4000 Miles Away | Long Story Short

Last Saturday afternoon I was standing outside of Mason Hall with the other ten students in the Hopkins Madrid study abroad group. About twelve hours later, our plane touched down in Madrid, Spain: our home for the next four months. When our plane landed it was about 7 AM local time, and despite not having slept for almost 24 hours at this point, I was so excited be in Spain. After landing in Madrid our group drove three hours to Salamanca, a city to the northwest, where we would be taking an intensive Spanish course for the next two weeks to prepare us for our classes this semester in Madrid. The entire drive, I was mesmerized by everything. The cars were different, the billboards were in Spanish, there were highways signs with names of cities that I had only seen on maps, and the Spanish countryside was nothing like I had pictured. Since we were driving through the outskirts of Madrid, I was expecting the land to be more built-up, but there were trees and fields everywhere and huge mountains in the distance. As soon as we approached Salamanca and saw the tan, red-roofed buildings from the bus window, I couldn't believe how old everything looked. My idea of an "old" building was like Independence Hall, but some of these are from the 15th century. And everything is so ornately decorated: all of the buildings have such ornate stone carvings on them. It's really an incredible city and so different from anything I've ever seen before. Shortly after we arrived, the group had gone for almost 30 hours without sleep, so we walked to the Plaza Mayor for coffee. Ordering coffee is so complicated here – there's café solo, largo, corto, con leche, frio, americano, etc. I still don't know what half of these are. Anyway, at first I was a little disgusted at how the cups are so small – I get a large coffee from Café Q or <a href="http://www.custompersonalityjerseys.com/custompersonalityjerseysnflcustomjerseys-c-1187_1188.html"><strong>custom NFL jerseys</strong></a> Starbucks almost every morning back in the states, and even though the Spanish coffee is stronger I just really like the big cup! I don't know why, it's just comforting to have a big cup of coffee regardless of the amount of caffeine in it. The Spanish coffee is definitely good though, it doesn't have the same strongly bitter aftertaste as coffee in the United States. Later on Sunday the grouped meandered through the streets for a few hours to get to know the city. Here are some pictures: Class is hard – there's only one other Hopkins student in my class, and most of our classmates are Spanish teachers who came to the school with a group of students and are taking this class while their students take a lower level class. Our classmates are from Poland, Slovenia, Japan, Bulgaria, and Washington State. At first it was a little overwhelming keeping up with the rate of conversation and understanding everyone's accents, but it gets better every day. I'm also learning a lot from our conversations about Europe in general: like today we talked about whether the head of the Yugoslavian government should be considered a dictator, and since everyone is from different countries, everyone had a different opinion. It was especially cool hearing what the two women from Slovenia had to say since their country was part of the former Yugoslavia. Going through a Spanish grocery store for the first time was also pretty exciting: the first thing I noticed <a href="http://www.custompersonalityjerseys.com/custompersonalityjerseysnhlcustomjerseys-c-1187_1232.html"><strong>custom NHL jerseys</strong></a> was that they only had one type of cereal! If it would have been Lucky Charms I might have been okay with it, but seeing that it was Special K, it made me miss America a little. Also, the fruit is so cheap here – I got a bunch of apples and a huge bag of grapes for like 2 euros. It would have easily cost upwards of ten dollars in the US. Â*There was also no peanut butter, but there were like 5 shelves of Nutella. Instead of Wonder Bread there was a huge wall of baked bread, some of it sliced. Instead of Nestle and Hershey's they had lots of Milka and Kinder. Instead of oval-shaped deodorant, it was round. In addition to purple plums, they had yellow and green ones. The M&amp;Ms and Oreos came in much smaller packets. In the midst of so many foreign looking products and packages, the isle that reminded me most of an American supermarket was actually the dairy isle: there were still a ton of different kinds of yogurt. I'm pretty sure I saw some Danimals in there along with a bunch of other colorful kids' varieties. As I'm writing this I'm watching the Phillies-Diamondbacks game on my computer. It's weird to think that I was sitting in those stands not even two weeks ago with my Jimmy Rollins jersey, and now I'm 4000 miles away watching the opening pitch live at 1:05 AM. It still hasn't hit me that I'm so far from home. Adjusting to life here has been much easier than I thought it would be – it's not hard to understand everyone, I actually kind of like the meal schedule here better than at home, and I've met so many cool people. Spain is basically amazing. I'm so happy to be here.