First Week

Hi everyone, I don´t have much time and therefore there may be typos galore and all that. Also, I FORGOT my camera cable, so the pictures will have to wait until next week... AAAARGH. I´m in an internet cafe at last after finding the one on which we originally planned closed... yeah. And if my writing seems strange, it´s because my brain has been thinking in Spanish and in Spanish language patterns for four days...

Firstly, my host family is a woman with three grown daughters who now live in Madrid, and so only her and another (very nice) student are in the house. "Mamá"is AMAZING and lovely and excellent. She´s an incredible cook and she´s a good teacher... she knows the meaning of "speak slower, please", and she explains words that we don´t understand. I´ve learned soooooooo much from her. Plus, we visited her mother mother, and her mother is a master knitter. I described a pattern for felted slippers to her. (To my American mother and Carla: they´re the magic Peter Pan slippers.)

Also, I´ve gotten to know most of the other students in the program, and I have a few good friends amonst them (if I hadn´t forgotten my camera cable, I could upload pictures right about now...) There´s a guy who looks and acts a LOT like Phil Lentz-- on the plane it was really weird because I´d see him out of the corner of my eye and think "Oh! Phil! Oh wait... " Anyway, pictures next week.

Classes just started in earnest, and they´re also really good, although I absolutely fail at grammar. I speak, and I make a mistake. Speak, mistake. Speak, mistake. No fun! In the class of conversation today, we did a round robin that involved Britney Spears talking to a giraffe, which then was carried away by a giant bird. Yeah, there are some crazy (good crazy) people in the program. :)

Spain´s culture actually isn´t as different as I thought it would be. They´re simultaneously more formal and more open-- in the U.S., if you´re in a good mood and you just randomly smile at someone in the street, they´ll smile back. Here, if you randomly smile at someone in the streeet, they look at you like you´re crazy. However, with people you know, there´s a much smaller "bubble" of personal space, and people greet each other with cheek-kisses. That´s pretty much the only thing that´s given me pause-- all the rest is just a little different.

For example, the food. Actually, it´s more like THE FOOD!!! It´s absolutely amazing, and there´s a ton of it. My Spanish mother is like Mrs. Weasley-- I say that I´m full, that I can´t possibly eat any more, and she tries to offer me more or yogurt or cookies or something. It´s the same when we eat at school-- there´s so much excellent food that you just want to eat but can´t! I was also going to talk about the dryer that my Spanish mother has, but I think that´ll have to wait until I have pictures because it´s something that you just have to see.

It´s interesting, because a lot is the same as well. I have to take the train to school every day and in the station, there´s always American music playing... one day there was Thriller, and Evanescence seems to be quite popular. Right now there´s a song by Avril Lavigne playing, and my Spanish mother has a documentary about Michael Jackson. Also, there are Spanish versions of American brands of things in the grocery store-- like Dannon (yogurt) is called "Danone" and there´s a line of products called "Don Limpio" (Mr. Clean)

Oviedo itself is absolutely beautiful-- the streets are an explosion of bright colors on all sides; the buildings are much more cheerful here than in the United States. There are mountains on the outskirts of Oviedo, and it´s all very scenic. The school building is at the top of a massive hill (we have to climb a billion stairs to get to it every day), and there´s an incredible view out of its windows, with the cathedral and the town spread out below and mountains in the background. (Again, CAMERA CALBE-- next week.)

Interesting things about the town include something in the central plaza that everyone calls "La Gorda", which means "The Fat"... it´s a shiny black statue of an enormously fat woman and her baby. Also, the bells that ring the hour don´t "toll"-- they ring out the anthem of Asturias (the province that Oviedo is capital of) every hour. It´s excellent. Also, during a walking tour we took of Oviedo, we passed a store called "Lanas-Corseteria," which means "Yarn-Underwear Store". I kid you not, there were lots of colorful balls of yarn in the window-- alongside a bunch of lingerie.

Next week I will have PICTURES (you have no idea how mad at myself I am right now)... But I want to end on a positive note, so here it is: It´s incredible how much better I´ve gotten at Spanish. After only four days, I understand about twice as much (people speak with a heavy accent here and VERY quickly) and I´m thinking in Spanish. My brain is getting used to putting together the words into correct grammar patterns, (you have to reverse word order a lot in Spanish as compared to English), and verb conjugations are becoming much easier and much quicker. Plus, I´ve learned many many words and I´m quite happy.

¡Adiós hasta la semana que viene!