ONE WEEK

Its been.. One Week. One week and fourteen hours. This past weekend I was at a Rotary retreat with about 60 Americans and a few Austrains, Germans and Canadians, but basically, the U.S took over a square mile (kilometer?) of Spain this weekend. It was nice to see that others are just as scared and excited as I am, and it definitely was nice to meet people that live in the Madrid area, so hopefully we can get together sometime soon and speak English (: Although truly, it is pretty fun practicing my Spanish and laughing at how I cannot roll my rrrrs for the life of me.

And today I took a nice long nap, and took a walk around my city, and so now I can succesfuly walk myself to the bank, the candy shop, the ¨chino¨(the Spaniards coined it, not me--a shop run by a chinese couple), the super market, the school, the park and the bread shop. Later I went with some other kids to the candy shop and guitars were played, and ipods were used and it was a nice relaxing night, like almost every night here, because people here are just very laidback and awesome.

And I learned today that ¨mini-me¨from the Austin Powers movies, in Spanish, is called ¨mini-yo¨, which for some reason, I find hilarious. And I learned the expression ¨flipa!¨which is a hardcore way of saying WOW.

But most exciting of all, I found out that I am going to Madrid on Wednesday to see a band (of friends of friends) and go to the Prado and we´ll just ¨dar una vuelta¨ which in this case means just take a walk, but it can really mean whatever you want it to, in whatever context. So I am excited for Madrid, excited to make mexican tortilla lime soup for my family for lunch tomorrow, excited to start school on Thursday, and mostly just excited to become Spanish-ish, and to have the opportunity to take a look through someone else´s eyes*.

Works cited: *Phil Collins, for writing ¨Look Through My Eyes¨for the soundtrack of Brother Bear, and for the song being on continual repeat for hours on the Bus in Baja Mexico (:

And this song, surprisingly enough, is one of my modivatonal lyrical devices that sums up what I´m intending to do here, in a very cheesy and phil collins-ey way.