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. :)

Ah, an Internet cafe.

It had to happen sometime...here I am in an Internet cafe in the train station in Salamanca. My wireless is being irritating again at home (the router needs to be reset but it´s in my host brother´s room) so I took a field trip. But when I asked how much it cost to use the Internet here, I didn´t realize that the girl would assume I meant one of their computers, not the wifi. So I would up paying 1.50 euro to use a computer for half an hour when I have my laptop in my backpack. Stuuuupid. Oh well.

Anyway. This weekend has been largely uneventful. I didn´t travel anywhere, so I´ve just been trying to find ways to entertain myself in Salamanca. Not so easy. Friday I still felt really sick, so I didn´t do much during the day, but I went out to dinner with my friend Maddie that night. We found this really amazing Italian place near one of our class buildings, and had farfalle with four-cheese sauce...delicious. Aaand they had ice cream filled crepes for dessert, yum. :)

The next day I did some homework in the morning, then went on a horseback riding excursion with IES in the afternoon. They bussed us to a ranch about 40 minutes outside the city. I originally wasn´t going to ride, but then I decided I didn´t want to miss out on the opportunity to say that I went horseback riding through the Spanish countryside, even though I´ve only been riding once before and I´m not a huge fan of the horses, haha. It ended up being not so bad, except for the fact that my horse just wanted to eat the ENTIRE time, and kept veering off to the side of the trail to munch on the weeds, no matter how many times I "Vamos"d. Plus I´m really sore today, haha, but it was a good time anyway.

Then last night I went and saw Vicky Cristina Barcelona with Maddie and another girl from IES, Kat. It was really good (if a little strange, maybe that´s a Woody Allen thing), and I was proud that I understood almost everything even though it was all in Spanish. So that was a good time! I also Skyped with the lovely ladies of Gallen 103, which was fantastic, and found out that I´m not going to have to miss out on seeing Michelle for a year after all! Yay. :)

And now my money is about to run out, so I have to go. I´m meeting Katie for tea in about an hour, so that´ll be nice, and I´ll probably try to get some homework done tonight. Then back to class tomorrow! Hope all is well, miss and love you. :)

Tengo hambreeee.

So this week has been pretty uneventful - classes and the like. I started my class at the University (the literature one), and I love it. The class is about half and half, Spanish students and international students, and there are people from literally all over the world - Luxembourg, Germany, the Czech Republic, England, France, China, Japan, Panama, Guatemala...crazy. My professor's so nice, and while she doesn't dumb the class down for the international kids (like a lot of the IES classes do), she also makes sure that we're keeping up. Plus one of the girls from IES is in the class with me (my ice cream buddy, haha), which is really nice.

This weekend we're taking an excursion with IES to Seville and Granada, in the south of Spain. We're leaving at a godawful hour - 7 am on Friday morning - and it's going to be something like a 6 or 7 hour bus ride, but I've heard those two cities are fantastic. Plus we're going to a flamenco show while we're in Granada, and having a couple of really nice lunches at the hotels where we're staying. So I'll probably have a billion more pictures when I get back, since I'm addicted to photography and all. Get excited.

That's pretty much it for now...short entry for once, haha. Hopefully we will have dinner soon - I'm still not used to this whole dinner at 10 pm thing!

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. :)