some more pictures :)

            

update on the week!

Hello there I think the last time I blogged was before this past weekend so I will start with our excursion to Seville and Cordoba! We took an early bus ride Saturday morning and headed off to Seville. We first went on a tour of the Cathedral which is the second largest in the world (or something along those lines) but it was beautiful and we walked up to the top of the tower of the Cathedral and got to see an awesome view of the city. We then all went on a tour of the Palace of Seville, which was very interesting to see and learn about. The gardens at the Palace were gorgeous and we got to take a lot of pictures there! We got some tapas for lunch (which by the way the food really has been so good here…A LOT of bread but very yummy). After lunch we met up with the group of Georgia students who are doing the same program as us except they are in Seville and played a little soccer game of Cadiz versus Seville people. Of course the Cadiz team won (and although it is slightly difficult at times to play soccer with mostly people who have never played before) we had soo much fun. The professor in charge of the Seville group is originally from Spain and grew up playing soccer and he played with us too….he was amazing but he also acted like he was playing in the finals of the euro cup and let’s just say he was a little too into it and not to happy with the Seville team when they lost haha. Later that night we all had dinner on the rooftop of a hotel! It was really neat, we had a beautiful view overlooking the cathedral and the food was delicious. When I say we ate a ton I literally mean I could not stand up after we were finished because we had so many tapas. The next morning we headed on to Cordoba, which is beautiful as well. We went on a big tour of a Mosque that is now owned by Christians and has been turned into a Cathedral. The architecture and details of the building were unbelievable and I am glad we got to see that. After touring around the city most of the day we made our way back to our home in Cadiz. Our mom did eventually make it back Monday from her pilgrimage thing she went on. Although we like the aunt who has been staying with us a little better than our mom, we still really like her and have been having many more conversations in Spanish. We usually don’t see our family a ton during the say except during meals and we are all starting to speak more while we eat. Some of the meals we have been having for example are potatoes and fish, a bean soup with vegetables, meat and French fries, and more. We always have fruit for dessert, which is nice also. Anyways, classes are still going very well. We have midterms next Thursday but that is a little ways away. We usually do not have a lot of homework but the most helpful thing is just listening and participating in our classes that are completely in Spanish. Focusing solely on understanding and learning in Spanish for 3 hours is sometimes a little tiring but everyone has been having fun in class and it has also been a way for our group of Georgia students to get closer (since it us just us in the classes).

This week we went to the beach a few times and also took a flamenco-dancing lesson yesterday. That was interesting and while we weren’t necessarily the greatest, it was very fun to learn about. Of course I will demonstrate some of the steps we learned when I return. We have another class I think in a couple of weeks so I am sure we will be professionals after that. Some entertaining things that happened this week… well on Sunday night Natalie accidently sat on this curtain thing hanging up in our room and kind of pulled part of the rod out of the wall. We were freaking out and the ceilings are too high for us to reach so we couldn’t get up there to try and fix it (which we probably couldn’t have done anyways) so it was kind of funny and we were laughing at one point because we had no idea what to do and of course earlier that week I had exploded a 2 liter coke all over the kitchen so we were a little nervous to tell them that we broke the curtain. Well the best part is when Natalie went in the next morning to tell the aunt, Natalie started with “tengo una problema” (I have a problem) and I guess her hands were kind of on her stomach because she was nervous and the aunt freaked out and thought she had some big medical problem and was sick.. So it worked out when we told her it was just the curtain rod and we apologized a trillion times and she was like oh my gosh do not worry about it at all! So luckily they are getting that fixed and weren’t too angry with us. Other than that overall everything has been going great and we are going to Lisbon, Portugal this weekend. We do not have class on Friday so we are all excited about our long weekend :) I will update you guys on how that trip goes!! Miss you guys!!

