Miscellaneous Update

My feet and legs hurt so much. I tried to be cute yesterday and today and apparently my pinky toes should just get cut off because they're the only part of my feet that got blisters. I got a blister on each of them walking around yesterday in my cute brown flats and then another blister on my left toe walking to class today. Ridiculous. And of course my legs aren't used to walking so much so they hate me right now because I'm not stretching at night. I should probably start doing that again...

In other news, I'm here and finally starting to figure out where I am in the city and where things are (mostly just important things and a couple of plazas) so I'm not whipping out my map to figure things out as much anymore, which is always a bonus so I don't seem like such a tourist.

I started classes yesterday and the ones I had seem like they're going to be pretty good. I have the same teacher from 955-1045 and 1115-1205 Monday through Thursday and she's kind of hard to read because she looks at you really intently and you're never sure if she's just curious or if she's angry (I don't think she's angry, I think she's just intense, but it's hard to tell). Those classes seem like they're going to be good. My first is Culture of Spain and it's only got 14 people in it. We didn't do too much yesterday, just introduced ourselves and she talked about the course a bit, but it's going to be good, I can just tell. Then I have a practical review of grammar II class. There's one at the U of I that I took already (204) and a super advanced one (404) that I didn't want to take so I signed up for 299, which is only at CEGRI and it's like in the middle, but I definitely got signed up for the 404 class (based on my proficiency exam) and it's just going to transfer as 299 (which is what it would have transfered as anyways because only 3 of the advanced hours that I take here will transfer as advanced hours) but I'm kind of like, "wait, I didn't want to take the harder class" but we'll see how it goes. There are only ten people in that class. But my afternoon class was the smallest - 7 people!!! It's my linguistics class and we're the only seven people that signed up for it. Insane! We started learning yesterday and it's going to be quite the interesting class, not really sure why it's required as part of the spanish major, but I guess we'll see. This afternoon I have Art History and Culture of Islam, so we'll see how those go as well.

We went to the Alhambra on Sunday and it was pretty much the coolest place I have ever been. The detail on the walls and in the architecture is completely mind-blowing and it is huge and just absolutely gorgeous. I put pictures up on picasa so you should all check them out (there are a LOT but not nearly as many as I took that day - I deleted the bad ones, but trust me, they're worth looking through).

I only got homework in one of my classes (linguistics) but it's to read pp. 45-121 in the book by tomorrow. Insane! I'm going to be reading allllll night. (After I attempt to salsa - we have free lessons tonight)