A couple "firsts" in España

On Thursday of this past week I had my first true “intercambio”, this is were I talk to a Spanish local and practice my Spanish/ask questions about the culture and such and learn new words and cultural norms. It went really well actually…we ended up talking for over 3 hours and by the end I really felt like my Spanish had improved just over those three hours and I learned a lot about the culture and even a few new words to add to my vocabulary. This was a good thing for me at a good time right after I started to feel like my speaking abilities were kind of at a stand still…needless to say I'm excited to have more of these intercambios.

This past weekend I also had my first true trip while abroad…Emilio and I went to Leon to visit his friends that now life there. Leon is a really cool city, much more relaxed and much smaller than Madrid and even than Alcala but I enjoyed it a lot. We ended up not leaving until Saturday morning (the original plan was to go on Friday) so the trip was a little short but fun none the less. When we arrived Saturday afternoon we met up with Emilio’s friends and walked around the city, for lunch we went from bar to bar ordering drinks and getting tapas (the majority of bars give a little free portion of food when you order drinks which are called tapas). This was actually a lot of fun because I got to talk to them a lot and they introduced me to typical Spanish foods and drinks and also typical foods and drinks for Leon. They also showed me around to the famous cathedral of Leon and other monuments there. Like a said it is a much smaller city than Madrid so we were down town for about 5 hours and we briefly covered almost everything. When we finished downtown we went grocery shopping and then headed to their house up in the mountains. Their house is actually more like a house in the US…they have a little yard and its more spread out which I liked. Once we got to their house we just hung out and talked and ate dinner.

We had planned to go up into the mountains today but they got some snow over night and the roads were starting to get bad so Emilio was afraid we if we waited we wouldn’t be able to make out back to Madrid and we also weren’t sure if we could go into the mountains with bad roads. While we were on our way home we also heard that Madrid was getting snow and everything was chaotic (that’s three times since I’ve been here that they’ve had snow and before now they haven’t had it in like 20 years). As we got closer to being home we were afraid it was going to be really bad to drive but by the time we got back the roads were fine with very little traffic so that was a relief. After we arrived in Alcala we went to an open parking lot and Emilio tried to teach me a little bit how to drive a manual. The parking lot was really small but I was able to drive around a little bit which was cool since it was my first real time being able to drive one…I know all of you outside of the family are wondering how I never learned with my dads love for cars but it was because all the manuals we had at home were Dad’s company cars and I was not allowed to drive them. Anyway it was neat to learn a little bit and he said some night when there is not traffic we can take the car out and drive around the area a little bit which I’m excited for.

Well that’s a quick recap of what I’ve been up to, hope all is well for everyone at home or wherever you may be. Next weekend I’m going to Toledo on Friday with the free trip from school so that should be fun (its only a day trip) and then in two weeks I’m thinking about heading to the southern tip of Spain and going over to morocco with some friends from school so I’m looking forward to the next few trips. I’ll be sure to post after I go and inform you all how they went. ¡Hasta Luego!