Day 4

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

This was the first day that I took the Renfe to UC3 alone… all went well on both ways. I got there a little early, so I checked my email/facebook and went up to Spanish class. Monica taught us more about food and then shopping for clothes. Fatima continued teaching us about music, and I really liked one of the groups we listened to, Nena Daconte, I might buy some of their music - the rest were just ok. I was able to use the internet in the break to write some updates instead of going to the cafeteria since I brought my water bottle (the tap water here is great).

After class, Isabel gave us the first part of her orientation – info about classes at UC3, living with a host family, and alcohol consumption. Once Isabel gave us the material about the Estudios Hispanicos classes, everyone went crazy worrying about what they were going to take. I just figured I’d wait for my advising session rather than speculate.

We then went to the cafeteria for lunch with Juanjo and a couple of other intercambio students from Spain. The food was ok, you know, cafeteria food, but it was funny because I asked what the vegetarian entrée was and she said the tortilla de vegetales. Yet, as soon as I bit into it, I could taste it had ham in it (it wasn’t good either). This is a funny thing I read might happen here…that they don’t consider ham to be meat and they put it in everything! So I ate my spinach soup and salad. We wound up speaking English most of the time, since they all wanted to practice with us. This is something else I think is funny, it happened to me a bunch in Ecuador and Guatemala… as soon as someone knows you speak English, they’d rather practice with you than let you speak Spanish. The girls I was sitting by gave me a hard time too because I was attracting attention from the male intercambio students… William sat next to me for a while and we talked about politics, which was interesting because he was pro-Bush/Iraq War. Maybe it wasn’t something we should have been talking about at our first meeting, but whatever, it’s always entertaining to hear what people think about that subject in particular and it definitely got everyone talking. We talked about sports too.

They kicked us out of the cafeteria area, but we went downstairs for café because we still had time to kill before leaving… we were going to the movies later. Most of the intercambio students left us then, and I sat with mostly my new friends from Marist. This was good because I got to know them better, about Poughkeepsie, Marist, their lives, etc. One of the intercambio guys Fernando went with us to the movies (again the girls and I giggled because he was paying me a lot of attention at first). We went on the bus and then the metro to an eastern part of the city I have yet to explore. Then we had to power walk for about 10 minutes because we were late, and even though it was cold, by the time we got to the theater I was sweaty.

The movie we saw was called La Mujer de Anarquia (The Wife of Anarchy), which was the story of a woman during and after the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. I understood most of what was going on, until the end and it got confusing, but Isabel clarified it for us afterward. I thought it was a good movie, plus it was an entertaining way to learn more about this time in Spanish history that dictates a lot of how they operate now. (It helped a lot later when we were at the Reina Sofia museum too)

When I got home, it was perfect timing because Natasha and Teresa were just sitting down for dinner. We talked about how the next day another girl was coming to live with us. Teresa called her “la chinita” because she’s Chinese (she doesn’t call her that to her face though). I also learned that she’d be staying in Natasha’s room because Stetson’s policy says that students living in home stays aren’t allowed to share rooms – so I’m definitely thankful for that ! Natasha also invited me to go out with her that night – I figured, why not?

So after dinner we got ready for what she told me was a “red, yellow, or green” party. I wore the only thing I had clean in those colors, my red knit dress.We left to get to the club at 11:30 and miraculously found the place… when we were walking down what we hoped was the right street, we saw the line and her friends. Her friends happened to be all guys, from the Netherlands and one German, Lukas. At this point in time I learned that the party was actually traffic light themed in a club that caters toward Americans (Dan told me later that they have them at Marist and he thinks they’re stupid). They gave me a hard time for not understanding the theme and wearing red, which means “I’m not available,” but I think would’ve probably been the best choice anyway to not attract unwanted attention. I say would’ve because we never actually went to the club, the line was too long. Instead we went to a little bar in Sol called La Soberbia. We sat down at a table, I had a glass of wine, and we enjoyed ourselves until it closed and we had to leave to catch the last metro home.