La Noche en Blanco Futbol!!

Busy Weekend

Maloneys the exact size. Well I had a great weekend here in Madrid. Friday night I went out to Maloneys with Nerea and got home around 430am. This is normal here, slept until 2:30pm the next way. I felt really weird when I woke up. Saturday I ate some Telepizza (The Dominos of Spain) and then got ready for La Noche en Blanco which is a huge festival here in Madird. All of Central Madrid is ipen to the public, so people can visit all the museums and monuments for free. They light up the whole ctiy and it is absolutely beautiful. I walked about 30 mins into the city with my sister and a couple of her friends to meet up with some of the American Exchange students from Madrid. Turns out we had to wait a hour for them to meet up with us because there was so many people. My sister went back to Maloneys and three of here friends and I met up with the exchange students and showed them back to Maloneys. Once again I got home at 5am and slept till 3pm. Sunday was the big day! Futbol!!!!! At about 5:30 Nerea and I joined 5 other friends and drove the the 2nd biggest soccer stadium in the world Real Madrid! The first biggest is in Barcelona-which just so happens to be Real Madrid's number one rivalry.

Real Madrid played a team called Xerez-which is where my host Mom is from. Who by the way I just recently went to lunch with, she is a very sweet lady and I will be visiting her a lot this year. My first visit is in two weeks. But anyways back to the soccer scene, Real Madrid won 5-0 and scored 4 goals in the last 20 mins it was a great game. Just being in a stadium that holds 90,000 people cheering for soccer gave me goosebumps. It was remarkable. People really do scream GOALL!!!! haha Soccer is HUGE here. People eat, drink and breathe it. Its pretty much the only thing in the news. And I am slowly but surely becoming a huge fan as well.

Other than that school is my new interest. Well kinda. I take a public bus at 800 in the morning 7 stops and walk about 8 blocks to an instituto (6th grade-12 grade) called San Juan Bautista. I take six classes every day that consist of spanish grammar, english, philosophy, french 2, history of spain, geography and economics. Its crazy. As of now I don't understand much, so I usually just read or study spanish. I have made a couple girl friends but the guys just stare at me. Its pretty funny.

Some more funny things about this amazing place:

1.Everything in my school is green, every shade.

2. The girl's toilets in my school don't have toilet seats.

3. Students have to buy all their books for school here.

4. The littlest things make my day here, just like the other day I met Nerea's good friend, Borja's dog. His name is Torr and hes a huge white fluffy dog with diabetes. I absolutely loved hanging out with him.

5. School here is waaay harder than the US. Students don't really go to school to be social, they go to study.

I have no plans for the weekend, but I'm sure something will come up. I am looking forward to going to Xerez on Oct 1. Hope all is well.

Muchos Besos

above:lightswitch

< seafood lunch with family and friends

Some side notes:

1.We eat bread with every single meal here, and I am not talking a slice of bread, I am talking your very own small baguette. It is time to break out the running shoes!

2. Spain loves English, everywhere I go people just want to speak English to me, even if they have not taken one minute of English in their lives.

3. I thought people at home were bad drivers, no.... I have never seen people get sooooo close to other cars while going like 40mph in my life.

4. I have yet to find a bathroom that contains a trash can within it. It is the weirdest thing yet.

5. Coca-cola and Fanta belong is equivalent to water here. And they serve coke with lemon everywhere people go.

6. American music is their favorites and it is awesome to hear them sing when they don't speak English.

7. (Picture Above) All light switches look like this, and they are always outside of the bathroom instead of in it. Oh and they switch down for on and up for off.

I am attending a futbol game this weekend! Real madrid vs (I believe)

Xerez. I start school on Wednesday and I am going to see the Backstreet Boys live in Madrid in October. :P

Hope this made you laugh!

Un beso (One Kiss)

Devon

Another Couple Days in my World

Hmm...where do I start, well everything is going great I am slowly but surely starting to fit in in Spain. I went to an American bar with Nerea called Maloneys. It is the size of my bedroom and the capacity is 33 people, but they usually pack aout 150-200 people in there. The only beer they have is Budwieser and everyone here has a weird obsession for it, and Maloneys is one of the only bars in Madrid that has it on tap, I just so happened to run into about 35 american exchange students mostly studying through a program from UCSD. They also serve Sangria, which is a spanish red wine that at one time had fruit soaking in it, so it tastes a lot like fruit punch. It is delicious. I really enjoyed meeting all of Nerea's friends, they are all very welcoming and fun. One thing that drives me crazy here is the smoking. Every restaurant I have been to, I eat next to a family constantly smoking throughout their meal, but this is totally normal in Spain and in most of Europe. Thankfully my host dad, nor sister smoke at all.

