Day 7 Sunday July 5th

We spent today on a bus. And by today I mean, We left IBSTE at 10am after breakfast of toast and cereal (normal breakfast), got into Barcelona around 11:00 waited until the bus left at 12 and then we were on a bus until this evening when we arrived in Madrid. When we arrived we met the owner ( think he was the owner) of Estudio Sampere. This is where we are going to be studying for the next three weeks. As soon as we met up with him we hopped on a series of trains and met our host mothers. Almost immediately we were swept away in a flurry of Spanish and headed off to see where we are staying for the next three weeks. My host mother seems to be the owner of an apartment complex of which we are staying in one. We (Paul, Reed, and I) have two bedrooms with another empty one with two beds in it, a living room, kitchen, and bathroom, to ourselves. We think she told us that there would be two more people staying in the other room for 4 days sometime soon. Then we were rushed off to eat dinner at 9:00, which I’ve come to find is normal timing for eating dinner and my stomach has become accustomed to this. Dinner happened so fast I barely knew what hit me. We sat down at the kitchen table and immediately there appeared coke and gazpacho(of which I’m not a huge fan, but I finished anyway). Next, out came the bread, and my host mother whose name is palmida or palmi for short, started cooking eggs and chicken(in separate pans) in olive oil. Less than twenty minutes after we had sat down a full two courses of food had been served. After the chicken and eggs she brought out a salad, and some melon (we aren’t sure what kind). All this time we are struggling to converse in Spanish and succeeding through what seems sheer dumb luck. One of us would be able to hear what was said and between all three of us we would come up with the semi-correct response. Nearing the end of the meal we figured out how to ask for internet and figure out the word for password. Discovering that we had to pay and figuring out how much took us about 30 minutes to sort out. We finally did and I was able to get online and talk to sarah for a few minutes before I got to sleep. For some reason being on a bus all day wears one out. I suppose on top of that constantly trying to figure out what people around you are saying is a struggle. I fell asleep with the light on before the other two guys were even done getting ready.
Here I would like to insert a little anecdote about the bus. On the bus the movie Transformers was playing. I figured I would watch it for a while, and so searched the bus audio channels for English and when it wasn’t found I found it in Spanish thinking I would at least try to keep up. The subtitles helped me immensely. But, I found myself watching and waiting for the time when they were going to start speaking English with familiar voices instead of Spanish with voices that almost match. The only voice that came close was Optimus Prime because they had to edit it and deepen it. It never happened, at least not before I fell asleep for about twenty minutes.
Also, we took our culture quiz, which consisted of 150 questions straight out of Fodor’s guide to Spain, word for word. I had spent some time studying unlike most of the group that didn’t care because Spanish is all that they needed to graduate, and one credit hour isn’t going to lower their GPA, and because I had studied, I finished in less than 5 minutes, and as far as I know only missed one. The only reason I relay this is because I was excited to take the test and actually asked him to take it early (which he wouldn’t let me do), and it felt really good to know that I knew for sure that I have an A for the cultural part, or at least that portion of the culture class.
-Scott