I am a terrible blogger.

Or maybe it's just that I watch shows I Tivo or Facebook aimlessly instead of updating my blog.

Anyway. So I got through 4 midterms and 4 papers...very exciting (not). Dad and I had a wonderful weekend in Salamanca, and a day in Burgos. I ordered lots of plain food for him and he said "No hablo espanol" a lot. :)

I've also been traveling a lot around Spain - my two friends, Maddie and Courtney, and I went to Valencia a few weeks ago and to Santiago de Compostela this past weekend. The weekend after this one, we're probably heading to Cordoba as well, and then I'm going to Barcelona (and a Barca football game!) with Maddie and our friend Jillian my last weekend in Spain. This weekend I'm heading to Madrid to meet up with Emily, who's flying in from Scotland!! :) Very exciting.

Other than that, hmm. I've had a few intercambios, where I get together with Spanish students studying English so they can practice their English and I can work on my Spanish. I think that my conversation skills are definitely improving, even though they definitely improved at a slower rate than my comprehension haha. But it's not nearly as much of an effort to string together a sentence and conjugate verbs anymore (even though half the time I'm probably still doing it wrong).

Salamanca's already all decorated for Christmas - they don't have Thanksgiving here so as soon as Halloween was over, bam! There's garland hanging across the streets, and all the shop windows have Christmas displays. And I thought the U.S. started early, jeez. They also are way into roasted chestnuts here, so every time I walk down a street at night, I smell them and think of NYC streets at Christmas (okay, so that usually actually makes me more homesick, but it's still a nice smell, objectively). I'm kind of sad I'm going to miss Thanksgiving at home, but IES is giving us a big Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant here, and all our professors and everything are coming, so that'll be nice. They also gave us a dinner a couple of weeks ago where we got to help make the food - the chef (who's actually pretty renowned) let us make our own pan con tomate appetizer, served us his paella valenciana, and then let us fire our own creme brulee (although it's called crema catalana here). That was pretty awesome (and delicious).

Also I am addicted to a) tortilla de patata and b) chocolate con churros. I'd better figure out how to make / procure these so that when I have cravings in the States (when, not if, haha) I'll be able to satisfy them. I do enjoy the Spanish cuisine, haha.

Anyway. I've got class soon, so I've gotta go. Hopefully there's people who haven't given up on me and still check this, haha. Miss you and love you. :)

Just a PSA.

I, Tara Powers, ate octopus for lunch this afternoon.

Case of the Mondays.

Back in Salamanca to start another week. My 9 am classes are at their normal times this week, not like last week when they were moved to afternoon and evening, so I actually had to wake up early again (yuck). I'm sitting in Fonseca, one of the class buildings, using the wireless even though I don't have class again till 1- I didn't feel like walking all the way home and then potentially not being able to get online. (So I'm technologically dependent and lazy - a lovely combination).

I spent the weekend with a big group of IES students in San Sebastian, which is a town on the northern coast of Spain. We left Friday morning and took a 6-hour train ride through the mountains into Pais Vasco (another region of Spain; Salamanca is in Castilla y Leon). When we got there, the three other people I was rooming with and I had to wait outside our hostel for 45 minutes until the owner came to let us in - he owns two hostels so he'd been at the other one. That wasn't too fun, but we chatted with the other college students also stranded on the front steps. When we finally got let in, we headed down to the beach to watch the sunset and wade a little bit, then got dinner in an Italian (!) restaurant near our hostel. I actually had the first decent pizza there that I've had in my entire time in Spain, which was exciting (they actually used sauce, unlike the poor excuses for pizza I've had elsewhere), and the pasta wasn't half bad either.

We woke up the next morning and spent the entire day on the beach, which was fantastic. The coast was beautiful, and the waves were awesome. One of the guys here rented a surfboard and was so excited about the fact that he could surf better waves here than in the U.S. I did a lot of sunning, some swimming, and plenty of eating tortilla de patata on baguettes - que rica! And I got some lovely color, which I always enjoy (see: Bermuda trip). We all had dinner at an awesome restaurant right on the water which was relatively cheap (San Sebastian's a big tourist town, so that's a very good thing) and had fantastic cheeseburgers, believe it or not. Aaand also, they are very generous with their gelato in San Sebastian - a pequeno was HUGE! They also had about 50 different flavors, which was very exciting, and of course I took full advantage of. Breakfast was yummy both mornings too - a chocolate-filled croissant at the panaderia right down the street from our hostel.

Speaking of hostels, because I know Mom is probably thinking about this - it was really nice, not sketchy at all. The four of us had our own room, with a lock on the door, and no other roommates so we didn't have to worry too much about leaving our stuff there. I mean, obviously we still locked the door and I took my important stuff with me, but it wasn't like there were strangers sleeping in the next beds. They gave us sheets, and there were two bathrooms that all of the hostel guests shared - but nice ones, tiled, with shower stalls and everything, not like community bathrooms at school. So yes, good hostel experience.

Anyway, Saturday night I also walked down to the old Gothic cathedral with two of the other girls to take some pictures, and Sunday morning I woke up and climbed one of the hills in the city to get to the amazing lookout points and see the castle ruins at the top. Touristy stuff, but well worth it - wait until you see the pictures! Then we boarded the train for our 6-hour ride back home, which was not nearly as enjoyable as the way there. I bought the tickets for the four of us who were in the hostel, and I bought three at one time and one at another. I accidentally gave myself the odd ticket, so on the way home my ticket was for a totally different car of the train. The conductor wasn't nearly as laid-back as the one on the way out, who let me move up from the back of the same car to sit near everybody else. So one of the other guys and I were relegated to a separate train car, and my seatmate talked on her cell phone VERY loudly for the first hour and a half of the journey back, prime napping time. Sigh.

