Welcome back! I'm glad you stuck with me and hope you enjoy your next view of my time in Spain.
Well, after my plane landed, D, A, and I discovered that unfortunately, our luggage was LOST. Our friends T and M had success in seeing their luggage, but we weren't so lucky. All the passengers kept grabbing their luggage one by one and before we knew it, there was no more luggage for us to hug with glee and claim as ours. This was a disappointment, but nevertheless, I prayed that we would only have to go a few days without the rest of our belongings. Thankfully I made sure to pack some essentials in my back pack so I wasn't at a complete loss!! Good advice from my big sister C. (Her luggage had been lost for a week when she came to study in Oviedo two years ago.) Anywho, the reunion we had with other UNI students at the hotel Isla de Cuba was marvelous and you would have had no idea that we weren't in IA. It didn't feel like we were thousands of miles from home at all now that we were seeing more friends.
Not long after speaking in ENGLISH with each other (lame I know!) did we find that we had to figure out where the five of us were going to stay since there wasn't enough room for all of us to stay with the rest of the UNI students. After being in the little cafe for a few minutes, the immersion into the Spanish language began! The owner was telling us where to find the other hotel and that we could pay the same rate as we would had we been able to stay in the hotel Isla de Cuba, but I was SO LOST because he was obviously speaking in Spanish!! Thankfully he wasn't talking to just me. Well, our expedition to finding the other hotel was supposed to be a pretty short walk, like about 5 minutes or so. I'm pretty sure we walked for about a half hour but with M and T's luggage which made the trek a little more burdensome. Now I was REALLY thankful that I didn't have my two big suitcases to haul around in the streets of Oviedo. So after asking for directions from a few natives and trying to use our handy map, we finally found our home for our first night in Spain: el Hotel Carbayón. It was so cute and wonderful to think about the idea of getting to sleep in a bed after all the traveling we had done. We were all super pumped to shower as well!! Not that we were dirty, but we were just in great need of feeling CLEAN after our many hours of travel.
Finally after we ventured around the quaint hotel and saw where the each others' rooms were, we got ready for our night out with P and L (our non-academic advisors from Spain) and headed back to the hotel Isla de Cuba. Our walk was about 10 minutes and the night air was so refreshing. This was the night we were going spend as a larger group, have dinner together, and share a little about ourselves so we could learn more about each other since most of us didn't know each other very well. There are 21 of us in the UNISIS program, (UNI Semester in Spain) so this took a little time. But hey!! We spoke in Spanish!! YESS!!! It was so fun to catch a glimpse of peoples' personalities and see who we would be getting closer to while we are so far from our families and friends back home.
Now it was time to eat, and in Spain, people don't eat until around 9:30pm sometimes. Well it was probably about 10pm and we were all VERY ready to eat but also VERY tired. There were so many courses of food that we were beginning to wonder when it would stop!! It was all delicious and thankfully I didn't see many things that I was too afraid to eat. Hooray!! Now it was time to pay for dinner but in euros. The money feels so fake that I still look at it and wonder how real it is. It totally feels like Monopoly money. Don't worry!! I know it is real because I have converted my U.S. dollars into euros and don't want to lose that money.
So after our dinner as one big UNI family, we had the opportunity to go out with P and L and head to a bar for just a little time to chill. (It was only going to be our group, so it was reassuring to know that we wouldn't have to see any sketchy people.) In Spain, the drinking age is 18, so I knew that I could partake if I wanted since I'm 20. At dinner, I actually tried something called "sangria" but didn't really like it. It was kind of exciting to take my first sip of alcohol in Spain because I knew it was LEGAL, and so I was only hesitant to try it initially because I had never had any before. After arriving to the bar, I chose to drink some juice because I like the taste a lot more, but it was fun to taste what other people got to drink. By the time we left and headed back to our hotel, we were all so ready for bed. The morning was going to come early because we had our placement tests waiting for us and had to take what luggage we had back to the hotel Isla de Cuba before we went over to the university. Be prepared to hear about the first day at the university in my next post!
Hasta luego...(until next time!)
No comments:
Post a Comment