Daily Life

A typical school day starts with me waking up at 6:50am to my Spanish talking alarm clock, groaning, and then forcing myself out of bed. After a shower and breakfast I'm off to school. I take the train about 2km to Villalba where I walk another 1.5 km or so to school. The classes start at 8:30 and end at 2:00 except for Wednesdays when we end at 2:50; we also have a 30 minute break at 11:00. My class schedule changes day to day. I have history, language, biology, chemistry, psychology, philosophy, English (yes!!!), and math. All of these with the exception of one (can you guess?) are pretty difficult. All of my male teachers are quite hard to understand; my biology teacher yells (along with my language teacher), and my philosophy and history teachers are just plain hard to understand. Also, I found out that the bathrooms on the right are for the guys and the ones on the left are for the girls, but nobody seems to care, guys and girls smoke in both. One weird thing is that all of the bathrooms at school and at the train station don't have toilet seats or toilet paper?!?

After school I go home and eat a massive lunch, take a nap, study, go on a walk, excercise, watch Spanish TV, look up Spanish words, explore, eat some more, read, etc. Then it's another fairly similar day.

I'm starting to go to this church called Amistad Cristiana which is the only church in Madrid that meets in a nightclub (but in the morning). There is also a youth (17-25 year olds) group night on Tuesdays. As far as making friends, things are going as well as can be expected. I'm planning on joining a hiking/camping/mountain climbing club at school, getting a pass to the local pool so I can swim with a neighbor who is my age, and maybe taking a break dancing class in Madrid.

The food here is different. There's some good and some bad. We eat a lot of olive oil, bread, and vinegar. They put olive oil in everything, even the salads, and I don't mean a little sprinkling of oil, they actually pour it on. However, I like almost all of the stuff I've been eating.

One little note to those who know exchange students maybe from school, church, neighbors, etc: Be nice to them! If you don't....