Note to self: chiste ≠ quiste

I never know if the television shows Adela and I watch during meals are in Spanish or in Valenciano, the local dialect of la Communidad Valencia,  because they are very similiar.  Almost all of the street signs in Valencia are written in Valenciano, but on every map they are in Spanish...makes it very confusing when you're lost.  Tonight during dinner, Adela and I were watching a Spanish talk show similar to a late night show in the US but with two puppets as co-hosts.... a perfect example of how extrememly weird Spanish television is.  The hosts started talking about some person and their "quistes."  Because all I do is ask Adela random questions about anything and everything I encounter day to day, I naturally asked her what a "quiste" was and if it was the Valenicano version of the Spanish word for a joke, "chiste."  They seem similar enough, right?  Wrong.  After several minutes of Adela laughing and struggling to describe a "quiste" to me, I finally just got out my dictionary.  A "quiste" is a cyst, definitely not a joke.  Whoops.  Better that I asked Adela, though, than tell my professors that I have a new "quiste" for them that's really funny!

Un Día Típico en Valencia

Now that I've started classes, my weekdays have begun to follow a schedule that is more or less the same everyday.  It's nice to be getting into the swing of things, but having a regular schedule doesn't mean my days are boring.  Definitely the opposite!  Here's a synopsis in pictures of what a typical day for me in Valencia is like :]

Every morning I roll out of bed to find breakfast waiting for me in the kitchen.  

My madre definitely spoils me :p

After breakfast I walk to school.  This is the street where my school is located.  Spanairds are really good at parking....  They love to double park so that no one can move their cars, let alone drive down the street.

This is my school!

In between classes I walk down the street to one of the several hundred gardens of Valencia and do homework, grab a snack, or just relax.  If there's time, I'll go home in between classes for la comida (lunch) and to work out.  La comida is typically around 2:30pm.  

When I come home, Galgo, the family's greyhound, is always fast asleep on the couch in the living room.  Galgo is sooo adorable.  Just like every Spanaird, he loves to take siestas in the afternoon after eaching lunch.  During dinner though, he always seems to have a lot of energy despite the fact that Adela takes him to the park to play for over two hours twice per day.  He has a rubber ball that he will hold in his mouth and then throw so that it ricochets around the kitchen, bouncing off all of the cabinets and sometimes landing on the table, haha.  He never fails to make me laugh :]  

In my room, Adela always leaves my laundry perfectly folded.  So cute!  Again, can you tell how much she's spoiling me?

After finishing up my homework, I meet up with some of the other girls and we walk around the city, exploring new areas.  Last time, we stumbled upon Mercado Colon, shown above.

Mercado Colon is full of tapas restaurants, bars, and cafes, and on Sundays there are free concerts there.  I will definitely be returning there soon!

Once we're tired of exploring, we go to a tapas bar/cafe and spend the rest of the night sampling delicious tapas, drinking cafe con leche, and speaking English.  After a full day of Spanish everything, being able to talk English is such a relief!  Bianca and Shauna are two of the girls that I spend most of my free time with.

Shauna and I at a tapas bar

After hanging out, I return home for la cena (dinner), which is always around 9:30/10:00pm.  At first it was hard getting used to eating so late at night, but now I'm starting to like it.  There's more than enough time to explore Valencia when you don't have to be home until after 9:00!   

A Little Taste of Mexico in España

For the past week, a few of the other girls and I have been craving Mexican food really really bad.  After several days of searching, we finally tracked one down!  Ends up there's one right across the street from our school.  It always appears to be closed, and we figured it was out of business, but tonight it was packed!  A few other girls and I ordered a heaping plate of nachos, and while we were waiting for it to be prepared a mariachi band appeared out of no where, serenading all the customers in the street.

¡Qué divertido!  Hasta luego :]

Mis Clases

I finally have my class schedule all figured out and exactly the way I want it :]  Here's what my life will look like Monday-Thursday for the rest semester:

Monday & Wednesday:
9:00-10:30am          Grammar Review
12:20-1:50pm          Introduction to Spanish Art

Tuesday & Thursday:
10:40am-12:10pm    Cultural Conversations
3:40-5:10pm             Spanish Culture and Civilization

