Scheduling issues, and a few pics...

Well, today was fairly stressful... Long story short, I have to pick out classes again because the ones I have simply won't work. Luckily the one class I had scheduled for today was cancelled because the professor is out with the flu.


Jay and I at the Ronaoke airport, ready to leave for Spain.


Elephant ready in carry-on, guarding the pringles and chex mix. He makes an excellent pillow.



This is Merce, slicing the "jamon cerrano" for us to eat.

Yesterday when Merche took me to the international relations office, we saw 2 peacocks hanging out on the roof of a library on the San Francisco campus. Their feathers were folded up when I started to take pictures, but then they started posing for us! I must admit, that was the first time I had ever seen a peacock outside of a zoo before. I had to ask how to say "peacock" in Spanish... again, just one of those things I had never come across before. You know what they call them? Pavos reales... Literally, "royal turkeys." I had to laugh. The peacocks just roam free around there apparently, and boy do they yell. Honestly, I didn't even know peacocks made noise.




I am getting more and more comfortable with the language and my speech is already improving. A few people asked me for translations for curse words in English, and apparrently they are really amused at how reluctant I am to curse loudly in public... In Spain, to curse is to speak the language, which is to say, everyone curses constantly, and nobody really cares quite like they do in the U.S. It is also very interesting how much more provocative some of the advertisements on the street are, for lingerie or whatever else. On TV, there are certainly scene that would normally get cut out in their American counterparts.




Merche loves to watch crime shows like CSI, Law and Order, The Closer, etc.. but they are all dubbed in Spanish of course. It seems strange to me, the different voices I mean.



Last night Merche made me dinner, which she called spaghetti, but it wasn't quite what I expected. Apparently, they don't do meatballs or meatsauce like we know. They use tuna. It was very, very strange. I ate it, it wasn't as bad as I expected, but not really my favorite.

Today for lunch she made me "huevo con blanco", which was basically white rice with a fried egg but with this weird tomato sauce stuff which is kind of like ketchup but not as sweet. It was REALLY good though, and the dressing for the salad was AWESOME! It was basically a mix of cider (apple) vinegar and VERY virgin olive oil.. it looks strange though, the olive oil I mean... not like the stuff I'm used to, this was very dark, and miraculously didn't make me sick. (for those of you who don't know, normally I can't eat a lot of oils due to the whole lack of a gall bladder thing.)



Well, I'll end it here for now, because I need to work on looking for classes. I might actually take one class for foreigners, which lasts for a month but is held everyday (intensive) and costs an extra 25 euros, but it specializes in Spanish-English translation. We'll see how it goes.