Class...and a bar, Monday the 15th

So yesterday was our first day of class. It wasn't as much class as introductions, but we're starting to get a feel for what it's all about. It went from 9 am till 2:30 pm...sighs.

Rafa is a prof that's going to talk to us about social issues in Spain, and we have three little projects to write for him, I hope it's not too hard. Mostly involving newspaper articles and such.

Javier is an Art History prof, and his classes mostly meet at the museums, once or twice a week, and will end by the beginning of November. We'll have a comprehensive test then, but not too much more.

Palmar is our prof from Carleton College, and with her, we have a ton of work. One part is a project about an issue that has changed/developed over time in Spain. Our small group of 4 plus a "tutor" (which is both a hired friend/mentor for this project) is supposed to study women and gender roles. Our presentation is the first one, on Monday, October 6th, so we don't have too much time to prepare. But hopefully, getting that over with will help us focus on the second part of her class. We have about 6 books to read in a period of less than 10 weeks. So we read a book, meet the author, read another book, meet another author, and so on, throughout her course. We also visit various places throughout this course, and learn about themes in the books more "firsthand" (ex: we're reading a book about a "golpe de estado", or coup, of the Spanish government; next week, we'll visit government building where it happened).

So after our "introductions" to all these, we were sent off. A group headed towards a bookstore to buy books for Palmar's class, but I wanted to go back to my host family's house first. Then I went to the office of the cell phone company that was selling our class phones (but I didn't buy one earlier because I wanted to check if the European cell phone I'm borrowing from a friend was able to take their SIM card, then I could pay only 50e for that, instead of 50e for the SIM plus 109e for the phone. The convenient part is we can sell the SIM/most of the phone (minus 5e per month, so 15e total) back to the company at the end of our stay here).

I meet up with a student from Carleton at the office, so we went to the bookstore together afterwards, where I paid 74 euros for 3 books (I have a couple more to buy as well!!! Ahh!!).
Afterwards, I came home and played some Cluedo (Clue) and Trivial Pursuit (in Spanish) with my host brother and his friends, which was a lot of fun. Although, I have no clue about ANYTHING European History or Spanish Literature. So much for my education...

After that, I ate a bit, chatted online for a bit/sent some emails, then found out that some friends were going out to a bar to celebrate both a birthday and Mexican Independence Day! So I took a train out to the heart of the city, meet up with four friends, and we went to a bar. I didn't order anything myself (although I did finish off my friend's red wine, which was AMAZING compared to the box stuff I've tried before, hehe), but it was a lot of fun spending time with the friends. I came home around 1:45am and fell asleep pretty quickly.