En Espana!

Adventure number one: airplanes. I made it through all my connections, made it through the long transatlantic flight, made it through customs with the other two girls on my flight, and we sat down to wait three hours for everyone else to get there - we arrived in Madrid Barajas about 7:15 am here. So we sat and talked in Spanish and played cards. Someone from the university was supposed to come with a bus and pick our whole group up. We went out to wait for them, and the bus came, and our profesora and two other students were still nowhere to be seen. By now, they're half an hour late, which turned into an hour, hour and a half, two hours, we're just sitting in the parking lot on this bus, waiting.

Finally they get hold of Profesora, and it turns out their flight came in way late, and so instead of looking to see if we were waiting, they assumed that we would've already left and just hopped a taxi and went to the rendezvous point in Alcala. We were pretty ticked about that - especially since no one had ever told any of us where we were going on said bus, and so we couldn't leave without her anyway, because we didn't know where we were going! It was very weird.

The bus took us to Alcala - a suburb of Madrid with cute narrow streets and apartment buildings. It's very European looking. They dropped us off at a public bus station where our families were waiting for us, and we were hustled away onto a public bus almost immediately with our host mom, Pilar, kissing our cheeks and grabbing our luggage and talking a mile a minute in Spanish. All of a sudden we're at the apartment and she's still talking and I was kind of like, what just happened! But it worked - Melanie and I unpacked while she made lunch.

They eat a lot here. Like, a LOT. The biggest meal of the day is "lunch" between 2 and 4. That's like a three course meal. I wasn't able to finish mine - I felt SO bad and explained over and over. I think we communicated the fact that we eat smallerish portions. We'll see how it goes. Then around 5 or 6 is Tapas, or appetizers, or tea/cookies/hot chocolate/fruit, depending what you want. Then about 9pm they have "dinner" which is a lot less than lunch, but still a full plate of food! Then for breakfast they'll have toast, fruit, whatever, something light. I've eaten SO much food today!

It's been an awesome day - I'm in Spain! Finally the day has come! I'm super tired, though, because of the jet lag/not having slept for about 48 hours, so my future blogs will make more sense. In the meantime, hasta la proxima vez! Chao!