Cat Spanish

Right now I'm on the patio outside the house of two of the Cedarville girls. There is no internet anywhere near my house. There are 8 of us sitting around swiping someone's wifi. My battery doesn't last long, so I'll write as much as I can... so far Spain is very nice... cool weather but sunny, I can usually figure out what is going on, although I can't talk too much yet, and I didn't have any problems from jetlag or changing mealtimes (maybe partly due to my cold, I'm not hungy much anyway!) So here goes...

Well, I arrived safely in Spain Thursday around 1:30 or 2:00pm. All the flights went very well, and the flight to Madrid actually ran a little early. I sat by windows next to nice people most of the way; the first guy let me watch part of Bourne Ultimatum on his DVD player with him, a Spanish lady from Madrid who kept telling me how much I would like Sevilla, and a man on another flight who looked at his watch and swore his way to Sevilla. Actually, he wasn’t so nice, but he kept cracking me up.

Let me just say that Madrid is not on my list of favorite airports in the world. Actually, the list of airports I despise goes like this: JKF, Madrid, Madrid, Madrid. Now, it wouldn’t be so bad if I went there again because now I know where to go and what to do, but information is not one of their strong suits. Aka they don’t announce when flights are boarding or late or display many signs. I was with a few other girls at that point, but I went ahead since I had an earlier flight, and then they went one way and I thought I should go the other direction. I never saw them again. But I found the way to the other terminal, got my tickets, and got on the plane. I don’t know exactly what was going on, but the rest of them arrived later without many problems.

Chilton met me at the airport and took me to my house. I am staying with Kourtney (another girl from Cedarville) with a family. Our señora has a store downstairs where she sells an eclectic mixture of decorations, jewelry, and accessories from around the world. Actually, she has purses, lamps, statues, etc. that I recognized straight from Thailand! She also paints beautiful pictures on tiles. She has a son, Gabriel, who is 14, and a daughter, Ana, who is 10. Ana is so patient with us, and we can talk to her fairly well. We spent most of yesterday afternoon playing with her... looking at all her stickers, stuffed animals, playing with Floam, and walking through the streets on stilts. Most of the time we can understand what they are trying to tell us, but we still have trouble talking to them… the thing we can talk to the most is the cat. We always understand it, and can tell it to get away pretty well :^) Overall, we really like our family, although it does take time to get used to how they do everything. I believe we are the only ones with kids in the home, and since our sra. has the store, we eat later than most the others, around 3 and after 10, so we go to bed later too.

Doors have become the bane of our existence. I am not even kidding. The door to our room, the door to our house, the door to our building, the door to Amanda’s house- none of them open. Ever. Every attempt to pass through becomes an ordeal complete with lots of yelling and lecturing. “From the bottom! You have to open it from the bottom first!” “We already did it; we can’t open the door!” or, “It’s me, Macarena. Let me in!” “But we can’t!”

I will probably look back at this post in a couple months and laugh hysterically. I love you all!