I feel like I keep getting screwed over. First of all, there was this crap with my flight home. I don´t remember if I have explained this or not, but STA Travel created a new flight for me that was different that the one I viewed and ordered, but still counts as the "group flight" and therefore is still the same (high) price. Fine, whatever. Until I realized that the return flight includes a 15 hour layover in Zurich, from 7 pm on the 20th to 10 am on the 21st. I went to a travel agent and now I am waiting for her to call me back after she talks to STA Travel to see if anything can be done to change it. She might have tried to call me this morning, but I was in class and couldn´t answer my phone... So then yesterday afternoon I decided to finally get my hair cut. It had gotten really long, and I really liked it long, but it needed to just be cleaned up a little bit. I had checked out the different "peluquerías" in my neighborhood and went to the one that seemed the most new and busy. I wasn´t too worried; my hair is straight, and I only wanted a trim, cut straight across the bottom. My only concern was that she´d cut it too short, so I made sure to say (twice) that I only wanted a little tiny bit cut off, just the ends, to make it healthier. She cut it the perfect length.... on one side of my head. The other side is a good half inch shorter. I didn´t notice while I was there because there was an advertisement on the bottom corner of the mirror so I couldn´t see that side. I think she noticed, because I saw her whispering something to one of the other stylists before she rang me up, but of course she didn´t say anything... To top it off, it cost 17 Euro. I had asked for a cut, the woman said, "cut and blowdry?" I said yes. She washed my hair before I realized what she was doing, but I thought, whatever, I guess this is how it goes, never mind the fact that I took a shower before I came here and my hair was still wet when I walked in... Got charged for all three. She fried my hair with the blowdryer and a round brush, blasting inch-wide sections of about 100 hairs until I had the statickyest hair ever. Whatever, a bit of Spanish style, right? Got home, thought it looked kind of uneven......... Got upset, convinced myself it was no big deal, just in my head... Paz came home and noticed that my hair was uneven before I told her that I had gotten it cut. She thought I had cut only one side by myself. I told her the story, she was really upset, and so was I. I don´t know if it was because I was a foriegner or what, but I´m pissed off, and sad, and am going to try to go back to see if they´ll fix it. Unfortunately this will require cutting my hair back to about the length it was when I left the States, so that´s three months growth suddenly un-done. I feel like I am more upset about it than I should be... I suppose nobody is ever happy when they first leave the salon. But it´s one thing when you don´t like the cut they gave you-- it´s another thing when they just do it WRONG when all you asked them to do was cut it straight. So I went out with Velia for a beer to try and make myself feel better, and that was better. Other crappy thing that is pissing me off: The class "Women in Contemporary Spanish Society" has been the worst class I have ever taken in my life. Originally, there weren´t enough people signed up to offer it, so they "combined" it with "Urban Development in the Mediterranean" which is a human geography class. They did this so they could continue to offer both classes so people could get the credits they needed, and because they figured since they were both sociology classes, somehow they would have something in common. "Combining" these classes ended up to mean that each week, (for the class only meets once a week for 2.5 hours at a time) we had either one class or the other, either one professor or the other. We started a week late, two classes were cancelled because both professors went to Cuba for some conference, so we have taken 5 classes with each professor and the only thing that detirmines which one we get credit for is which subject we write the final paper and take the exam. In the "Mujeres" (women) class, we watched a movie, which took up two class periods, read one article about domestic violence and commented on it, and talked about the history of the feminist movement, which was mainly talking about the US and the rest of Europe, for two class periods. Today, our last class with this professor, we started 20 minutes late, spent about 15 minutes figuring out a date that we could go to her house for coffee and to talk about her trip to Cuba, heard the same information in review that we learned last time about spain and the global feminist movement from 1960-1975, (total information that we learned: the fact that there WAS a feminist movement.) then she told us that Franco died and Spain, in a hurry to catch up with the rest of Europe started to make more liberal laws again. Then we heard the years that a bunch of countries legalized divorce/abortion. After that, the conversation shifted to talking about the future of the world, and how a very conservative wave is passing again, adn how our professor´s only hope is the young people in the anti-globalization movement, and then we talked about Cuba and then ended class early. You just read EVERYTHING that we did in class, I did not leave anything out. I have learned nothing in that class. What I will learn will be learned on my own while researching to write this paper, and I will also learn a bunch of dates and names when I memorize them for the exam from the packet that she gave us but that we never talked about. And to think that this class was basically the reason that I came to Alicante-- It was a program in Spain at my language level that had a women´s studies class. What a crock. What a waste.
