I Miss My Trumpet!

Spain is awesome, but I definitely miss a few things from the good ol' USA. Here are some things I miss, in the order I miss them:

Andy: being 4270 miles apart isn't fun.

Friends and Family: same. 4270 miles sucks.

Music: my host family has a piano, but it's so out of tune that playing it is actually painful. I miss being in band a lot, probably because I've never gone this long without playing. The other day I saw a trumpet in a shop window and I seriously stood there staring at it for about 5 minutes before I snapped out of it. The university doesn't really have a concert band; they have an orchestra, but it conflicts with a lot of my classes. Man, I miss music.

Milk: the milk here is so weird. It's called UHT, which means Ultra-high-temperature processing. It also means that you don't have to refrigerate the milk before you open it. It always tastes really sweet and creamy, sort of like I'm drinking a creamer, but not. I miss my American pasteurized skim milk!

Buffalo Wild Wings: they don't exist in Spain and ohmygodIwishtheydid.

Pizza Hut: they don't really exist here either. They have pizza, but it's weird.

Pancakes: ohhh God, pancakes. They don't eat pancakes for breakfast, or in fact at all here. However, I have heard of a few restaurants in other parts of Madrid that sell pancakes...I'm gonna have to stop by.

Pets: oh yeah, plenty of people around here have pets. The thing is, I just can't touch them. It's the worst. If you see the fluffiest, cutest group of 3 Pomeranians on a walk, you just can't coo at them and pet them and hug and kiss them, because that's not what normal people do, ever.

Walmart: I just miss the convenience of it. You go in, you get everything you need, you leave. Here, everything is separated. The medicine is only sold in the pharmacies, the hair supplies are only sold in specialty stores or el Corte Ingles (too expensive,) and snacks are pretty much only sold in liquor shops.

That may actually be everything I miss, in a nutshell, at least. At the same time, though, there is so much of Spain that I love and will miss when I leave! Here's what I will miss from Spain, not necessarily in any order:

Lunch meat: I hate ham, but the ham here is delicious. The turkey is really good too.

Bread: people have bread with every meal here. I never have too much, but it's really good, and it's so charming to see people walking down the street with a long baguette tucked under an arm! :o)

Architecture: oh man, do I love the way things look here. Balconies, lofty windows, pretty facades...I wish buildings looked like this in the US!

The Metro: the subway here is really clean, fast, convenient, and affordable. What I will NOT miss is the pickpockets in the metro.

People: the people are so nice here. The other day, I ran into an elderly lady in the elevator who just struck up a friendly conversation with me! Even if my Spanish is terribly awkward, people are still so nice to me.

European friends: of course!

Sangria: enough said. Actually, I'm going to miss the drinking age here as well...it's going to be weird heading back to the USA and not being able to drink for like 6 months til I turn 21.

There's more of that too, but I'm not heading back yet! I've got about 4 months left here, and I intend to make the best of them!! :)

Luego!

Gran Via!

Wow, I've got a lot to update on! So much has happened in the last couple of days but I've been so busy since I've started classes.

Last Saturday was Madrid's Carnaval celebration. We went to Plaza Mayor on Friday to see if there was a parade, but it was just a little event. The cool part was that I got to see Plaza Mayor for the first time at night. It was beautiful! If you haven't read much about Spain before, Plaza Mayor is an old old olllddd plaza, like 1589-old. They used to hold bullfights, soccer games, markets, trials, and even public executions there. Rumor has it that you can still see the blood on the walls from the bullfights...ahhh I don't think I'm about to go looking for it, though!

Speaking of gross, Carrie and I went to lunch at school the other day and she ordered something at random, Callos de Madrileño. What is a callo, you might ask? Well, it's tripe. And if you don't know what tripe is, it's animal stomach :S Oh my lord that was gross! I was just eating a ham sandwich but I felt so sorry for her. She braved through it for about half of the plate, then gave up. Actually, she deserves a medal for that.

