Settling in and my germaphobe mother...

So I started classes three weeks ago, and I'm finally feeling settled in here. Which, to be honest, kinda sucks. I don't want to have a sense of normalcy, I want to be in awe every day, to notice that I take classes in a centuries-old building, that I live somewhere where I barely speak the language, that beer for breakfast is completely acceptable. I don't want to miss anything, or not appreciate where I am and what I'm so lucky to be able to do.
Classes haven't been as rough as I thought they'd be, even though we spend way more hours a day in class than we do in California. Our first week the university had us take a placement test for which Spanish class they put us in. The test was tough, I knew I wasn’t going to place very high in Spanish, and I didn’t and that’s fine. I’m going to learn a ton either way and still get credit for my Poly classes. Our Spanish classes are broken down in three parts: grammar, oral communication, and culture. The main focus is grammar, but I really enjoy the other two and have great profesores so far. I’m speaking Spanish A LOT – at meals with our parents, in our Spanish classes (profesores don’t speak much English and can’t usually translate with words very much) and hanging out in town or at bars. My pronunciation is better from being around the language so much, and my vocabulary is getting better literally by the day. It’s pretty exciting, but it’s exhausting to constantly be thinking about what you want to say and how you want to say it. It’s testing my patience just as much as my knowledge of the language.

Once in a while I get to have some-what American food for dinner! It cracks me up. French fries and hot dogs and a fried egg. The food here has been kinda weird, and cold milk just does not exist. They all drink really pasteurized milk that doesn’t need to be refrigerated until you open the box (yea, it comes in a box) and everyone drinks it warm with coffee or hot chocolate mix in it. Needless to say, I’m struggling. I haven’t seen anything remotely close to cereal in WEEKS… I’ll probably demand that my mom bring Honey Bunches of Oats to SFO when they pick me up. There’s been a lot of seafood, they’re also big on jamon (ham), but it’s weird and lunch-meaty which isn’t my fave, a loaf of bread at every meal, salad of just sliced tomatoes and lettuce drenched in olive oil… actually, just about everything is drenched in olive oil… but I’m getting used to that, as well as the eating/sleeping schedule here, which is NUTS. So bars in California have last call around 1:30 – 2... yeah, bars are just getting going at that time. I came home at 4 Friday night and the bar was absolutely packed when we left.

We’re all really amused by the fact that every club we’ve gone to blasts American dance music. I can now brag about the fact that I have danced to Michael Jackson in an Irish Pub in Spain. American music and culture is everywhere - on peoples clothing, in restaurants, stores, bars, in commercials... absolutely everywhere. But I never get the vibe that people here think they're getting a "second-hand" musical culture.

A really good drink I’ve discovered is wine and coke, called calimocho (sp?). You won’t believe me til you try it, but it tastes good, and they serve it at most bars. Also, the words bar and café are interchangeable here… people will sit down with a beer and read the morning paper, or have a coffee, or both. Crazyness. And lunch is the biggest meal of the day, served around 2, and then dinner is smaller and we eat around 9:30. I’m doing a lot of walking, our flat is 15+ minute walk to everywhere, which makes me feel better about all the food and beer I’ve been eating…

And my mother is a crazy is a germaphobe… Kristen (my roommate) and I have to spray down the shower with Spanish Simple Green and rinse it off every morning. No joke. And she straight up smacked my wrist when I grabbed a handrail in one of the university buildings when she walked us to school on the first day.

All in all, life is good here. Hopefully I can update again soon and write about our trips to Barcelona, Burgos, Segovia, and plans for Granada and Sevilla in a couple weeks! adios dear friends