Número uno

Since I've just passed the one-week mark of being in Spain, I realized that I had better start this blog before it gets too late. Quick overview of the last 10 days: Thursday the 6th I took a flight from Seattle to Chicago, and then a flight to Boston. Here's where it gets a little sticky though - I missed my connecting flight from Boston to Madrid due to a few miscommunications between American Airlines and me. I ended up spending the night in Boston (shout out to Nora, Hugh, Kyle, Brianne, and Bridget for rescuing me and letting me stay at their house!) and returned to the airport at noon on the 7th, all ready to take a flight to JFK and then to Madrid. Of course, that would have been too easy, so my flight to JFK was delayed long enough that I would have missed the connecting flight there, and I hopped on a 7 pm plane to London and an 8 am flight (finalllly) from London to Madrid! Aha, but there's another twist. My luggage didn't get the memo to fly with me from London; apparently it was lazing around in the Heathrow airport while all the dutiful luggage flew on their connecting flights. Anyway, it was a journey and a half, but I survived! My luggage arrived the night we got to Bilbao, Monday the 10th. But first, some stories from the days preceding Bilbao!

Madrid: I'm one of 15 in a group who signed up to study abroad in Bilbao with a company called ISA (International Studies Abroad). Our program fee includes tuition at Universidad de Deusto, room and board with our host families, excursions throughout the semester, and free admission to the museums and other sites we visit with the group. The 15 of us are already getting to know each other  really well, and I'm relieved we've avoided any group drama (at least thus far). We're from all over the country: we have students from California, South Dakota, Michigan, Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, possibly Minnesota, and of course, Washington! Everyone else arrived in Madrid on the 7th so they all met each other before I got there, but I only ended up missing out on a quick orientation and a museum. After I took a taxi from the Madrid airport to the hotel at about 1 in the afternoon, everyone met back up at 2 to go to the Reina Sofía Museum, which houses a lot of Picasso's work including his masterpiece, the Guernica. We also saw some of Salvador Dali's work, so it was cool to see original paintings by Spanish artists in person. Needless to say, following our visit to the museum, I was running on 12 hours of sleep distributed over three days (it's probably not actually that dramatic of a statistic, but the time change exacerbated it my exhaustion), and I fell asleep at about 6 pm and woke up at 8 the next morning for our whirlwind trip to Toledo.

Toledo: Beautiful! Seriously, if you're in Spain, Toledo has to be at the top of your list of destinations. It's a super old city with a giant wall around about half of it. There are cathedrals everywhere, some of which we got to tour. Sidenote: all our tours have been conducted in Spanish, so I've been in total immersion since I got here. I was frustrated at first because I couldn't adequately express myself whenever I tried to talk to the tour guides or locals (or other people in the group, for that matter; our program director, Genoveva, encourages us to speak in Spanish all the time so we get more practice). However, I've picked up some useful phrases and vocabulary and improving every day. Although I haven't kept track yet, I set a goal of learning 10 Spanish words every day. I might be learning more than that right now, but everything's still jumbled in my head, trying to keep track of grammar and tense and articles. I thought taking 5 years of German would help me learn Spanish, but most of the grammar is way different so I can't trust German sentence structure to help me out.
More Toledo... the city is famous for their swords, daggers and suits of armor. We were there on a Sunday so not too much was open, but we still went in a few shops that displayed some pretty impressive armor. Anyway, we checked into the hotel in the afternoon and had a pretty relaxing night. Food that day consisted of a delicious chicken doner kebab for lunch and a jamón (ham) and huevo (egg) sandwich for dinner. With the 14 hours of sleep I achieved Saturday night, I think I avoided jet lag altogether! At least one good thing came out of a whole mess of traveling.

Bilbao: Monday morning we left for Bilbao on our autobús (charter bus). It's about a 4 hour drive from Toledo to Bilbao, since Toledo is about an hour south of Madrid and Bilbao is about 3 hours northwest of Madrid. We took a quick stop in Burgos for lunch (I'm pretty sure it was a truck stop restaurant) and hopped back on the bus for the remainder of our trip. Even after the first couple days of being in Spain, I felt like I'd been here for weeks at least because we've been packing so much action into every day. Once we got to Bilbao, our host families scooped us up and brought us home (we took the Metro). My host family consists of María Jesús, my host mom, and Carlos, my 24-year old host brother. I have a roommate from the program named Lauren, and she's a lot better at Spanish than me so she's been invaluable in translating for me. She's also super nice. So we set ourselves up in the apartment, which isn't huge but has plenty of living space (3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room, a study, and a kitchen) and took a 2 hour walk around the city. Bilbao is the capital city of the Bizkaia province (Basque country), and its population is something like 450,000 in the metropolitan area. The downtown area is so clean! And it feels so safe, even late at night. We walked along the river, which is actually more like an estuary, and when we got back, my luggage was waiting for me.
The next few days consisted of orientations, tours of the city, the university, the Guggenheim, and the Museo de Bellas Artes. We took a placement test for Spanish classes (I may have gotten 2 or 3 right out of 80), learned about extracurriculars, and just about exhausted all the information we'll ever need to know for the next four months. I've been adapting well to the city scene so far, the food is delicious, and I'll be posting something soon in the next few days (or at least within the week) to catch up on anything I forgot and add more exciting events that are transpiring.

We start school tomorrow! My only definite class is a 10-hour a week Spanish class. I'll be fluent in no time!
Hasta luego!