There are two Friday's per month that we will have classes on, and it rotates between Mon/Wed and Tue/Thur classes.  They make sure to give us some Fridays off so that we can travel on our own.  Grammar Review probably seems boring, but I think it's going to be very helpful in the long run because I will be using the things I learn in class every day out and about Valencia.  Then maybe all of the confusing Spanish grammar rules will finally stick in my head haha.  Intro to Spanish Art is my favorite class thus far.  We began with prehistoric art and will be going all the way up to today's modern artists like Dalí and Picasso.  The professor is really funny and makes an already interesting subject even more interesting.  The other day he took two chalk board erasers and used them to act out a scene from Greek mythology, haha.  I also really like my professor for Cultural Conversations.  He's good at making sure we understand everything he's telling us.  The class essentially teaches us how to converse like a native Spaniard, introducing us to the correct phrases to use in certain situations and drawing us away from using literal English to Spanish translations.  Spanish Culture and Civilization is similar to Cultural Convos except it encompasses all aspects of life in Spain, not just conversation.  The past two class periods have been a giant Q&A session, with us asking the professor anything and everything we're curious about when it comes to life in Spain.  The professor is the same one as art, and so I know this class is bound to be fun :]

I thought the Spanish only rule in the school was going to be a challenge to follow, but I haven't slipped-up yet!  I've gotten frustrated a few times when I can't quite get across what I'm trying to say.  It's hard when your known vocabulary is about the size of a pea.

I have a bunch of new photos that I will be sure to post tomorrow.  It's getting late here and I need some extra zzz's so that I can actually understand my professors tomorrow morning.  You wouldn't believe how much more you need to concentrate when your professors don't lecture in your native language!

Hasta luego!

Would you like some fish with those bones?

I just ate my worst  nightmare for lunch.... Adela basically cut a whole fish in half and served it to me, bones, scales, and all.  Sooo scary!  She told me that Laura, her daughter, just uses her hands to eat this kind of fish so that she can easily pick out the bones.  I told Adela about Mom's fish bone incident in Florida... hopefully that won't happen to me...

Mis Primeros Días en Valencia

It's hard to believe that almost a week has gone by since I left for Spain!  Each day seems to go by faster than the last, and I'm becoming more and more busy every day.  Last Friday was filled with orientation sessions.  In the morning our orientation was in English (thank goodness!) because the professors wanted to make sure we understood all of the details about living in Valencia.  We were given several maps of the city, a bus pass, and a folder full of information about Valencia.  In the afternoon we had the academic orientation where we received our class schedules and were introduced to all of the professors and advisors.  At the end of the day we had to sign a contract stating that we would only speak Spanish while in the school building.  I'll need to start thinking in Spanish while I'm in school too, otherwise I know I'll slip up and say something in English accidently.  Or maybe just put tape across my mouth....hmm haha.

After orientation I returned home for lunch with Adela, mi madre.  She makes the most delicious food!  We mostly have huge ensaladas (salads) for lunch with melon for dessert.  She made gazpacho, a cold tomato-based soup, for dinner last night, and I love it!  It was perfect because it's been soooo hot here lately.  That afternoon I met up with some of the other students at a cerveceria (bar) for sangría, a fruity wine drink that's very common in Spain.  I also purchased a cell phone, but am only going to use it to communicate with the other students in my program.  Unfortunately, it's wayyy to expensive to use it for international calls.

Saturday was out first excursión!  We went to Peñiscola, a small city about an hour and a half north of Valencia right on the Mediterranean.  It was beautiful!  We went to the beach for a couple hours right when we got there and then explored the city's castillo (castle).  Adela packed me un bocadillo (sandwich) and some chocolate cookies (which promptly melted in the sun, boo) for lunch at the beach.  Bocadillos are a staple food in Spain, and are basically a bagette with something, anything, inside.  Usually some kind of meat and cheese, but they can also have potatoes in them.  Here are some pictures from Peñiscola:

The streets of Peñiscola near the beach are full of tourist shops, ice cream stands, and cafes.  Up towards the older part of the city, near el castillo, the streets are very narrow, curvy, and made of either bricks or small stones.  At the end of the day I was exhausted from all the walking and from being in the sun.  For once, though, I didn't get sun burned!

Sunday was a free day and I decided to spend it at the open air market in the morning and at the beach in the afternoon.  I got lost trying to figure out the bus system, and never ended up making it to the market (oops haha) but explored La Plaza de la Reina and La Plaza de la Virgin instead because that's where my wrong bus took me.  These two plazas are the most well know in Valencia and are separated by a huge basque-style cathedral.  Absolutely breathtaking.  I sat at a cafe in La Plaza de la Virgin drinking a Fanta Limón for the rest of the morning just people watching.  A couple of the other students, Shauna and Bianca, met me in the plaza and we hopped on the (correct) bus to the beach.  I definitely see myself spending a lot of days at the beach.  The Meditteranean is GORGEOUS and soooo warm!  It's like bath water and because there's so much salt it's impossible to sink.  Almost every shop and office in Valencia is closed on Sundays and if the weather is nice, everyone goes to the beach.  As I discovered on Sunday, the beach culture in Spain is so much different than that of the US....I've never seen so many boobs in my whole life, haha!  Probably half of the women don't wear tops, all of the kids under 10 years old are naked, and the majority of the men wear Speedos.  Yikes!  So I'm going to apologize in advance for any future beach photos which may accidently contain naked people haha :p