I don't mean to make the food sound gross here, because the food here has been delicious otherwise! On Friday at Plaza Mayor, we went to our first real tapas bar, and it was delicious! I got to try sangria too, which is definitely my new favorite drink. The Manchego cheese here is delicious, and so is the paella. They also served olives (with pits!) when we sat down, just as a standard.

Woops, I got kinda off-track there. Anyway, on Saturday Carrie and I went shopping on Gran Via and then came back for the parade. Gran Via is basically the equivalent of Broadway or Michigan Avenue. There were so many stores! I bought a few Spanish things too, so now I don't stick out quite as much as I used to. Finally, Saturday night, we got to watch the parade, and it was beyond amazing!! There were people walking on stilts, people doing backflips on bouncy stilts, so many old cars, crazy awesome floats, and movie characters too!

This week, I finished up my intensive-Spanish class. The whole class meets for 45 hours and this intensive part met for 15 out of the 45 hours in just 5 days, so that was a bit of work. My Spanish is getting a lot better, though. I can at least communicate what I want to say, although it's really difficult to express myself. I'm almost a different person in Spanish than I am in English, which is really weird.

I found out a few days ago that I don't have enough hours and have to add another class, so everyone, cross your fingers for me and hope I get into another one! They really hate schedule changes here, and it's all done by hand because they hate computers for some reason. It's like the dark ages here...just kidding! But yeah, hopefully this all works out.

Oh yeah, yesterday I went to the Reina Sofia art museum with a friend from Spanish class, Kruse, and it was awesome! We saw Guernica by Picasso, which was definitely very cool in real life. I could look at that for ages; there was so much detail. A lot of other parts of the museum were modern art, most of which Kruse and I did not understand. They did have a cool exhibit on 1970's mod furniture. That I can understand!

Today, I was planning on getting up early and going to this huge outdoor flea market, El Rastro, but when I woke up, it was pouring rain. Personally, I'm not a fan of getting wet, so I decided to just stay in for the day and work on homework and summer job applications. We're about to start lunch soon, I think, and they have guests over, so I get to practice my Spanish even more, albeit in a really intimidating setting. But, at the same time, having guests over means she serves really delicious/rare/expensive food...kind of a reward for all my hard work, right? :)

Looks like we're eating! Hasta luego, amigos!

Class, Culture, and Fashion!

Woo, I have a little time to write!!

The last few days have been absolutely crazy! Carrie, the other girl living with my host family, got here on Monday at 2 and I've pretty much been busy since then! The first night she was here, we explored the neighborhood a little more and got to see Parque del Oeste. Nieves emphasizes that you can jog there (she pretends to jog and be out of breath whenever she reminds me of this hahah.) Anyway, Carrie and I are 99% alike, and it's super cool :D

My orientation was crazy too, but at least that went by really fast. Everyone was stressed when we started talking about changing your schedule!! I get stressed from other people being stressed, so by the end of the day, I was stressed too, and I don’t even have to change my schedule.

My first class started yesterday, my Spanish class for exchange students. It’s great because we’re mostly all the same level of Spanish, so if we struggle, it’s okay, because most of the time we know what the other person means. And the professor is so nice! This is really weird to say but she reminds me a lot of Miss Grotke from the TV show Recess. Ahahah, nerd alert! Anyway, the class is easy so far, but we have to go through a week of “intensive” Spanish, which means class is every day for 3 hours straight. It can be a little boring, but I’m actually doing well.

