I'm here!

So, I made it alive. I did not sleep at all on the plane. That means I missed an entire night's sleep. That photo is what I looked like upon arrival. When we came to Madrid, we had to circle around for 15 mins in the plane because airport traffic was apparently backed up a little. It was soooooo pretty though. Seriously, once we flew over Madrid, the skies opened up. There were solid clouds the whole way, then suddenly it was completely clear. Anyway, after we landed early, I waited an hour for another girl to come in so we could share a cab. That taxi driver spoke so fast....I had no idea what he was saying half the time. The Spanish here is sooooo different than what I'm used to. When we got to the hotel, I slept for 5 hours because I could. We had dinner as a group, and I met a bunch of great girls. There are 30 females in the program, and 3 males. Dinner was fishy. the salad had a big smoked raw salmon or something on top of it. Needless to say, I couldn't eat it. Then we had some fried fish for the main course which was good.

I've been using my Spanish alot (obviously). We are required to speak it to each other. I picked out about 2 other girls who seemed to have the same confidence level as me with speaking, so that made me feel better knowing that I'm not the only one. It actually made me more confident in a strange way. The people in this program are from all over the US. It's so awesome that you can do this even if you move around to different states.

My roomate here is the same one that I'll be living with in Valladolid. She's very nice. She's Brazilian and Portuguese, and has a pretty cool accent. Anyway, I'm just kind of spewing out what has happened so far, which isn't very exciting, but hopefully we'll have some FREE internet sometime so I can take more time to think while a write.