day trip to Morocco

We made it home from Morocco!! Starting from the beginning, we woke up at about 530 in the morning and then met our group at 630 in order to make a 7 oclock bus to the city of Tarifa, Spain. The bus ride was about 2 hours and then we grabbed some breakfast and our tickets for the ferry in Tarifa. We ended up using a program in which we bought a ferry ticket to and from Morocco that included a tour guide for the day and lunch. The ferry ride took about 35 minutes from the coast of Tarifa to the city of Tanger in Morocco. When we arrived we got on a bus that first took us around part of the city and then up to the top of the hills where the really nice houses were. Our tour guide explained to us how there is a huge gap between the few who are very rich and then everyone else is extremely poor. We got off the bus and had a chance to ride a camel which was interesting, they are not the cleanest animals but it was a cool experience. We then continued the rest of the tour off of the bus. We walked all around the little streets which were very old and dirty. I am definitely glad we got to go and see Morocco but there were WAY TOO MANY people on the streets with jewelry and others things coming up to us every second asking us if we wanted to buy it. That got a little annoying but we got down yelling no at them pretty quickly. Our tour guide took us to a place where we learned about the rugs they make in Morocco and then to a spice shop where a man spoke to us all about the mixing of different spices and how they make medicine for different things. We all stopped at a nice little place where they gave us a Moroccon lunch including some vegetables, chicken, soup, and a honey cake. After a while of walking around we headed back to the ferry. I loved getting to see Morocco and was glad to add an Africa stamp to my passport, however I do not plan on spending much time there in the future. We made it home pretty late and headed to bed because the strike was over and unfortunately we were having classes in the morning. Class has been going well and like I said I really like my teachers and think we are going to learn a lot. Yesterday after class was our first big beach day. There is a small pretty beach right by our house and right by the school that a bunch of us went to. The weather has been great and I'm hopefully improving my tan. At 630 we met with our program leader and the group for churros dipped in chocolate. They were AMAZING and let's just say there were definitely none left over. Me and Natalie went back home and took a siesta (which we should definitely start that trend in America) and then had a nice dinner including some green beans and fish. Our mom is still away on her pilgrimage trip or whatever she is doing so the Mom's sister is still staying with us and she has 2 sons. We loved playing and talking with the 7 year old boy again and this time the 17 year old boy had dinner with us too. He was fun to practice our spanish with and he was giving us the scoop on some local slang that they say in Cadiz. We ended up talking with them for about 2 hours and were having a great time also watching a game show with them in Spanish. This morning after class we went to the beach again and then came to the school where I am now to get some internet. Tomorrow we are going to the museum of Cadiz which we hear is pretty cool and then this weekend we are all going on a trip to Seville and Cordoba so I am excited to let you all know how that goes!! Hope you like the pictures :) 

First Day of class!

HOLA! Alright so we have had a great last couple of days and the biggest lesson we learned was that our spanish is much more on the level of the 5 and 6 year old kids that we have met. (I am kind of kidding but not completely). After my last post and before we met up with some friends to watch the Chelsea soccer game, our host mom's sister came over with her 7 year old son Jesus (accent on the u). Jesus is great and LOVES to talk to us which has been wonderful practice and he is just adorable. Anyways on Sunday me and Natalie woke up and went on a nice casual run along the coast (which we need to make a habit of considering people in Spain eat about 20 pieces of bread with each meal of the day). Then we met the whole Georgia group at la plaza de flores for a scavenger hunt type thing around the city of Cadiz. This was an optional activity but of course we want to participate in everything :) However...my group was me Natalie and our new friends John and Jack and we might not have put our full effort into the scavenger hunt. First let me tell you about Aitor. Aitor is the Georgia teacher in charge of our trip and he is originally from Spain and is a very interesting man. He is absolutely so awkward and hilarious and we love him but he laughs at us a lot when we cannot respond to him in spanish. But anyways Aitor handed each group the scavenger hunt and we all scattered in different directions. After about 5 minutes my group and me decided we wanted to take a little rest on a bench in the park and then figure out which direction we were suppose to go to find some Simon Bolivar statue. Well while sitting on our nice park bench we ended up meeting a few girls who go to UNC Chapel Hill and of course one of them was from Atlanta and ended up knowing about 20 people that we knew (weird how that stuff happens). Well of all the little places in Cadiz, Aitor happens to be strolling by and sees us not exactly being the most aggressive with the scavenger hunt but instead sitting on a bench talking to more Americans. May not seem very funny to you but if you knew Aitor you would realize it was a funny moment. Well then we did turn on our game face with the scavenger hunt and ended up finding a few of the answers and actually learning some cool things about the very old city of Cadiz. I know you would love for me to lay out those facts but we will save that for a later date. Later on we had mushrooms, chicken, and french fries for lunch at the house and yogurt for dessert. While the meals are different than ours, they have all been very good. It was an overall wonderful and relaxing weekend and we also got to do some fun things.