Every day and night I eat lunch and dinner with Nerea at the coffee table in the living room (picture above) and watch ridiculous spanish television, but it is one of my favorite times because I get to talk to Nerea.

I finally went shopping! I now don't feel super out of place wearing american attire. I took the Metro with Nerea to central Madrid, Gran Via, and went toa couple stores such as Zara(which is pronounced thara in Spain, along with all Zs and Cs), Mango and H&M. It was great, but the exchange rate...not so much.

This past weekend I attended a Rotary orrientation at a college campus about 30 min north of central Madrid. I got to meet about 50 students that are all living in Spain for the year on Rotary Youth Exchange (A picture of a few above). The cafeteria food was absolutely horrible and all of us could not wait to come back home to the food of our host families. It was a great weekend and I now have some American friends in Spain.

Today is Sunday, and it just so happens to be a big family day in Spain. I went to lunch (at 2 o clock) with my host father's best friend's family. They have a daughter that is 14 and a son that is my age. We went out to a seafood restaurant in a very nice part of Madrid. It was absolutely amazing. I had the best Paella I have had yet. (For those of you who don't know what Paella is, it is a famous dish here is Spain and it is basically rice cooked in broth with seafood and saffron.) After lunch we went back to their home and the daughter, Patti, had me help her with her english homework and told me how much I look like Hannah Montana and how she really wants to go to California. I felt like a Goddess. We all played an old famous Spanish game that consists of an iron square board with a backboard and contains a bunch of round holes and a frog with it's mouth open. You take small metal washers and throw them at the board, if you get it in the mouth its 50 points, anywhere else it is 10. It was interesting, but fun.

my room> :)

Central Madrid shopping my favorite place so far :)

First Days in Spain

Hello everyone!,

I finally made it to Madrid yesterday at around 330pm after 14 hours of traveling. My host Dad (Jose or Pepe) and my host sister, Nerea, picked me up at the airport and took me back to my house. The very first thing I noticed in the airport was the smell of cigarette smoke and the fact that the airport is HUGE! I finally got my luggage jumped in my host father's Lexis to drive home. My house is on the third floor of a nice apartment building I guess I could say. Its two stories the bottom story has a small kitchen, living room and dinning room along with my host fathers bedroom. Up a tiny spiral staircase is my room and Nerea's room its more like a big loft. We have a t.v. and a couch with a spinning bike thankfully! And of course a bathroom. It is a very high end house, we have a maid named Pepi, she does not speak any English, but she speaks slow to help me and she is very sweet.

Last night I went out to tapas with my host family and they were absolutely delicious! Tapas are like appetizers or little dishes served on top of a small piece of bread. We ate at around 9 and got home at about 11, i was extremely tired so I slept for about 11 hours last night. This morning I woke up and ate breakfast, a pice of toast warm chocolate milk and orange juice, then Nerea and I took a bus into Central Madrid. It was by far the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The architecture here is amazing. There are tons of fountains and statues.And Nerea and I walked through the Central Park. We got a coca cola at the top of a nine story building called Corte de Ingles which is a lot like a Macys. After a ton of walking Nerea and i took the Metro home which was nuts, tons of people. Pepi made us some lunch that consisted of a Russian salad which is like hard boiled eggs, beets, tomatoes and such cut up with a sweet dressing its delicious and we also had these things that kinda look like pot stickers but they are filled with flavored meat, they were also delicious. After that it was time for SIESTA! We watched some ridiculous Spanish talk show and now Nerea is napping and I am emailing.

Now the big question, hows the language. Well its really hard, but my host Dad and Nerea have been speaking mainly english so i can start to feel comfortable. I try to speak back to Nerea in spanish and she helps me. My host Dad says no more English from here on out and I am glad because I really want to learn. Other than that, they just speak very fast and the accent is hard to understand, but I will eventually get it. It is only my second day here.

Tonight I am going out with Nerea to a bar called Maloneys to meet Nerea's friends that are all very excited to meet me. It should be interesting.

Last Day in the United States

Hello everyone!

My time has finally come. It has been so hard talking and hearing about how much fun all the other exchange students are having while waiting for all my travel plans to be finalized. But, the time is finally here. I will be flying out of Sacramento airport tomorrow (Sept 7, 2009) at 12:05pm! I will then connect through Minneapolis to Amsterdam, then Amsterdam to Madrid.

I look forward to the most amazing year of my life so far and couldn't be more fortunate for Rotary and my whole family getting me here.

Talk to you Soon!

Devon