My entries probably won't always be this long, but we are on our way to Salamanca, and it's a couple hour bus trip. The scenery is very beautiful with rolling hills and even a wind farm! I thought of you Dad. You always appreciate a good wind farm.
I left for Spain Monday afternoon with my friend Blake as my flying buddy. I met Blake at K-State in a couple of Spanish classes, but she is also from Wichita. We left Monday at 1:10 in the afternoon, had a connection flight in Atlanta, then landed in Madrid about 9:30 Tuesday morning their time, about 2:30 a.m. to my body. The overnight flight wasn't bad at all; there were personal screens in each headrest and we could choose which movie we wanted to watch, or tv shows, or play games, and we could also look at where our plane was on the map. Dinner wasn't half bad on the plane either. The only bad thing was that there wasn't much leg room, and it was very difficult to fall asleep even after taking drowsy dramamine. When we got off the plane though, it was easy to trick my body into thinking it was not really 2:30 a.m. because it was so sunny outside.
Blake and I made it through customs. I uttered my first Spanish word to a Spanish person in Spain when I said "Gracias" to the man who stamped my passport. Pretty advanced, I know. Then we waited at the carousel for our luggage, luckily it made it (our instructor and two of the girls weren't so lucky). My suitcase could have been spotted from a mile away with those polka dots. Next, we set off to find Dr. Torrico (our instructor). He had given us instructions on where to meet him, so we tried to follow everything carefully. It said to stay on the lower level, because the upper level was for departures, and we should be in T4 and look for Exit 11. We looked and looked for Exit 11 but it was nowhere to be found. So we resorted to asking the people at the help desk. We started out speaking in Spanish but had to revert back to English to try to figure it out. She ended up telling us Exit 11 didn't exist. Great. We walked back and forth some more thinking maybe he had made a mistake in his directions, but ended up having to use a payphone to call him. We told him where we thought we were, and he told us not to move, he would come find us. We waited, and waited, and waited some more. Then after a while, we realized we weren't in T4 at all. Some other girls that had been there a while happened to walk by and pointed us in the right direction, UP the escalators (where we thought we weren't supposed to go) and to a bus that took us about ten minutes away to another terminal. Needless to say, it was a little stressful, but just a silly mistake.
Once we had met with the rest of the group that had also arrived, we had plenty of time to kill, so Blake and I decided to explore around the airport. It was on this walk that we experienced our first time of probably many more to come of being whislted at and being called "guapa" or "pretty". That didn't take long at all, Daron's warnings seem to be very accurate. It's still funny at this point, we'll see about later in the trip.
Later, the group wanted to get out of the airport and explore Madrid a little and have some lunch. We figured out the metro system all by ourselves, not without looking "tourist-y" though. Fourteen American girls walking around makes it difficult to try to blend in at all. Downtown Madrid reminded me a lot of NYC; not all that pretty and a little dirty looking. We found a lunch spot and struggled through a menu where we only understood a few words. We really didn't know what we were ordering. In general, lunch is the biggest meal of their day, so for the "Menu del dia" you pick two plates of food and then a dessert and you also get wine or sangria and bread. I shared with a girl because we both didn't know what were getting ourselves into, and the first plate was Arroz Cubano, rice with a fried egg in what seemed to be marinara sauce. The rice was alright. The next plate were these breaded things filled with sweet potatoes--also an interesting flavor. Finally, dessert was an ice cream sandwich: very American and very tasty! The sangria was also very refreshing because we were outside where it was very warm, and the sangria was iced and more like a fruit drink than anything.
Also, in that hour or two that we were downtown eating, we saw to fights between two sets of men. One was from road rage and they both got out of the cars and were yelling at eachother very loudly. Another, a man was working on the sign of a building and dropped a piece of plastic on the sidewalk that almost hit a man. Some harsh words were exchanged, I dont know what they were, but I know from the tones of their voices that some very harsh words were used.
Well like I said, we are riding a bus over to Salamanca right now. It has been a pretty long day and a half, and I will be ready to try to catch up on some sleep tonight.
Love you all!
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