School and such

A lot of you have been emailing me asking what school is like and how my classes are going so I thought the best way to update you is via blog post. I promise I've been doing fun things and I'll post them soon but I haven't had much free time to upload pictures or write blog entries! (which is a good thing, but I promise I'll get to it this weekend ... i think)

Anyways,

my school schedule goes something like this:

MTWTHF (all five days) but on MWF my day is done at 2:45

10am-11:30am Grammar Class with Alicia

11:30am-12:00 pm descanza (break for coffee)

12:00pm-1:30pm Conversation Class with Begona... here we simply chat. it's pretty cool we learn slang, talk about the right way to say random things from "this tastes like sh*t," to the word for a shot at a bar, the proper way to ask for eggs at a grocery store ... it's really useful and fun.

1:45-2:45 Culture Class ** the topic and professor change every two weeks but will cover topics of Arte, Cine (movies), Gastronomia (food), Historia, y Literatura**

------- in all of the above mentioned classes my classmates are: 1 american named Bob who is part of my group, one older american woman Carly, who has a young daughter, they live in the residencia with me, a pregnant woman from Romania, and then about 7 chinese kids and 2 japanese kids. at first, it was really hard that very few people in my classes spoke English but already, in the two weeks I've been taking classes my confidence in my speech has grown because I am forced to speak spanish if I want to communicate with my classmates. The asians don't speak english, and obviously the woman from Romania doesn't either. It's really great practice -- I even had enough confidence to go to the post office and hair salon by myself this week without my friend who has better spanish knowledge than i do!

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then on Tuesday afternoons we also have another class from 4-6:30 called Spanish Culture but it's more medeival history, and it's a real college level class taught by a spanish professor with real text books and everything -- It's pretty hard to follow.

Thursday afternoons we have another college level class from 4-6:30 called Spanish Cinema and Theatre. right now we are reading a play written in 1610 ... it's the equivilant of giving a 10 year old american student a shakespeare play and telling them to understand it and then write essays on it. we don't know these old spanish words and they aren't in our modern spanish dictionaries -- soo agian, we're a little lost but at least we're all in it together!

on another note, the food is GREAT! different, but great!

tomorrow (saturday) we are going to tour Real Madrid's stadium and then wander around madrid in the Salamnca district. Sunday my friends and I are thinking of taking a day trip to a near by town but haven't decided which yet! I promise Sunday night I'll update the blog with pictures of all the cool things I've been doing!

Chao Chao!