Alcalá de Henares

Alcalá de Henares

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

And so the homework begins...

Yup that's right.  Homework has begun, which means blogging may become a little limited due to the fact that there's only 24 hours in a day.  But I walked to school again today by myself, and I've come to realize what a luxury it is to 1. Own a car and 2. Go to a school with a small campus (Walking to the Science Center always seemed so long but now I can only wish that my school was that close).  But I enjoy watching the sun come up over the old buildings of Alcalá and watching the people hustling around the streets getting ready for the day, so I guess there's trade-offs to the long, long walk.  

I had two classes today, "Civilization and Spanish Culture" and also "Geography and History of Spain."  The classes are taught by the same professor, so I get to see Professor Carlos de la Hoz for three hours a day on Mondays and Wednesdays.  Wonderful.  My Civ. class was first and I was a little confused because he took out a big map of Spain and began explaining geography?  I thought he was teaching the wrong lecture to my Civ. class.  But then when I got to the Geography class he did the exact same lecture!  So what I didn't get the first time, I got the second time.  I wouldn't mind if his classes were like this every time because then I will for sure be able to understand the material by the second time around! 

I was once again reminded today that I'm not in the United States.  I had to go to the "Carefuer?" to buy some school supplies because I heard that this was the place to go.  So off I went, by myself, because my friends decided to take a siesta instead.  It was easy enough to find and I grabbed myself a cart (which actually consists of pulling around a basket), and started looking at the school supplies.  Number one requirement for my notebooks was that they must have horizontal lines, like normal notebooks do.  It seems like all notebooks here are graph paper instead of paper with lines.  So I scavenged through all of the notebooks and finally found four that would suffice.  I saw cuter notebooks made by Papyrus but they cost so much more and were made of graph paper.  I must say I'm kind of a snob when I pick out school supplies and I was not thrilled with my choices.  I got the ugliest notebooks, the cheapest pens because the brand that I use only had blue pens, chunky highlighters (I like the thinner ones), and thumb tacks to hang up pictures on my cork board finally.  Needless to say, I was not thrilled with the purchases but they needed to be made so I settled with the less than pristine supplies.  On my way out I looked at the curling irons and found something that had like 8 different functions, curling iron, straightener, crimper, and more other options that I probably wouldn't use.  But I decided not to spend my precious money on that, and my hair will thank me because it only gets blow dried here because I don't have access to other hair appliances.  Maybe when my hair grows out a little longer I will cave in and get the curling iron...

But in the meantime, I think I'm going back to Madrid for the weekend with friends so I'm excited about that.  My weekend starts Thursdays at 2 because I don't have classes on Friday, a first in my life.  But it's been a long week of figuring out classes and getting adjusted to school again, only this time everything is in Spanish.  But life continues to surprise me over here and I'm loving learning everything I can about Spanish culture.  Well it's time for bed and since I didn't have a siesta today, I should have no problems falling asleep :)

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