Done

I’m officially done with the program for the summer! Right now I’m in Madrid just relaxing. I did a little shopping today and bought some gifts for people. I hadn’t done that yet until today. Barcelona will be the hot spot for that I think. I’m super excited for Jordan to get here. I think he’s in the air right now, probably almost landing in New York. I’m glad he flies during the night from there to here because the time will go by quicker for both of us. I just hope that he’s able to sleep on the plane and that I can sleep tonight because we only have tomorrow in Madrid and that’s it.

To sum up my last week of school: it was hard, but fun. First of all, on Tuesday morning while I was trying to get my breakfast ready, I hit a cereal bowl with my arm and it fell and shattered all over the place. My feet were bleeding in a couple of places from the ceramic. I felt really bad because the bowls are from IKEA, and the nearest one to Montserrat (my host mom) is in Madrid. She is in love with the store and with all of the items she owns from there. I paid her so she could buy a new one, but I could tell she was disappointed because she didn’t know when she would be in Madrid next. Oh, this just reminded me of another little incident that I didn’t write about before.

Montserrat did our laundry once a week, and since nobody in Spain owns a dryer, everybody hangs their clothes on clothes-lines to dry. In this building where the lines are is in the big square hole in the center. You can look out your window and see your neighbor like RIGHT there like 10 feet in front of you. So we’re on the 3rd floor and we have to be careful when we’re taking our clothes off of the lines not to drop them because we’d have to go down to the bottom and ask the grumpy neighbor for get it for us. So what do I do? Drop a shirt. Of course it wasn’t even my shirt. It was Esther’s. It actually didn’t even fall all the way to the ground. It landed on the clothing line of the lady on the ground level. I was terrified to go down and ask her to get it for me. I rang the doorbell twice and nobody came to the door. Then I looked to my right and there was a small window that opened up to the opening in the middle of the building. And what was right there? Esther’s shirt hanging within arm’s reach. YAY! Victory! The end.

On Friday I just had my linguistics exam, which was not easy. It took me the entire two hours to complete it again. But everybody took that long. For my night class, I just had to turn in an essay. We were the only class that still had class that night. Our professor was too scared to cancel because she thought she would get in trouble with the head of the program. But every other professor from Spain canceled their night classes! Anyway, we thought we were getting out early, but no, we stayed the entire two hours. And guess what we did? We listened to Flamenco music for an hour and 20 minutes. Yep, we just sat there and listened. She just kept the songs coming. Arg! We were all very impatient.

That night, the whole group met up at a place called Vinotinto, and it was a really cool place. The professors bought us tapas, and they were delicious. I went with these three other girls to a bunch of other places, and I was basically the designated driver, except we didn’t drive anywhere. We had fun though. We walked into one place and were probably the oldest ones there. It was filled with teens. One of the girls I was with who was drunk went to the bathroom and didn’t come back for a while. I went in there to check on her, and she was in there talking to a 17-year old, giving her advice on some problems that she was apparently having with a boy. It was soooo funny. They were in there talking for about a half an hour, and at the end, the girl asked my friend if she had facebook because she wanted to talk more. Geeze…. Anyway, after that we went to a pizzeria and stayed there talking for about 2 hours about relationships. We really had a good time. Oh, and one of the girls with us from the program named Rachel is really pretty, tall, skinny, has long blond hair, and striking blue eyes. Wow, that kind of just sounded like a description of my sister. But anyway, guys literally stop her on the street to talk to her because she’s so pretty. I’ve never seen anything like it. They all invite her to “a party they’re going to” and what not. She’s so nice that she always talks to them, but she’s not arrogant at all. And here, it’s not like in Mexico where the guys have hardly seen blondes before. There are blondes all over the place here, but she’s just the prettiest! So anyway, I got home around 4 am, and I think that was the latest I’ve ever been out in my life. Come to find out the next morning, my host mom had arrived home just a little bit before I did. It’s just the norm here.

The next day I was planning on doing a little shopping and then go to the beach. I got all ready to go, and I hadn’t even looked outside yet. My “mom” woke up, and said, “Ay, it’s raining.” Dude, I seriously thought that it was just a neighbor taking a shower because you can hear everything that your neighbors do….and I mean everything….yeah… Anyway, it was the first rain during the day in Valladolid that I experienced. I liked it. Needless to say, I didn’t go to the beach. But I shopped a little and walked around a lot. My Esther was gone for the weekend up north, and I missed her. But it was a good relaxing day.

…Oh, I just got a text from Jordan. He made it to NYC safely!!...

Today as we were getting ready to leave, we thought Montserrat wasn’t up yet, but she had told us that she would come with us to the place where the group was meeting. We didn’t want to wake her up, so we left a goodbye note because we had just called a taxi to come pick us up. Then, she came out of the bathroom. She had just showered and didn’t realize what time it was. She was running around in a panic trying to get ready quick. I went down the elevator in the meantime to see if the taxi had arrived. Yep, he did, and the guy was really really grumpy. He told me that he had been waiting a long time for us and wasn’t really happy about it. I told him that the lady on the phone told me that he would arrive in 5 minutes, and only 6 minutes had passed. By the time we left, I looked at the meter in the taxi, and we were already at 6 euros. But we arrived and said our goodbyes to Montserrat. She really was a great hostess…especially compared to other students’ experiences.

Thank you to everyone who took my “pole”. I loved the answers!