And then came the first day of class...honestly I believe a lot of us forgot we were here to take classes. BUT class was great and we have awesome teachers! We got up for breakfast and took our 2 minute walk to the school (University of Cadiz). All the Georgia students take 2 of the 4 classes that they offer on this trip. Both my classes have about 15 people in them and we are only with the Georgia students which is nice. Our teachers however are University of Cadiz teachers and both of mine are really awesome. Both girls, Ainhoa and Inma, were very easy to understand and are going to make the class fun. They gave us our books and we went over the syllabus and pretty much talked in spanish introducing ourselves for awhile. I am actually excited about these classes because I feel first off that we are going to learn a ton in them and also it is easy to go to spanish class when we are already in full spanish mode living in Spain. To be honest.. most of us need to be in these classes to keep us polishing up our spanish while we are here in order to get around (one of our friends Jack the other day told us he was going to the mobile phone store to buy a go phone and he came back about 10 minutes later with a coke and an ice cream and said he had tried to talk to the worker and couldn't understand anything so he decided to leave...this is also the guy that on our first night tried to order a drink and the waiter came back with a ham and cheese sandwich so maybe he's the one that needs to be studying the spanish dictionary and going to class more than us). Anyways the point is that class is going to be very helpful and we all think they are going to go very smoothly. But of course nothing is dull with us and halfway through our first class our teacher was called out of the room. She comes back in to tell us that tomorrow there is going to be una huelga (a strike) at the University. We didn't exactly catch all of the details of the strike but we think that they raised the tuition for the students and so the students chose a day to go on strike... but we aren't one hundred percent positive on that...all we heard was "there will be no class tomorrow." Well we do not waste much time and about 15 of us are going to spend our day off going to Morocco. We take an hour and a half bus ride from Cadiz to some city that starts with a T that I will get back to you guys on that and then we take a 30 minute ferry over to Africa. We get a tour guide for the day and then take the same travels back tomorrow night. I will definitely post some pictures when we get back from the trip :) Back to today...after school we came and got lunch and talked to our mom (who finally we found out her name is Toni!!) Toni told us that she is going to be leaving for a week and her sister is going to stay with us (we really like the sister so we are excited about that... it is still kind of hard to understand our mom but her sister is easy to talk to and we think she really likes us). Toni is going away for a week for some Catholic pilgrimage where people from all over Spain travel for a few days sleeping in the streets on their way to some certain city where it sounds like a big party/celebration on the weekend. They all wear flamingo dresses because they are big in to flamingo dancing (We think our mom makes flamingo dresses for half the people going because they are alll over the house)... so hopefully our mom has a good time on that and we will see her again next week. After talking to her, we went to a little soccer club with one small field because Aitor had rented it our for the Georgia group for an hour. A bunch of us went and had so much fun playing against each other. About 3 guys and 3 girls had played soccer in high school and everyone else just joined in and we decided we definitely want to do it once a week because we all had such a great time. I loved touching the soccer ball again and playing some pick up games was a great way to spend the afternoon. Towards the end of our game, some local older Spanish guys came to the field to play after us. I'm sure they thought we were the most terrible embarrassing soccer players they had seen considering they play soccer like 5 times a day. I could tell they were truly enjoying watching us by their constant laughter and intense clapping whenever one of the girls made a good move. Once my friend Katherine scored and they stood up clapping singing some victory song, so that was some great entertainment. After soccer a few of us went to the beach for a little while and then hungout in the plaza near our house. At the plaza, 2 5 year old girls and a 7 year old boy who were from Cadiz came up to us and talked for awhile. This was the second and reassuring time that we should stick to talking to little kids because we definitely are more on their level. We then headed back to our houses for dinner. I know this was a longer post but there is always so much to say and I am hoping to keep it updated. We have to get up pretty early tomorrow so I am heading to bed but will let you know how our Morocco trip goes! Hasta Luego!!

