Spain!

Whew, so I'm officially in Spain! It's 5:30am local time and I just woke up (unintentionally, of course). I went to bed very early at 9pm because of the jet lag and I think I'm still getting used to everything in that regard. As such, I have a couple of hours before breakfast and heading off to Toledo with my class.

Here's the official rundown of the past, what, thirty hours (only thirty!?). First, I went to DFW with my Dad and got through the ticket counter and security fairly easy. One lady at the ticket counter questioned me about my group travel, but no issues. Once on the inside, I couldn't find a currency exchange, so I just plopped down and started reading Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. It takes place in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. So far, it's interesting. We got on the plane, and I got the very back of the bus, window seat, next to several fellow students. Out of the 40 people going to Spain from my school, 36 are girls And out of all that, I was the only guy on the group flight! Anyways, our flight was good, all 10 hours of it. Eck. We talked for an hour and a half, ate a pretty uneventful dinner, fell asleep during Nights of Rodanthe, woke up during Flawless and pretty much never slept after that. I passed some of the time teaching my new friend Lindsey how to play gin with cards. Also, we had fun joking with Mercedes that she is now la madre for taking care of the toddlers sitting next to her! Breakfast on the plane was quite forgetable, some sort of stewed collard green, an omelet-like contraption, hash browns, good fruit, roll, and OJ.

So we arrive in Frankfurt, everyone is extremely tired and we all suddenly come to the realization that NONE of us speak ANY german! Oops! Luckily everyone waited for everyone else as we got our passports checked, went through security again, etc. You know those groups of clueless tourists that you either get exasperated with or make fun of in the airports? Yeah, we were that group! I think my time in Frankfurt was more of a severe shock than arriving in Madrid. See, at least in Spain we are learning the language and don't feel like complete idiots. I have never felt so inadequate as when we ran around the Frankfurt airport.

Now, the flight from Frankfurt. Let's just say the flight attendant seemed to like me. Slight awk-ward. I'll chalk it up to the fact that all 25 of the rest of the people from school were zombies and I was still chatty and positive. The steward was really nice to me, so that works. He gave me two lunches (which were better than breakfast!) and a schokolade bar of his own. Also, it was really weird trying to communicate with him because he of course spoke german, but he was also fluent in English and Spanish. So I speak English, but also find myself thinking in Spanish because a lot of the other passengers were Spanish. I realized how behind us Americans are, because in the rest of the world it's entirely normal to speak two languages. However, our society is kind of ridiculous sometimes in insisting on English all the time. I think we may be doing our children a detriment by not teaching them another language early on. But I digress.

We arrive in Madrid and I feel much better than in Frankfurt, because I can get by pretty well here. Luckily, everyone got their baggage, but the really strange part is that we never had to go through customs. Nothing. I guess they stamped my passport when I entered the EU in Frankfurt and that was good enough? Whatever.

We ended up on tour buses (which I got yelled at by the bus driver for putting my feet on the seat?). Driving through Madrid was a lot of fun. It reminds me of New York, but with better architecture. Also, there are ads for things like Australia and other American/Western things, so at the same time it feels like East/South Dallas a bit too with billboards in Spanish for American goods. Once we got to the Fundacion , my familia, Concha and her son Carlos picked me up and we were off in a taxi to their apartamento. In the taxi ride was the first culture shock for me. Something clicked and I thought to myself, "oh God, I'm in a taxi with everyone and the radio jabbering in Spanish. I'm off to live with a family I have never met for the next four months." And that was it, no worries since.