Yes, I'm still here.

Not a whole lot of excitement lately, back to the school thing more or less...some more frustrations with the ever-changing classroom for Translation, but I've managed not to kill anyone yet. Nobody seems to know what is going on, ever. Honestly, I just finally had a mini-breakdown last week because I was getting so frustrated with it all. The worst part of it all is that it's not due to a language barrier or anything like that.... no fault of my own, just a completely wacko organization (or rather lackthereof) of the university, where everyone seems to be on a different page and they seem incapable of getting a message across to everyone at once. You see, there's this thing, called EMAIL...

...and yes, there is such a thing as university email... but most people don't utilize it, and honestly, I can't say I blame them. The webmail interface makes VT Webmail look divine, and as every Hokie knows, VT Webmail has got its issues for certain. Okay, aside from that, there's the basic issue of, well, NOBODY CAN REMEMBER THEIR EMAIL ADDRESS. Why? Well, first of all, you don't get to choose it. Second of all, it has absolutely nothing to do with you, your name, or anything like that. It's just a randomly assigned number of sorts with "UO" stuck on the front for "universidad de oviedo". So for example, someone's email address could be something like "UO1859301@uniovi.es"... so yeah, of course nobody really uses it.

Okay, frustrations aside, things are okay I guess. It is starting to get warm here which has me a bit bummed because I was hoping for some cold weather to hit. I have 3 or 4 long sleeved shirts that looks like will never make a debut in Spain. In fact, I went out shopping the other day to try to find just a long sleeved button-down light shirt to wear over my tshirts for some arm protection because I'm actually starting to bust out the sunblock now.

...so the shopping adventure. As I mentioned in the last post, the stores are all completely organized by color. You can't just walk into a clothing store and be like "hmm, I would like to buy pants. I will walk over to the PANTS section." No. First, you must envision exactly what color of pants you would like, and then dig through the shirts, skirts, dresses, etc that also happen to come in that color. Incredible.

Long story short, I didn't find anything that would even work, much less in my size. Bah. Merche is also fair-skinned so she has a bunch of long sleeved light shirts for protection so she said she'd take me to the place she gets most of hers next time we make a trip out to Parque Principado which should be fairly soon... hopefully I can come up with something there.

I know I've mentioned this to a few people but for everyone else who hasn't heard, Becky and Jonnie are moving in on Sunday actually, into Merche's room upstairs, and Merche is moving in next door to me where Andreas was earlier... so that should be interesting. Becky and Jonnie (her boyfriend)'s lease is up on their flat and they have a reservation of some sort on a new place, but it will take a couple of years to be built. In the meantime, to save some money, Merce and Pedro decided just to let them stay here with us, save up some cash, and move to the new place when it is completed. So yeah, little by little over the past week or two they've been bringing stuff over here from the current place, and this weekend they'll finally move out for good.

Well, I'm going to get a bit of work done on the online VT class... coming to the end of the semester over there, but still a good ways to go for me here in Spain. I'm not really sure if I'm even registered yet, to be honest. Who knows.

Next weekend we're going to Muros and then leaving from there to see Santiago de Compostela... weee? More pictures to be had, I'm sure.