Monday morning I had to take a profiency exam at school :s  The professors just wanted to know which students may need more help than others (aka me!) and which are basically fluent (hopefully me at the end of the semester!).  The vocabulary tripped my up pretty bad and of course they used a verb tense that I've always had trouble with.  Right after the exam a few of us went to El Corte Inglés and the mall.  El Corte is like a Macy's and was a perfect pick-me-up after the exam.  At my orientation at the end of spring semester at MSU, we were told not to bring shorts because no one in Spain wears them.  Wrong!  All the girls in Spain my age wear them.  So I bought a pair at the mall and immediately changed into them because it was almost 90 degrees out!  They'll be perfect when I'm running late and just need something quick to throw on.  After exploring the mall area I hopped on a bus to the historic center of Valencia near La Plaza de la Reina and met some of the professors and students for a walking tour.  It was amazing!  Here are some pictures from the tour:

The cathedral in La Plaza de la Reina.

The walkway that connects the Basillica to the Cathedral

All of the apartment buildings are tiny and squished like these in old town Valencia

Even the post office is gorgeous!

Plaze de Toros, where the bull fights take place in Valencia

Plaza Redonda, where the open air market is that I unsuccessfully tried to get to on Sunday.

Phew, this was a long entry!  I better get going and prepare for my classes tomorrow.  Hasta luego!

¡Bienvenida a España!

Three flights, one bus ride, and 48 hours later I have finally made it to Valencia, Spain!  These past few days have been filled with many emotions...I'm excited, nervous, stressed, amazed, and overwhelmed all at the same time.  It just seems so surreal that I'm living in Spain right now!

To my surprise, I was able to fit everything I wanted to bring with me in my one checked bag and two carry-ons.  Even though it was a pain to haul them all over JFK International Airport in New York and the Madrid airport, it was definitely worth it.   Little things that may seem unneccesary, like my MSU blanket, just make my new room seem more cozy and help subdue my homesickness.

All of my flights went really well, although I wish I would've been able to sleep better on my flight from JFK to Madrid.  I've decided that it's impossible to be comfortable in an airplane.  No matter what you wake up with some part of you cramping haha.  I got my first taste of what life would be like in Spain on my international flight.  All of the attendents spoke to us in Spanish and all of the announcements were made in Spanish before being translated in English.  Quite the reality check when you can only make out every 5th word they say.  Needless to say, my Spanish-English dictionary is going to become my new best friend.

After arriving in Madrid, we all hopped on a bus to Valencia.  I told myself that I would not fall asleep on the bus in order to try and overcome jet lag, but as soon as my butt hit the seat I was out cold.  I woke up every half hour or so to take in the scenery we were passing.  My favorite part was the huge fields of sunflowers :]  Here are some pictures that I took:

The bus from Madrid to Valencia

I've never seen so many sunflowers!  So pretty :]

The majority of the fields are filled with wind turbines!

I was beyond excitement when the bus finally pulled into Valencia.  I snapped a photo of the Torres de Quart, which are one of two twin-towered stone gates that are all that remain of the old city walls.  They date back to the 15th century, and they definitely made me feel like I wasn't in the US anymore.

The bus took us to the fútbol stadium in Valencia, where all of the host families were waiting for us.  We joked that we felt like puppies at the pound waiting for our owners :p  My host madre, Adela, picked me up in her baby small car and off we went to her apartment, where I'll be living for the next 4 months!  It's a good thing she drives a small car because I've never seen an undergrand parking garage as tiny as the one she parks in.  Adela is sooo sooo nice, and extremely patient with my lack of communication skills.  She talks nice and slow for me and repeats everythings at least twice.  Since I've met her, I feel like I've already learned so many new words and am a little bit more confident when I speak.  I was able to hold an entire conversation with her during dinner tonight!  She's had several study abroad students like myself live with her the past few years and says she loves it.  Her apartment is very nice and I love my room.

The location of Adela's apartment is perfect:  15 minutes from school, ATM right next door, bus stop right outside, and supermarket a block away.  The hardest part of the day was figuring out which shampoo and body wash to buy at the supermarket...I probably stared at the stand of soaps completely confused for a half hour haha.  

Despite all of the language confusion today, I do know that this is definitely going to be an eye-opening semester full of so many new experieneces.

Well it's getting late here and I have a full day of orientation tomorrow.  I hope my sleep pattern isn't too messed up and I'm able to get some much needed zzz's tonight!

Hasta luego!