Un muy buen día

(The Palace Hotel in Madrid, Spain)

I just looked at how long the last post was, and was shocked. But since I always write too much and I know you all are clinging to my every word, I figure, why break the habit now?

Today I got to sleep in a bit, because I didn't have to be to Carlos III until 1 pm.  I went with my friend Amanda, who lives in the same building as I.  It took us 1.25 hours to get there today, so I'm going to have quite the commute to school.  

We took a tour of the school led by two Carlos III students - Guillermo and Fernando.  The school is really nice and bigger than I expected.  It's only 20 years old, so it's pretty modern and up-to-date.  It's right in the town of Getafe - which has lots of restaurants and stores that will be helpful in avoiding homework.  The library was the most impressive part. In the main section, all the bookcases and desks are circular, which is really cool - I'll have to get you a picture of that.  

Then I sat through several hours of professors presenting their classes, in Spanish, of course.  My problem (or one of them) is that I find Spanish to be a very soothing language, and I seem to get very drowsy listening to lectures in Spanish - like I said, it's a problem.  But towards the end of today, I seemed to be picking up a little bit more of the presentations, so I think (well, hope) that everything will be okay, language-wise.  Classes start on Monday and we have to definitely register by the Monday after.  I have a meeting with the advisor tomorrow to go over classes and get my schedule worked out.  Some of the classes depend on a language proficiency test that we all had to take this past week. There were oral, writing, and grammar sections (I'm sure I did wonderfully on all of them. . .), but we don't find out what level we are until Monday - so we can't know all of our classes yet.  I just hope you can't score low enough to get kicked out. . .

I came back home after all the presentations, but as Elisha (a friend) and I were walking to the train, Guillermo appears and is going in the same direction.  We all took the train together and I asked him a few questions as an interview for my article.  It was an interesting conversation - he was amazed that Americans usually only have one lock on their doors. Meanwhile, at Julia's, I have four keys - one which is so big that I it doesn't even fit in my wristlet bag.  I'm going to have some muscles after lugging that thing around for four months!  But back to Guillermo.  He is muy guapo and is very nice, too.  You know the Spanish custom of kissing everyone on the cheeks twice? I could get used to that.