ohhh madrid...

Whew. Well I'm finally here in Spain...I arrived Thursday morning. My flight was good, except they lost my luggage. That was awesome...I got it back the next day though. For the first two nights, everyone in my program stayed in a hotel close to Puerta de Sol (the center of Madrid). The hotel was amazing and it was really good to get to hang out and meet with everyone. We had an orientation type thing, and then just explored the city in the afternoon. At night, we all went out and had a good time...The schedule here is so hard to get used to! People don't eat dinner until around 10pm, and thennnnnn go out to bars and stuff after that. 3AM is when everyone is out...a lot go until 6 or 7 am....then get up and go to work or school. Its crazy. I'm slowly adapting. On Sunday, we were transferred to our apartment. I'm living with three other girls- Kiley, Tory, and Miriam. Kiley and I share a room and Miriam and Tory have their own. Our apartment is tiiiiiiny, but nice. Not many people have AC here so it gets a littttle warm during the day..but we have a lot of windows so its actually pretty nice. We live in the east part of the city (Goya)..its a nice part of town with lots of little shops and cafes. That night, we rode the metro to go see a movie in the park. Lucky for me, the movie was Transformers. I just looooove movies that are about things that could never happen...psych...It was in spanish too, of course...so it was a long 2 1/2 hours. Anyway...this morning, we took our placement exams to see which level of spanish we would be in..There are two levels- intermediate and advanced.I'm in the intermediate and I'm really excited about learning more spanish...it's realllly difficult trying to communicate. However, two of my roomates are pretty fluent, so thats helping a lot. I've met a ton of great people and I'm exciiiiiited to get into a routine and stuff this week...I'll have class from 8:30-1:30 Monday-Friday and then the rest of the day free. Hope everyone is doing wellllllll...I'll try to update again soon. Hasta luego :)