Clases y Amigos Nuevos!

Hola a todos!

I just finished eating my lunch, and it was a little different, but good! I had rice, 3 little hot dogs, an egg, and yogurt. I'm kind of tired though because we were out pretty late last night. It was the first of our weekly Thursday meetings and we met at this bar to talk about our classes, familias, and impressions of Spain, things that we did and didn't expect. For me, some unexpected things were how they eat a lot of fried food and how they watch a lot of tv. I like to join my family when they watch the news, but some of the shows seem kind of ridiculous and Jerry Springer-like.

I've had a lot of fun exploring the city though! The other day, my friend Abbi and went for a little run through the city and saw a lot of new places. The buildings here are really cool as you can see in the pictures! Above is La Catedral, me drinking cafe con leche (coffee with milk) in this cute little bar between classes, and mis amigas Ashley, Abbi and me by "La Gorda" (the Fat Lady). I've also used the ping pong paddle Josiah gave me and played in the park with some friends, winning of course since my paddle is so awesome! Abbi and I also went to this cafe to get churros con chocolate, which is basically fried dough with a cup of thick hot chocolate. Delicious!!!

I really like my classes too! Phonetics is probably my favorite because la profesora is really nice and funny and encourages us to speak a lot since we're learning about pronunciation. I also find the language part of it really interesting of course! Yesterday in class, we all had to take turns reading this long sentence, because apparently Spanish writers don't believe in commas, and we had to figure out when it was ok to pause and take a breath. Then we started going through the alphabet and she went down the rows asking people to say a word that starts with each letter. I was a little nervous at first, especially because I was the last one she asked and everyone had already said the easy ones! It became a fun game though and I'm learning a lot of new words.

It's nice getting to meet people from other countries and schools too. I have friends from Russia, New Zealand, Virginia, and Missouri and there are other people here too, including some Japanese students! Last night after our meeting, we went to this place that was giving free salsa dancing lessons and we met many more people there too! The instructor was this younger girl who was from Cuba and didn't speak any English, so that made things even more interesting for the people in our group who had never tried to salsa. We met Spanish speakers who also spoke English, and it was fun to talk in both languages throughout the night!

I think I'm getting better!!!