys' apartment... it was fun and there were a ton of erasmus kids there so it was nice to talk to people (most everyone speaks english, though some are more difficult to understand than others), but smoke + staying up late = me going home WAY before everyone else. also, the metro closes at 130am, so i had to make sure i was home by then. when i got up to leave at 1, remy walked me to the door and after we were out of earshot of everyone else was like, 'so really, why are you leaving so early?' poor kid didn't believe me that i was just tired. i told him i'm just an old person and that's the way it is with me, which he found hillllarious. i keep forgetting that things we say in the US (or even just my group of friends, we do say some odd things) don't make sense to other people.
and off on another tangent, but things not making sense reminded me... the weather here is crazy. absolutely crazy. one day last week it wasn't even raining, then suddenly started hailing really hard for about 3 minutes, then it turned into rain for like 10 minutes, then it quit altogether. the weather in general has been pretty good, though. hopefully it stays that way while i travel these next two weekends :)
so back to what i've been up to... saturday morning i met liz, one of the church girls, to go on a cow hunt around madrid. we were supposed to meet another girl that was a friend of a friend of liz's, but the girl didn't have a phone and we couldn't find her, so after waiting a while, we left. anyway, madrid has painted cows like college station has painted trains... but a LOT more of them, and usually they're in groups of 3s or 4s. we started out at atocha, walked through the parque del retiro (which is really pretty and will be even better when it gets warmer), where we saw some interesting people and an adorable children's puppet show. on our way out of the park we saw a church and went inside for a bit (it was beautiful), then kept wandering up the street we were on. for some reason we were under the impression that we were headed in a general direction that would easily take us back to the city center, sol. and after walking a while and loitering at bakery windows, we realized we were quite a bit east of where we wanted to be. so we found a route and started back toward sol.
bear in mind that, being the brilliant person i am, i wore my new boots. yes, the leather ones i've been trying to break in that already turned my heels into giant blisters. i thought a nice little walk on a saturday morning would be good for getting them a bit more comfy... but i didn't count on walking as much as we did, and definitely did not get any more comfortable as time went on. by the end i was practially limping, partially bc i'm a baby and partially because it really stinking hurt. all in all we walked about 5 miles (see the map). it was good exercise, and my project for tomorrow is to find cheap boots, because cheap = not leather = more comfortable for the kind of walking i do here.seeing the cows was fun, there were some really cute ones... my favorite was probably the one painted like a hamburger - oh, the irony :)
sunday was my first trip - toledo! i went with the Erasmus Student Network (for the non-spanish kids), which made it so much better bc they arranged everything. rode the bus up there, wandered around the city for a while, freezing our butts off and trying to understand the history our guide was telling us in spanish. then we went to the cathedral, which was absolutely gorgeous. so grandeous, so overdone... but not gaudy overdone, if that makes any sense. wandered around for a while, tried to follow our guide to lunch but he lost us, ate, waiting, wandered around the city some more, and went home.
toledo was absolutely, unbelievably beautiful. the prettiest place i've ever seen in my life, seriously. i expect that that statement won't be true anymore after i see austria, germany, and italy in the next few months, but for now... wow. so so so pretty. this is my favorite photo of the town:
like i said, it was gorgeous. why can't anywhere in the US look like this? other than the fact that some of those buildings were constructed before europe had a clue that north america existed...esmir was my bus buddy both ways, and we ended up getting dinner at this place called cerveceria cien montaditos, which was awesome. i love bocadillos because they are tiny little sandwiches that usually cost about a euro each... you only need two, and this place even gave us chips to go with it... so far i've had spanish cheese, some ham thing, smoked salmon, and chicken with almonds and philadelphia cheese. all were most excellent. then we went to this bakery that's right outside of the metro stop that's been there since 1894 (ridiculous!) and had a pastry called napoleon con chocolate (or something like that) for a euro, that's a sweet flaky pastry with chocolate inside and powdered sugar on top. oh to be completely full for 3.20 euros, how i love it!
oh, and saying 'philadelphia' reminded me... a lot of my foreign friends like to think the know a lot about the US, esmir in particular. so today during economics of integration (while the TA was going over all this really complicated math stuff that i'm hoping i don't have to know, it was crazy looking) i look over and esmir is writing down US states. he then challenges me to see how many i can get, and if i can beat him. when we both gave up, he had about 36, and i had 45. that's right, i didn't know 5 of my own states. even worse - delaware, connecticut, and wisconsin were ones that he remembered and i didn't, though neither of us remembered wyoming or minnesota. stinking midwest and north east...
in other news, i might be headed back home a couple of weeks early in june... apparently the european kids aren't as interested in traveling outside of spain as i'd counted on, and most americans i've met are heading back to the states soon after finals. i think i have finally found someone to go to italy with over semana santa (my spring break), though, which is great. hopefully that works out, because otherwise i just won't go. traveling alone is pointless. i think that by the end of all this time away, i'll be glad i did it, but definitely ready to come home. and if that happens 2 weeks early, i won't be disappointed at all :)
AND kayla booked her tickets last night to come visit me in may, get excited!
and now, to bed. i'm such an old person...
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