Beginning of Week 2

Monday! The beginning of the second week of classes (already!). When I got to school I was surprised at how many people were there. Literally I think the size of the school tripled over the weekend. The size of my class doubled! There are now, 2 more girls from Germany (well one’s a girl and one is a woman), 1 woman from Ireland who lived in Australia, 1 girl from Austria, and 1 boy from England. It’s definitely a multi cultural class. And now we have Ruben first and Susana second (which makes me a little sad because, while I like Susana, I enjoy Ruben’s class more and it was always nice to look forward to his class during Susana’s.) After class I went home and ate lunch and did a little homework. Then I met Katie and Sina in the metro and we went to a big mall together. We were there a pretty long time.  I bought myself 2 plain short sleeve shirts to wear with my patterned skirts. They were only 3,50€ each and I know I’ll wear them a million times.  When I got home I ate dinner, finished my homework, showered, then talked to my family on Skype. I went to bed later than I wanted to, but it was still a successful day.

On Tuesday right after class I went home, changed my clothes and went for my first run in Spain. Boy was it painful (since I haven’t run in weeks, but shhhhh keep that a secret).  But I forced myself to do it and was happy afterwards. I ran to the Temple Debod which is located in a nice park with a big circular path around it. So I was able to run around the path 4 times and run back.  When I got back I went to unlock the door when suddenly Loli appeared beside me. She had been waiting because she couldn’t unlock the door. So I tried to put my key in the lock and it only went halfway and no further. We were locked out. So we chilled in the neighbor’s parlor for a few minutes until Jacinto came home.  Loli told him her key and my key weren’t working. So he tried his and of course, it worked.  Loli said to the neighbor “of course it’s the man’s key that works.” She’s so funny.  We ate a delicious paella lunch together. Then I did ALL of my homework and showered.  Then I walked back to school for our first cultural activity this week. We walked to the tourist office in the Plaza de Colon as a group (there were like 20 of us from school now). It was supposed to be a tertulia for all the students from Madrid area schools, but only we showed up. So we listened to this kind of boring lecture about things to do in Madrid. I kind of fell asleep.  But we got little presents from the tourist office (Madrid Post-it notes, a little notebook, and a couple of guides on fun things to do as students in Madrid). After that Katie and I hopped on the metro to meet up with Antonia and Sina in Sol.  When we got there we went to this fantastic bakery right on the plaza and got Palomas Chocolates (basically a giant cookie-like thing covered in chocolate.) They were freaking delicious! When Sina and Antonia arrived we went to a little restaurant for a drink, but the waiter told us (only after we had ordered our drinks) that if we were just going to drink we had to go to the bar, because the tables were reserved for people who were going to eat. So we ordered 2 croquetas de jamon just to please the snobby waiter. We didn’t leave him a tip. After that we made our plans for tomorrow (Sina’s last day L) and went home.