All in all, a great weekend. So now 4 days of classes, then an IES trip to Sevilla and Granada this weekend! That one should be fantastic too, if a lot of time on the bus. But now, since the battery life on my laptop sucks, I have to find an outlet before it dies. And I have to find some food before my 1 pm class, because I cannot go from 8 am to 2:30 pm without any snacking. Miss you and love you all. :)

Pues...las tiendas en Espana estan cerradas los domingos.

For the non-Spanish speakers among us, that means that basically everything in Spain (or Salamanca, anyway) is closed on Sundays, except for a few of the smaller cafes and candy stores here and there. So even though this is the first day where I've honestly had nothing to do (I decided to skip the flea market and catch up on my sleep, since I think it happens every Sunday and I have a huuuuge sleep debt I'm still paying off), I can't actually do anything, because there's nowhere I can go. Ahh, the irony.

So anyway. Yesterday was quite fun. We got a bus to the mall (centro comercial!) for an all-you-can-eat buffet lunch - deliciousss. I, for one, was very excited to have a slightly wider array of food choices. There was even pizza! Admittedly nowhere near as good as pizza in the U.S., but it had sauce, and cheese, and tomatoes, and a crust. Good enough for me! And there was frozen yogurt for dessert!! I need to stop getting so enthusiastic about food, haha. Afterwards we shopped around the mall for a little while (stupid exchange rate) and then saw a movie - Viaje al Centro de la Tierra (that would be Journey to the Center of the Earth, starring the esteemed Brendan Fraser - true cinematic gold, I assure you). It was a good time, though, and the McFlurry has returned to my life. Alas, not the Flake McFlurry a la Spranceland '06, but they have an Oreo one with fudge here that is also quite delicious.

Whitney and I met some friends for dinner after the mall at a bar/cafe/pub place called Erasmus. It was nice to have a meal out a restaurant - it feels like so long since I've done things like that, or like riding in a car, even though it's only been a week. After dinner we hung out in a little cafe we found until everyone else came out, since we didn't feel like going home and coming all the way back.

Salamanca is crazy at night right now because this is festival week, so there are hundreds (maybe thousands? I'm bad with numbers) of people in the streets starting at 8ish and going until at least 3 (later than that, I have no authoritative evidence, haha - I'm not a true salamantina who stays out till 7). The little casetas, which I think I mentioned before, are hugely popular. They set up high tables all around where people can bring their drinks and little plates of tapas, and everybody kind of just mills around socializing and enjoying the music. I think there are also going to be bullfights in the Plaza de Toros, so hopefully I get to go see one of those this week! I have to find out what time they are, plus I couldn't figure out whether Mary told me they cost a lot of money, or nothing (you would think that would be semi-obvious, no? Hah) so we'll see.

Lunch today was seafood paella - honestly one of the most delicious things I've ever had. We also had a pork chop, but I was still too happy about the paella to care haha. And then a chocolate pudding, yum. (By the way, sorry if this totally reads as a daily catalog of my meals. However, I enjoy food.) We watched the news with lunch today too, instead of what we usually watch - either Los Simpsons (haha) or a really bad Spanish reality dating show. So that was pretty cool.

I'm in the midst of uploading some photos from the past week to Flickr.com, so you'll be able to view them here: . Right now I'm having a little trouble uploading in bulk, but I'm sure I'll figure it out soon.

Tomorrow we're taking a day trip to Segovia, which is supposed to be a fantastic city. So hopefully I will have lots of pictures to show from that trip! Then the rest of the week will just be more Spanish classes (we have our oral exam to place us in our classes for the semester on Thursday, yikes), salsa and flamenco classes two nights this week (!), and actually registering for classes. Hopefully I will find a laundromat soon, because I'm running out of clothes (yeah, and they told me, "No one ever complains that they didn't have enough clothing" in the stupid guidebook. Lies!)...

A quick entry...

So the only reason I have time to make this entry is because I screwed up a meeting I had with one of the directors to talk about my classes - good job, Tara. Hahah, in my defense, she only sent it to me this morning while I was in class and wanted me to come in during our siesta time, so she was really banking on me getting the email (and what if I didn't have wifi?). And then I was back here working on HW and forgot that the 15 minute walk should start at 3:15 to get there by 3:30...I just blanked out. So I called her and explained that I didn't have time to get to the center before our next activity, and she just scheduled me in tomorrow (and that entire conversation was in Spanish, mind you, so go me).

Anyway, things are going pretty well (I almost typed "mas o menos bien," haha). We went out a little bit on Tuesday night, which was fun. And our "intensive" Spanish classes have started, so for four hours a day I am in class just working on language. I'm in Group B, which isn't the crazy smart group with two native speakers but also isn't the remedial one, so that's perfect.

I've had gelato twice here so far - delicious places to get it in the Plaza Mayor. I'm also in love with Carrefour, which is basically a Spanish-style Wal-mart. That's where I've been buying all my snacks, since breakfast is way early, lunch isn't till like 2:30, and dinner is at 9:30 or 10. Crazy!!

Anyway, now I've got to go...we're having a couple of talks about Spanish student life and voting from abroad, then a walking tour of the university. I think a bunch of us are going to go and see the residencias tonight, where the IES kids who aren't doing homestays are living in the dorms. Miss and love everyone - email me / leave comments and say hi. :)