Hello! I am beginning to realize how important my sleep is going to be! This whole "siesta" thing is definitely working out for me. Today, Ginny and I slept in until 1:30 in the afternoon (sorry mom). I cant believe how tired I was. Yesterday was another exhausting day.

After walking around town in the afternoon checking out museums and part of the old town (new pictures in my album) we came back home and hung out at the house. Ginny, Bengt and I walked over to Carre Four-which is a sort of walmart about a 10 minute walk from where we live. We picked up some shampoo/hangers/toothpaste and came back home to eat dinner. After we finished we headed into town to meet up with our group from Iowa State, as well as the group from Michigan that Bengt is from. We went to a few new places last night and went dancing (my favorite of course:) On our way home, Ginny and I decided to try and brave the bus. After a failed attempt to catch the bus the night before, we found where the night route goes and were able to catch the 4:00 bus come (after chasing it down the street in the rain) We had to full out sprint to catch it since we were desperate for a ride home since the next bus doesnt leave for another hour after that. We made it home fine, and were able to skype with family before we went to bed. This whole time difference actually works out pretty well since by the time Ginny and I get home at night it is usually a little after dinner time here in the States.

After sleeping in very very late into the day, we sat down for lunch with our family. It is interesting that lunch here is the biggest meal of the day. It is a more formal meal and we sit in the nicer dining room for this meal. Lunch actually went really well today. The first couple of times that we ate together there were a few awkward silences since Ginny and I are usually both very tired and not fluent yet in our spanish. But today we all sat and talked for about an hour! What a great feeling:)

Tonight we are planning on meeting up with our friends Andrew and Sean to talk about our plans for next weekend. We are looking into going to Milan since that seems to be the cheapest flight out of Madrid. The airlines out of madrid such as EasyJet and RyanAir offer cheap flights from country to country. The catch is-you hafta book in advance and you have to pack light. Flights normally run anywhere from 10-90 euros. So the earlier you book the better off you are. Hopefully we can try and book our first weekend adventure tonight!

Tomorrow we start classes and have our orientation. I am not sure yet what classes will be like but I am very excited to begin. I think that my spanish will be a lot stronger once I get a good refresher course on my grammar from these classes. My "mom" and "sister" here in Spain are great about correcting me and helping me with my sentence structure but I still have a ways to go. Cant wait to see what its like!

More to come this week!