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!!