Staying Busy [quedo ocupada]

  As of today my program is one third of the way through. :( Things for me are really starting to get going. I am still loving my professors and the classes I decided to take. I have learned tons about the history of Spain and the European Union. Going through school, I always hated history class, but I am really enjoying it here. The field trips to historical buildings and cultural events around Segovia break up the school day pretty well too. So far in my class, we have visited the aqueduct, a synagogue and artesian shop in the Jewish Quarter, the weekly farmers/flea market, and stopped at many different sites along the way.

 The fish here is delivered fresh every day. They cook it with its face, eyes, and bones still in it.
 

   Yesterday, I started my internship attempting to teach children English at a tennis camp. I didn't
write about it in my blog post yesterday because it was a disaster and I was afraid it wasn't going to get any better. My friend and I had no idea what we were doing, we had no classroom, no resources, no plan, no idea how much Spanish these kids knew, and to top it off, we were supposed to hold class with a bunch of 5-8 year olds on a playground. One little boy cried once and another cried twice. When they found out we were from the United States, all they wanted to do was play futból americano. Which to them means run around and hit/kick/tackle/throw sand at each other. Again, disaster. Today, I convinced one of my friends in the program who wants to be a teacher to come with us. Having three of us paired with the thunderstorms (rain = class in the tennis shop) made for a fun and somewhat productive day of teaching. We also have another group of students who are a little older. Today, their coach wanted us to teach them the English vocabulary relating to tennis. None of us play tennis or know much about tennis so we kind of pulled that out of our @$$ but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do, right? 

   I bought my bus ticket to Salamanca for this weekend. I'm going there with five friends and am
very excited. The oldest university in Spain (and third oldest in Europe) is there, as well as everything that accompanies college life. Trying to navigate through the different options of transportation here is not as easy as I was expecting. I have been told that you don't need to know Spanish to visit Spain,
however, if you want to see the smaller cities and towns, I would definitely recommend it. Buying our tickets as quite an ordeal, but long story short, we learned that when you buy a round trip bus ticket here, there is no return date. Instead it's open and you have two weeks to decide when you want to come back. You tell this to the station at your destination and then they print out the ticket for you.

   Tonight, a group of native Spanish speakers met with a large group of students from my program and we separated into groups for "intercambios." We will be helping them with their English and they will be helping us with our Spanish. My group consists of me, three other girls from my program, and two 28-year-old women who live in Segovia. They were very nice and we have already had some great conversations. I think we will be meeting weekly so I am very excited to have the opportunity to improve my Spanish and cultural knowledge with natives.

My rainy view this morning.

   The weather has been unseasonably cold and rainy here. I seriously cannot escape Michigan weather no matter where in the world I go. As much as I may complain, I loved being able to fall asleep to a summer thunderstorm last night. Thunderstorms aren't very common here, so some of the Spaniards become a little distraught when the thunder booms and the lightning flashes. This was pretty comical for the rest of us who deal with thunderstorms quite frequently.