Plaza de San Antonio

Me and Natalie are reading in the big plaza right by where we live! Our apartment thing is in the pinkish cream building behind me in the picture. Last night we had a big dinner with the whole group outside at a really cute restuarant and they brought us tons of tapas throughout the meal. We had potatoes, bread, fried fish, empanadas, salad with tuna, and some ice cream to finish it off! I'm starting to get to know all the other students on the trip better and we have a really fun group that gets along very well! Today has been pretty relaxed since we decided not to travel this weekend because we just got here Thursday. We are already very quickly learning our way around but still having some troubles with the keys to our house haha but we think we've finally gotten it now! After dinner at our house we are going to meet up with some other people in the group to watch a big soccer game that is going on tonight! Just wanted to give a quick update love you guys!

Real Madrid Stadium

Cadiz :)

CADIZ!

Finally to Cadiz!!! On the bus we found out the names of our families and if they had children, etc. Me and Natalie were very excited to hear we would have a sister and a dog at our home. For some reason we expected that we were going to have a small cute spanish 5 year old little sister and we were bragging to the other groups about how they should come play with our little sister. Well... we were pretty far off when we met our 19 year old not so small sister. Let's just say we were a little nervous about the healthiness of the meals we were going to be eating the next six weeks and decided we need to be doing some running everyday. But let's back up a little to when we first met the parents. Our Dad, Antonio, and Mom (who we are still working on her name) were waiting for us when the bus arrived in Cadiz. We got in there car and they took us around the beautiful and very small city of Cadiz which is shaped like a peninsula with la playa (the beach) on one side and a bay on the other. Arriving at their house, which is not really a house at all, was very cool. I will take pictures to give more of a visual but we entered into a building and went up to the second floor. The whole second floor is their house with an open courtyard type thing in the middle which probably makes no sense but i will post a picture later. We have a very nice room and bathroom that has a balcony opening up to the street. After unpacking for a little while, the rest of the night was far from boring and I'm sure you would have loved to have had a video on me and Natalie. Let's just say we may have been a tad "culture shocked." While we had spoken some simple sentences when we first met the parents and daughter, dinner was our first big conversation. I wouldn't actually call it a conversation though considering they did about 99 percent of the talking and us the listening. While we did catch some things they were saying, we stuck with mostly nodding in response. She made us a little steak and french fries and then lots of bread with cheese and ham that she kept encouraging us to eat. After a little while they just were speaking to each other and a couple other people came in that we are not exactly sure if they were related or friends. We eventually headed back to our room to finish unpacking where Natalie and I didn't speak to each other for about 15 minutes and we didn't even realize it haha I think we were afraid to talk in english. Well we took a deep breathe and then could not stop laughing because we realized we really did know so much more spanish than we were using and we for some reason kind of froze. We were much more relaxed and decided to go on a walk for a little while but of course our simple walk we wanted to take ended in a minor catastrophe. All the streets of Cadiz are small and look pretty similar and we had been in the city for only about 2 hours. Needless to say, not exactly sure what we were thinking, we got extremely lost. So here's the situation: Its about 12 oclock at night we have no idea where we are we have no maps no phones and all the streets look EXACTLY the same. (mom and dad- Cadiz is not a dangerous place at all there is not much violence so no need to worry about our safety...the concern was we really did not know if we were going to make it back :) ) welll about 45 minutes later we found our building! (today we realized we were literally circling the small streets by our home for the entire 45 minutes) But ofcourse that isnt the end of the story...we proceed to be unable to unlock the main door on the bottom floor of the building. After about 15 minutes of fidgeting with the stupid key, the lights of the lobby come on and our mom comes to the rescue. Of course we were so embarrassed and she just laughed at us but we finally made it back to our rooms. So I know our first few hours in our new home for the next 6 weeks may have seemed like a disaster but everything definitely turned around today. 