Fashion! Oh the fashion. All the boys reading this can just skip over this paragraph since it’s girly stuff. Here’s what’s in: purple, black, scarves, tall boots, and tights. Seriously, there is so much black and purple here, it’s almost bizarre. Scarves and black tights are almost a necessity with outfits. Everyone and their mother have a pair of tall boots. And black is what outfits are based upon. This is the winter season clothing though; now that we’re coming into spring/summer season, the stores are putting up a lot of khaki, white, and lighter colors. So far I’ve bought a Spanish designer purse from Salvador Bachiller, a leather jacket from Stradivarius, a skirt from Zara, and short boots from El Corte Ingles. It’s stuff I wouldn’t normally wear in the United States, but I love it 8)

Culture! Wow, things are different here! I can’t even begin to explain all the differences. Things are similar to the United States here, but not, at the same time. The toilets flush weird. Everybody owns a washing machine in their kitchen, but nobody owns a drier: they just hang clothes to dry in the courtyard. They iron EVERYTHING because it all dries funny from hanging on a clothesline. They have blinds outside the windows in the bedrooms, which makes it really dark in the rooms, if the blinds are shut. I can’t even tell if the sun is up yet when I get up in the morning, even if it’s already 10:00.

Oh, and sometimes, the water shuts off. (I’ve only seen it once, but it was really bizarre. I went to turn on a faucet and all that came out was an airy, creepy sound.) The city is supplied from aquifers in all of the parks, and there’s a monitor of the water there. Sometimes, if people are too wasteful with water, the city shuts the water off for a little while to scare the crap out of everyone. Generally this works, but it creates some other odd customs. Nieves always keeps two giant bottles of water in the refrigerator, because if the water turns off and you’re thirsty…well…

Man, I’m tired! I went to Carnaval today (that’s the Spanish way of spelling it,) and it was so awesome. But I’ll write about that later since I’m about to pass out. Hasta luego!

I Made It!

I’m finally in Spain!! It felt like I would never get here.

I flew in on Thursday. The plane ride didn’t feel that long, and the flight was really empty to so I ended up having 2 seats to myself, awesome! It was a Spanish airline, so they did all of the instructions in Spanish first, then English. I guess I looked Spanish because all the flight attendants talked to me in Spanish but talked to the guy behind me in English!

It was a little sad leaving Chicago because they had all this horribly slow, sappy piano music playing in the background while we took off. Fortunately they shut that off after we were in the air, but then they showed a really strange Iberia-sponsored “news show.” It all worked out in the end because I just listened to my iPod for most of the way and watched The Hangover.

The best part was when we finally reached the coast of Portugal. We flew over Porto, Portugal and its lights looked so pretty at night. The clouds kind of made it look like it was sparkling too, so my first glimpse of Europe was absolutely beautiful.

We landed in Madrid at 7 am their time. No snow here; it’s been in the 50s all week, so that’s totally awesome. Their airport was really new but sooooo long. I went through 7 or 8 moving walkways before we got to the middle of the terminal where the exit was. It was early, so nobody was really there except the people that had just gotten off my flight.

Nobody was in the line for customs either, so I got to go straight up to the guy. He took my passport, stamped it, and said, “Bienvenida a España!” and I said, “Gracias!” Oh man that was absolutely my first conversation on Spanish soil.

Later that morning, I met my host mother. She’s really nice and definitely very motherly! After she made me a traditional Spanish breakfast, she showed me the university and then took me shopping for a bottle of coke after I said I was tired. Her husband works at the bar down the street from the apartment, so apparently I can head over there whenever I want for something free. Today she gave me a glass of sherry from the 1920s; it was really good.

Spain is so different from the United States! People are really friendly and nice to each other; it’s rare to find a stranger who’s grouchy or who won’t respond when you speak to them. Everybody, and I mean everybody, is nice. The architecture of everyday buildings is gorgeous. And they only buy furniture that fits perfectly into the space it occupies, so it’s like every room has feng shui or whatever it’s called. They listen to a lot of music in English too, even if they don’t understand it. Rihanna is really popular here, and so are a couple of bands that are obscure in the US.

Woops, this is getting long. I’ll update later because now I need to buy a new jacket! I look kind of conspicuous with my big red coat haha.

Hasta luego, amigos!