After school yesterday I went to the colegio (elementary school) where I am going to be volunteering, helping 8, 9, and 10 year olds learn English. It was one of the first things here that I have seen and thought, "of course, this is for me, I am excited about this!" We saw the classrooms and students and met some of the teachers... really nice. We did see the preschool rooms and I thought about all of the "maestras" in my family... I don´t know the schedule yet but I´ll be helping there once or twice a week I think. I´m really excited, it seems really fun and it will be a good thing to add to my schedule and give me stuff to do. I feel like something has clicked, language-wise. I am still struggling and I know I make a lot of mistakes but it seems like I am remembering vocabulary all of a sudden and I am able to understand basically everything that is said to me, and I feel confident that I can respond the way I want to and communication can happen. It is the beginning but finally I can see how this language thing is going to work. Gracias Dios. Friday friday.... weekend be good to me. Gonna give the nightlife another try I think.

This morning on the way to school I had a conversation with Paz. A real conversation, where she would say something and I would say something. This is a very good thing. We were talking about Ben and about long distance relationships-- she didn´t realize that I went to school so far away from home and didn´t live at home every weekend. In Spain people generally live with their parents until they are about 30, and usually don´t work at all while they are in school. I´m glad we had this conversation because I think I am getting depressed from lack of sound. There are plenty of sounds here, but many of them I can´t understand, like the TV in the background or the radio or people talking on the bus. I have to work really hard to listen to them so usually I tune them out. The other sounds that I can easily understand are bus noises and cars and American 80´s music pumping from car stereos outside my apartment. I am realizing that I haven´t seen a piano since I´ve been here and I certainly haven´t heard Jesse messing around with different chord progressions and old/new songs. I haven´t heard any records or organs or choirs. I haven´t been singing very much or even listening to my music because there is something weird about speaking/listening to English while I am in Spain, even when I´m by myself.... I don´t really understand why. (Thank goodness choir starts on Monday-- I´m really hoping for good things.) I speak English with people at school and when I´m out with my friends but I feel like I can´t really have conversations with them the way I can with Janna or Mom or Ben. I am much more silent here than I have ever been because it´s a lot of work to just comment on things if I want to say something more than "I like that" or "that´s incredible." Anyway, we had this conversation. And it was really great. I think it was spurred by the caffienated (HOORAY) coffee I had this morning. Hey, it wasn´t Starbucks coffee either, the girl couldn´t get her employee discount so I never got any beans from there. Paz found some leaded coffee in the back of the cupboard. I asked Paz if my accent was very bad-- I know my words aren´t perfect but I don´t want to have an ugly accent. She told me that my accent was sweet, because my voice is sweet. She agreed that many Americans have an accent that sounds like (and she made this noise, imagine an old engine trying to start) "raorrrraaaorrrrrraaaoorrrraaaorrr" but that mine isn´t like that, es dulce. They have an interesting concept of Americans.... one guy I talked to thought that we all carried guns around in holsters in the street, frequently witnessed speeding car chases, and usually parked our cars and walked away leaving them open. We are either easy going chill people or the ultimate patriots or selfish and self-important. As my teacher said, spaniards get their ideas about Americans from two places: the movies and George Bush. Another really interesting thing about Spain is the gory, gory news. I can´t believe the things they show on TV-- footage I´d never seen of September 11th with people falling and crashing from the towers. Dead bodies in the streets. Bloody messes. Two days ago there was a terrorist bomb in País Vasco and three policemen were severely wounded and one killed-- they showed two red indistinguishable pieces of him lying in the grass on the news. America gets the prize for violent fiction, but I can´t believe the real life things that I see on the television in Spain.

Thought I would give this page a little bit of a new style. It was easy because I don´t know HTML and so I just click on the pre-designed template that I want. Woohoo! I went to Lucentum last night, which is an archeological museum on the site of a dig. It is this ancient Roman city where you can walk the streets and see the foundations of the different buildings and rooms, and see firsthand the places where the wheels from the horsecarts wore down the stone. Pretty amazing.... pretty damn old. I figured out how to turn on the TV with the remote control. To turn it off, you press the power button. Obviously. To turn it on, you have to press the number of the channel you want to start with. When I have wanted to watch TV up until this point, I have been sitting on the couch, repeatedly pushing the power button in vain, and then getting up to push the button on the actual TV, which you have to push twice, once to shut off all the power (it´s kind of in remote-only mode) and once to turn it on. It took me all this time to ask somebody how to use the TV. How lame is that?

I ran out of toothpaste. Sadly, you can´t buy Tom´s of Maine in España, so I had to venture out to the Mercado and see what I could find. The kind I got is clear and it has little blue "Micropartículas" in it. The micropartículas seem to be the big selling point since the word is all over the box, but nowhere does it explain what the microparticles are or what they do. But hey, my teeth feel clean.

