Thursday Jan 15th
The weeks here go by so fast! Nothing exciting happened in class…fiction was boring, as to be expected. We talked about the movie we watched the night before in my conversation class, which was interesting…and she said she was going to take us to a market next class (exciting!) After class I went home, ate, took a nap and then met up with Carly to find our way to the mall to meet some other people. We aren’t very good at riding buses haha. We ended up on a bus that didn’t go directly into the mall parking lot and we didn’t see the mall until after we passed the stop so we got off a lot later and had to wait for a bus to take us back (oops!) The mall was pretty standard, but pretty much all the clothing stores had the same things in them (boring) and I didn’t find a purse that I wanted (which I’ve been looking for since I got here). We got Ben and Jerry’s (yummm!!), looked in the bookstore and then Carly and I headed back to catch a bus home. We ended up on a bus that circled around the whole city that the mall was in and drove back passed the mall to get on the highway (we were so nervous we would end up in the middle of nowhere at night lol) EVENTUALLY it took us back where we needed to be, with quite a few detours on the way. I didn’t go out at all after that because we were leaving for Granada in the morning!!! For dinner I had ham and grilled cheese and soup (so good!! My favorite!) and at dinner my host parents told me that the internet was working! And I almost jumped out of my chair I was so excited. I hurried up and finished dinner and brought my laptop out to see if they new which network it was and the password, they just kept saying they didn’t understand it and I should ask their daughters when they got home (bummer!) But I was still soo excited and called Craig to tell him, and he of course mad fun of the level of excitement haha While we were on the phone, Maria came home and set it up on my computer and it was hard for me to walk away from it to go to sleep (scary how much you take advantage of having internet everywhere in Athens)

Wednesday Jan 14th
I am growing to really like Mondays and Wednesdays because I only have one class from 9-11 and then I’m done (besides the planned activities). We talked in Culture class about the style of architecture in Toledo, which intern was a history lesson (because Toledo, and the rest of Europe is chock full of HISTORY! Which is why I came here, so I love that!) Toledo is known for and is proud of the mix of heritage of Christians, Muslims and Jews; and how it’s shown in the architecture and other places throughout Toledo. After class I went home at 11! It was pretty exciting for me…took a short nap and worked on some homework. Lunch at 2:30, like usual…and then headed back up to school for another tour. We had to be there at 3:45 so Carly and I got on the bus a little after 3. We had taken this bus up to the Plaza to walk to school before so we didn’t think we needed to ask if it was going there… We were wrong. We ended up going all the way around the old part of the city and got kicked off where the bus route ends and had no idea where we were haha. But we figured it would be an adventure so we got out the map and it ended up being quite a bit closer to the school than the other bus stop. However, after we rushed to the school thinking we would be late…no one from the program or a tour guide were anywhere to be found. The tour didn’t start until 4:30, apparently. The tour was pretty funny because apparently the professors and the people that run the program don’t talk…earlier that day we walked around during my Culture class to an old church that is a museum now and the tour guide tried to take us in the same museum…
After the tour we had to watch a movie, La Lengua de Las Mariposas (the tongue of the butterflies…we learned about it in my Conversation/Composition class the day before and had to watch it for that class) It was okay, sad ending…unnecessarily awkward sex scenes (pretty much most Spanish movies I’ve seen haha)
Carly and I sat around the school building to use the internet until they kicked us out at 9.