We woke up feeling much more confident in our spanish and had a good conversation with our mom at breakfast. Our mom is sooo sweet and has had students the past few years so she is extremely patient with us. For breakfast we had 2 options for cereal: Special K with chocolate chunks it in or chocolate pebbles cereal. We got changed and our mom (which hopefully soon i can refer to her by name) walked us to school which is on the bay and is also a 2 minute walk from our house. It was a relief to talk to all of the other Georgia students who although did not get lost in the city and locked out of their homes did have similar experiences talking to their families. We had a quick orientation at the school and then the entire group went on a walk around the city. Then a few of us stopped at a small cafe for some coffee before I had to be back at my house at 230 for lunch. They are very serious about being on time if your mom tells you a certain time that you will be eating. Lunch went GREAT with our mom and sister. We are already feeling better about the spanish even though we definitely still have to pick up on the accent some more. We watched a spanish show with our sister for a little while and she put the spanish subtitles on for us so that it would be easier for us to understand (reading is easier than just listening). Anyways I hope I did not make our family and the first night seem like we hated being there lol, it is just definitely a cool experience living with a family who knows absolutely no english. I am sitting in a plaza now on the computer and we are meeting our Georgia group at 9 for dinner tonight. Our mom told us that tommorrow she is going to pack us a picnic for lunch so that we can take it to the beach with our friends! Since we just got here, we are not going anywhere this weekend but are just going to try and learn our way around Cadiz better. I hope I am keeping you all a little entertained and I plan to post as much as I can! I am very excited to get to know my family better and be more comfortable with my spanish :) talk to you soon! Adios!

Gran Via

I have arrived!

hello hello! A couple benadryl and an interesting airplane breakfast that included fruit, coffee, and a kit kat later we made it to the Madrid airport! We arrived at about 8 in the morning Madrid time and at about 2 in the morning home time. The airport was huge and very cool and Natalie and I along with our 3 friends from Nashville who were on the same flight from Chicago to Madrid took a cab to our hotel to meet the rest of the group. We stayed at Hotel Tryp on Gran Via and it was much nicer than I had expected. We were centrally located on a main street and I will post a photo of the beautiful city. Without having time to change or get settled, we immediately set off to explore with the group. We started at a small cafe called Cuidad de Tui where I had my first meal in Spain. For 3 euros I got a ham and cheese sandwhich, coffee, and some orange juice, therefore I guess I did not branch out too much on that first meal. However at least I did not give in to getting Subway, Starbucks, McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, or even KFC (which were all there in the main streets of Madrid). Later in the day, we went on a bus tour and then had dinner together at the hotel. This meal contained lettuce, tomato, corn, some interesting meats that I decided not to try, and a couple other things. At night the streets were very active with people and the weather was perfect (it is pretty hot during the day but I'm not complaining). 

Day 2 in Madrid was Wednesday and was a very action-pacted day.  We started off touring the royal palace which was absolutely beautiful. All of the ceilings had amazing paintings and everything was extremely intricate and elaborate. When leaving the palace, I went with a small group to a cafe where we got quesadillas con pollo (chicken) which were very fresh and yummy. I then experiened the metro for the first time when about 15 of us decided we wanted to go to the Real Madrid stadium. We took the metro to a stop right outside the Stadium and then went on a tour. I took a lot of pictures and cannot wait to show you guys! We traveled back to the plaza de Espana on the metro where we went to the Museo del Prado.  The Museo del Prado had a lot of older artwork and was interesting to see. I really like all the people I have met and I think we have a great group going to Cadiz. The teachers here with us are fun, easy to get along with, and always speak to us in spanish. While we used some spanish in Madrid, I think once we get settled into the small city of Cadiz with our families we will be speaking spanish almost all of the time. We are now currently on the 9 hour bus ride south from Madrid down to Cadiz. We are all anxious to meet our host families and see Cadiz!! Miss you all and I will post again soon!