Madrid is an enormous city. We left on Friday after classes (didn´t get a chance to write then: thursday night we bought our tickets to Italy!!!! so exciting.) and rode a bus for 5 hours or so to our hotel in Madrid. It was a nice big fancy hotel and the views from out of our little balconies were impressive. Everyone said Madrid was very similar to New York. I wouldn´t know because I haven´t been there, but it had the busyness and the crowds and variations of people and stuff going on and noise and smells and some of the buildings that i would imagine are in New York. We had all of Friday night free, so I got some dinner (a giant mess of cholesterol burger with cheese, bacon, a fried egg, mayonnaise, lettuce and tomato-- probably the most amazing burger I ever had. came with a big mug o´ beer too) and helado (spanish ice cream. very good.) Afterwards we walked around a little... I had kind of gotten separated from my friends and so I ended up in this party in someone´s hotel room that wasn´t very fun. It seemed dumb to be partying in a hotel room that could have been anywhere... A lot of them went out to bars and clubs later on, such as the 14 story club Carnival, but I was not up for it and had an early night instead. In the morning the bus was broken so after we waited for an hour outside the hotel, we walked to some places that weren´t originally on our itinerary. This unfortunately involved a lot more waiting, and was frustrating. It was a grey cold rainy day and none of us were prepared for it either, being used to Alicante´s perpetual vacation temperatures. It´s kind of like Florida. But once we got inside the places things were better. First we went to this nunnery that has been active since the 15th or 16th century that is also an art museum. I liked it a lot, very quiet and peaceful in the midst of the crazy city... it was interesting to think about the nuns who live there in a middle-ages lifestyle. Afterwards we went to the palace. AMAZING. I took far too many pictures that will express far too little about the impossibility of this place. So gorgeous, every room intricate and beautiful and dripping with chandeliers and carvings and statues and decadence. One room was totally covered in porcealin. Every ceiling had these fancy paintings of angels and the heavens... I was reminded of the ballroom from Beauty and the Beast. Pretty much every room was a smaller version of that ballroom. We visited the senate and had a little tour of the building before breaking for lunch. I ate with Amy and Phil (who both were backpacking around Europe this summer seperately from each other but in all the same places-- very cool people) at a little place called Café Jamaica or something like that. We had some delicious pasta meals- I had some kind of mushroom linguini deal. At first I thought they had real coffee there, so I ordered the Guatemalan blend, but it turned out to be just Guatemalan espresso.... There is no such thing as a cup of coffee here. It´s all espresso or "café con leche" (coffee with milk) or some other blend, but no plain coffee. And a 20 oz cup is unheard of, except at the Starbucks in Madrid (currently the only one in Spain) where several people from our group rushed into to satisfy their cravings. I didn´t go inside but I did ask a friend who worked at a Starbucks in the states to see if she could get her discount and pick me up some beans.... It was my first time patronizing that corporation in years, but I tell you, the decaf beans we have at my house are just not cutting it in the morning and I´m sick of buying the 0.35€ espresso cups from the vending machines at school at 10 o´clock every day. Tangent, sorry. After lunch we visited La Prada and another more modern art museum that I can´t remember the name of.... Saw lots of fancy things, Goyas and Picassos and Dalis. Overwhelming... I wished I knew more about art. I was all museumed out. So I totally changed gears and fed my sports craving with a Real Madrid futbol game. A big group of us went, one girl organized it, and I hemmed and hawed about going because soccer is not my favorite thing, but I decided that if I was going to see a soccer game it was going to be there. As one guy put it, if you didn´t like football but had tickets to the superbowl, wouldn´t you go? I made the right decision. It was AWESOME. We were way up at the top of the stadium and it was crazy noisy and the excitement was so contagious. Those guys are amazing, their skill is incredible. I can´t believe how well they are able to control that ball with any part of their body. Intercepting a pass by jumping up and hitting the ball with their head, and it flies directly to an open teammate who is 20 yards away. But they sure are babies when they get hurt, or if they feel like pretending for one minute that they are hurt. Made our way home in the rain by taxi, and ate dinner at a chinese restaurant. Hit the spot. Getting to Toledo in the morning was another small problem. September 22 was Dia Sin Coches (no car day) in Madrid, and an enormous bike ride was taking place along the street in front of our hotel. We cheered them on for a while and it was so cool and I missed my bike so much, but they never stopped coming, and our bus could not leave. We were literally waiting for hours but finally made it out of the city. Rearranged our plans once again. I really liked Toledo. An old city, narrow streets, very hilly, lots of old gothic buildings and all cobblestone roads. Lots of displays of shining armour outside of souvenir shops, lots of swords and knives and painted ceramic stuff inside. We visited La Casa del Greco and saw some of his art, which I was very fond of. Walked around, worked our quads and calves, ate at a little restaurant and had to get on the bus to come home. I wanted to buy a postcard with a picture of the fabulous cathedral and the caption, "HOLY TOLEDO!" but amazingly, nobody had invented it yet.