February 8

I was happy to wake up and see the Saints had gone on to win. I hurried down to breakfast, grabbed a few breakfast snacks and was out the door on the way to Negocios class.

We talked about the format of a professional letter, how to write addresses when sending mail and discussed subjects when writing emails. This class has been really helpful. We sit in a huge circle, so it’s pretty easy for everyone to practice pretty actively.

In my hour and a half break between classes, I worked on our homework assigned from the class before (it was just some reading) and hung out in the cafeteria. I had an orange and noticed that there were a lot more people in the cafeteria than ever and thought we must be because regular class schedule was starting back up. I ordered a new type of espresso that is so far my favorite. Its called cortada which is a shot of espresso with only a splash of milk. It is awesome.

In Linguistics, I learned something completely new that I wish I had known before I came to Spain. “Cuanto Cuesta?” Is a response I was always taught was used to ask for how much something costs. Our teacher told us that actually over here they use, “Cuanto Vale?” is the more preferred expression over here. We went over a very useful ser/estar practice sheet that cleared a lot of things up.

I walked back and caught the tail end of lunch. We had a plate of meatball type things with fries on the side we had a huge hunk of lasagna. My mouth was definitely watering; I used my standard issue piece of bread and made the best meatball sandwich with a lasagna filler I have had in a long time.

I went back to my room after lunch and took a quick hour nap that was perfect. I went with a few people and got another cup of coffee. We tried out a new bar that was really cool. The coolest part I remember was there was a guy giving a student English tutoring. It was really interesting to see what they were talking about and how he taught her. It kind of reassured me a little bit.

We decided during coffee that we were going to have a game night and wanted to play Monopoly. We went to Corte Ingles had to go up every floor and over to the second building before we found it. Monopoly was ridiculously expensive; it was something like 80 euros, which is over $100 U.S. dollars. We saw Manzanas con Manzanas (Apples to Apples) for 44 euros and decided we were going to come back after we had some more people to throw in on it.

We decided a puzzle would suit us well and found a dinosaur print for 14 euros. We hurried back in time to have our meeting about weekly events. The meeting got out at 8:00 and I went right to dinner. There was some fried pork that I proceeded to make another sandwich out of it. I topped it off with a rare but much needed piece of cheese that Nikki had won from the scavenger hunt that we did one of our first days here.

After dinner, we worked on the Puzzle for a while but had to give up because it is so much. It was fun though; there were a lot of people coming in and out helping us. I got in bed pretty early and fell right asleep.