Spain, Day One

After many months of paperwork and counting down the days, I have finally arrived in Spain! For those of you who aren't super familiar with how my trip is set up, here is a little breakdown for you. I am in Spain for a total of six weeks. The first four weeks, I am enrolled in a study abroad program through my school and am staying with a host family in a flat in downtown Madrid. Once my program finishes, my parents are flying out here and I am meeting up with them to stay an extra week in Madrid in a flat that they have rented for the week. THEN we are traveling to Barcelona for another week where my boyfriend, Craig, is going to be flying to in order to meet us. So six weeks total. I will be back in the US on June 20th. 

I hope I have passed along how to contact me to most everybody by now but if for some reason you don't have it, just shoot me a message and I will give it to you.

My flight over was a little disappointing for me. While I made it in one piece thankfully, there were a few nuances that I encountered. The couple in front of me kept making out with each other throughout the entire plane ride which was just pleasant. At one point, they put a pillow between themselves and me so I couldn't see them. Maybe I was starting too intensely? If you're gonna do it in public though, these are the consequences people. I had also been promised a USB port on the plane but come my arrival to the plane, there was no port to be found, which was superb because I had let my phone battery run down while I was in the airport thinking there were be a place for me to charge it when I got on the plane. Aside from these things and the very minimal leg space, my flight went as expected. I didn't even try to get any sleep but that made for some good time to watch movies. These overseas flights all have individual screens for each seat nowadays, and they always have the best movie selections. I decided to familiarize myself with some of this years big movie award recipients and watched The Theory of Everything (which was absolutely fantastic!), Still Alice (a little artsy for me but still good), and Into the Woods, which I could not take seriously for some reason. Usually I am a big musical movie aficionado but this one just seemed too goofy for me (and not in the meant to be a laugh out loud comedy type of way). 

One of the best parts of my plane ride was meeting a woman named Louise. She is an older, American woman who was on her way to Spain to meet up with her son and also had the good fortunate of sitting next to me on the plane. Not only was she super friendly from the get-go (and not in the way most people who sit next to you on planes are where you are obviously trying to read your book and they won't shut up) but she also turned out to be one of the most giving people I have met. We began chatting about why we were going to Spain and once I told her that I was nervous about finding my hotel, she immediately offered to help me find it once we arrived. She also gave me some gum, her brownie from the airplane dinner, and a warm hug once we finally departed from each other at the airport. The world needs more people like friendly, old Louise. I hope she has a great rest of her life.

I arrived at my hotel at about 10:30 a.m. (Spain time) and only had to briefly wait for my room to be ready. I was extremely proud of myself for navigating myself thus far. I had used Spanish both with my cab driver and with the lady at the check-in desk and they actually seemed to understand what I was saying–it was a miracle!

Naturally, the first thing I did when I got to my room was sleep. I was knocked out for about 7.5 hours, which felt great. Unfortunately, that put me at about 7:30 p.m. here when I woke up so now my body clock is all screwy. I'm hoping to sleep from 2-7ish tonight but we will see if I can stay asleep that long since I am pretty well-rested.

Once I woke up from my nap, I cleaned myself up a little and went to the hotel restaurant for dinner, again using my Spanish with the waitress. She actually pegged me for an American (probably because I was eating dinner early like most American tourists do when they travel to Spain) so she started speaking to me in English but when I told her that I was studying abroad to try to become fluent in Spanish, she told me that we could use Spanish while she served me and that she would speak slowly so that I could understand. She also taught me a few things while I was ordering. For example, when I want to order non-sparkling water, I need to say "agua mineral." She also clarified how meat cooking levels translated in Spanish (you know like medium, medium-well, medium-rare, etc) as well as teaching me a few new phrases. I am so appreciative of the patience I received and the friendly nature of the staff at this hotel and can only hope that this is representative of how the rest of Spain will treat me.

All in all, I would say it has been a great first day, and I can't wait to really get this adventure started. I arrived in Spain a few days before the rest of my fellow UK students, which is why I am in this hotel. I am meeting up with them on Monday so I still have a day of relaxation before I really get going. I would like to do a "word of the day" system so that this blog is somewhat educational to my readers too. Today's word is going to lay the foundation for the rest of our words: it's "palabra" which means "word" in English. So now you know when I say "palabra del dia" I mean "word of the day."


Thanks for reading and check back tomorrow to see what else I am up to!