Hello Spain

Well, now I can officially say: the beds are bad.  Not horrible, but not the most comfortable things on earth.  I feel like I'm sleeping on a board with a one or two inch pillow on top.  That made me wake up pretty early this morning, but I tried to just roll over.  While I was foolishly attempting to fall back asleep, several things were running through my head:  speak Spanish better, what to say to Marli, what did you get yourself into.  The main one was probably the most serious, but every time I think about that I always feel better about the next day.  I feel like I'm in trouble, but instead I change it to thinking, well your here, now what are you gonna do about it.  It's not like I'm going home tomorrow, so I'm gonna have to adapt to the situation and enjoy every minute of it.  I think today really helped with that.  I got myself up with my alarm (8 o'clock) but was up earlier like I said.  So I walked outside my room and "caught" Marli having a morning smoke and cafe.  Really I just didn't know that she smoked.  It seems like she just smokes in the kitchen and blows it out the window.  So even though I really needed to go to the bathroom, I decided to talk to her and when I ran out of things to say I asked her about desayuna (breakfast).  She took me to the salon (dining room/living room with tv) and showed me what we had.  I ended up eating toast, and surprisingly enough, cereal.  However, the cereal was chocolate oat clusters with solid chocolate chunks.  Now that's what I call cereal!  There was also peach marmalade and eclair like things, but I needed to get moving, so around 8:30 I started getting dressed.

Now the fun stuff.  I am in a room with Rob and Matt.  There are also two others, Ricky and Andy, down the hall.  I was going to take a shower, but decided all I really needed was a quick wash, so I never even ended up in the shower.  Meanwhile, I thought Rob was going to the shower and by the time I got out, the apartment was silent and I only found Matt.  Marli then returned and said in spanish you are gonna be late.  I was like whatever, ok lets go Matt.  I asked him whether Rob had gone and he said I don't know where the other guys are.  This was pushing 9 and we had to be there at 930, so with a 25 min metro ride ahead of us I said, let's go.  The metro was nice.  Really nice.  Like clean and new and bright, almost makes you forget about pickpockets.  Almost.  Luckily nothing has happened yet, but there are lots of fun stories like ipods getting the cord cut while your listening to music and the ipod is walking off in the other direction.  Anyway, we made it to our stop and said ok to the university.  When we surfaced from 3- 50 foot escalators, we realized we had no idea where the university was in relation to the stop.  After much confusion, we found a map and ended up arriving 15 min late.  Later we found out Rob WAS still in the apartment when we left.  However, when he came out of the subway, a house mother ushered him in the direction of the school, much like the way Ron Weasley's mom helped Harry... so he made it there before us.  

The first day at school was interesting.  We saw the three buildings of campus.... and went on a walking tour.  Campus is nice though.  Pretty location with so much around.  It really is a great city.  Everything is within walking distance or a metro ride.  My roommate Matt actually rode the metro from the Airport (one shady situation, but no other problems).  I will probably do that on the way back because it is 1 euro vs. 35.50.  I now have a phone, but I'm not giving the number out here cause the rates are way to high to be receiving calls left and right.  Back to what I was saying before, I'll be taking pictures of all around and labeling them for everyone.  The tour today gave me a lot of pictures, but I didn't take very many because I figured that I'd be around that area enough to take a lot of pictures.  So we traveled around the city with a huge group of people, I met a lot more of new people and caught up with some others.  We ended up at Plaza de España, so Rob and I just walked back to our apartment, which was like a block away.  So I guess a few of us are going to be going out in a few minutes and this post is long enough.  Tomorrow I'll continue with whatever's on my mind.

P.S.  A special thanks to Matt Feickert for enlightening me to Picasa by google.  I'll be using that website to post pics and there will be a link on here.  Right now there are only about 20 pics, but I'm having troubles with uploading.  I believe the website is: http://picasaweb.google.com/dwetzel0