I have now been in Alcalá de Henares for 3 full days. I love it. I have already sent out a few e-mails with details of how everything has gone so far so I won´t repeat myself but I will summarize: The plane trip to Spain is very long, the metro is a crazy fun place but you have to keep an eye on your bags, Europe has a thing with boots and there are boot stores everywhere, their traffic is crazy, their cars are all miniatures of the ones in the States, and Alcalá is jam packed full of buildings, people, and cars, and I just don´t know how it all fits between the small calles.
My host family is wonderful, the missionaries told us they are the stronegst family in the ward, they made us feel right at home. I especially enjoy being around Miguel, he is 17 and a real fun kid. He isn´t afraid to tease us and likes to get a reaction out of us. Today Callie closed the door on Fran because she didn´t see him coming through the gate and Miguel exclaimed ¨¡Tu eres mal!¨ (You are a bad person), I like that he´s not serious with us. Today he helped me upload some of his music from his computer so I´m getting a good stash of Spanish music. He really is great.
Today we had our orientation at the Universidad de Alcalá, this year the University is 500 years old. Crazy. The orientation began with a 100 question test to determine our level of Spanish, I lost my concentration at about #80. The thing about everyone speaking Spanish is that it takes immense concentration, you can´t get away with half listening, I have to be looking directly at the speaker and concentrating on every word to get even some of it. We had a city tour today but it was hard to hear our guides over the noise of the city and in a group of 37 students, let alone understand them. So we saw a lot of cool old buildings that I´m sure are important and I want to know why, but I will have to find out later. As we walked through a small walk-way going towards the street from the University buildings we passed a woman squatting on the ground relieving herself and staring at us as we walked by. It was SO strange, I don´t even get it, we´re talking the whole 9 yards, right in front of us. ¡Que extraño!
We did pass a croissantería which was exciting. I love European bread.
So the tour was nice, it did give me somewhere to start, hopefully I have time to learn about the significance of all that I saw.
Callie and I took the bus for the first time today, it went over just fine. I´m getting a better sense of direction here. Although this was also the first day we tried to use our keys, there are different keys, one for the gate, one for the front door, and one for the door from the outside to our room. The bus ride was 15 minutes and it took us longer than the ride to get inside the doors of the house. The huge gate door finally opened for us but then we couldn´t get it closed and then the lock fell out and then we shoved it back in and hoped it would be okay and then we stood at the front door for a full 5 minutes, the knob isn´t really a knob, I don´t think it´s supposed to turn and the key just kept turning in circles. It was rediculous and we were laughing so much at the silliness of the situation that it made it even harder to concentrate on the task at hand. But finally we got in the door and I´m just glad nobody was there to witness the fiasco.
We ran into the missionaries 3 or 4 times today, first at our house, then after institute, then they waited at the bus stop with us for 20 minutes and rode the bus with us and then told us how to get to the Plaza (they were on their way to an appointment, not purposefully acting as our guides) and then we ran into them on the plaza like an hour later. There were 8 missionaries in the ward on Sunday, the ward was taken over by Americans. I haven´t been forced to speak much Spanish, everyone speaks English! I´m still hoping Susie will drop the English, I understand her Spanish really well but not Paco´s (her husband).
Every Monday we have a devotional and then Institute and then F.H.E. The Institute teacher, Hermano López is really good, it´s all in Spanish but he´s pretty easy to understand. He gave a really good lesson about recording our life experiences and referenced the talk from President Eyring on recognizing the hand of God in our lives, and stressed the importance of writing everything in a diario. So I don´t feel bad for the detailed blogs. The course will be on the History of the Church in España, I´m pretty excited for it. Tomorrow classes begin, we only have class M-Th which is going to be awesome. We´re going into Madrid tomorrow night, I can´t wait. Spain is so fun, there´s so much to look at and take in!
