Starting at the very beginning,
My mom and friend, Annie, took me to the airport, but on the way I realized I forgot my wallet and retainer case. We finally get to the airport, I check my bags, but I am overweight, even after spending the entire day packing, weighing, and re-weighing. The lady wasn't very stringent because I think she knew I was going to Spain and that I probably needed everything I had. I said my goodbye's to Mom and Annie, and went on through security. I put my backpack and my 'too heavy to technically be considered a carry-on bag' bag though, but I get pulled aside and they start going through my bag. The I explain to the lady why I have the Jelly Belly's and Blue Diamond almonds and other such things, and she is so interested in the whole experience and everything I have to say. Which wasn't that great because it was announced that my flight had its last call for boarding. She lets me go, I run to jetBlue and board the plane. Dead Last. I meet the girl from Turlock, Brianne, who is also in Spain for the year with AFS, I watch a little bit of The Proposal, and wake up five hours later at 8:00-ish in the morning, in NEW YORK CITY.
We try to call our pickup bus, but we don't know where to wait. We see another AFS kid go by, but don't say anything. We finally decide to follow him when we see him get in out bus and drive away. We wait another two hours to be picked up. We check in to the Doubletree, mingle a little, then wait until four when things officially start. At the orientation I got to meet all my friends from the group on Facebook I joined earlier in the summer so it felt like I already knew a bunch of people. I met some new friends going to Austria, Scout and Ana. That night we did some cultural activities, one was doing a quiz on Spain and the US. The prize for a correct answer was a Starburst, which I would now be able to thoroughly enjoy without my braces. Let's say I was full by the end of the activity. We had free time after that, and I took advantage of all the time to be together with my friends who would be going off to Austria. We watched America's Got Talent kinda as a last Hoorah for America. Went to the hotelroom for the curfew, but my roommate, Mack, and I weren't very tired so we called up some of our friends in the hotel.
I think I regretted staying up so late that night because we had to be out of our rooms by 9 in the morning. We did more activities; watched a video about New Zealanders who spent a year in various countries including Spain. At the end, all of us Spain people were so glad we decided on Spain because the boy had such a great time and it seemed like a fantastic place to be. We had about four hours to chill in the hotel before our flight. We spent our time taking pictures on MacBooks, watching YouTube videos, and taking impromtu photos with each others' cameras.
I rearrange my friend's bag to make sure she isn't charged on the international flight. We head to the airport, check our bag's (I wasn't overweight this time, thanks to the strategic planning of me and my mom), and have some dinner before boarding the plane. At this point we are all extremely excited and most of us have trouble sleeping. I watched I Love You, Man at the same time as two friends sitting behind me so I could look behind at them and we could laugh together. I get about an hour and a half of sleep on the flight from NY to Zürich, Switzerland. We have about an hour and a half pitstop in Zürich. A few of us got lost in the airport, but we made our way back to the group luckily. And its so cool! They have smart escalators that turn off when no one is on them. Anyway, I buy some authentic Toblerone in the airport, and later we meet the Swiss people that are staying in Spain because we traveled together on the same plane to Madrid.
The Madrid flight was nothing compared to the Zürich one. It flew by. No pun intended, really though, I didn't mean to do that. I was surprised how dry Madrid was. In California when I look out the window of a plane it is always different shades of green from the farming and all, but here it was like different shades of brown. We arrive in Madrid, gather our things, and meet some AFS volunteers and head on our way to the hostel forty-five minutes away. We are all sweating profusely from the heat inside that bus, and are all extremely nasty from what seems like 24 hours on the go. We get to the hostel, meet the other internationals, and start pretty much right away with some 'culutral activities.' The ones there were a million times more fun and dangerous than those of New York. And they all involved kissing, no joke. Someone got a bloody nose in the first round. The games could best be described as WWE meets Matchmaker. Throughout the night more internationals arrived and it felt like a homecoming for some of us who had talked a bunch in the summer. Curfew was eleven, but it was more like a 'we can't make too much noise curfew' instead of a sleepy-time curfew. So a group of us stayed up and messed around on the lawn, and just talked. The next morning was slightly sad because we had to say goodbye to people that we wouldn't see until the end of the year at the final meeting.
Those going to Catalonia got on the same bus to the bus station where we later boarded our bus that took us from Madrid to Barcelona in a mere EIGHT hours. Luckily, I sat next to one of my friends, Gunnar, from Iceland. We talked a bunch and watched the South Park Movie. I sat in one of the middle rows on the bus so I was constantly turning around, back and forth jumping between conversations. The time went by so quickly, surprisingly. We met our families at the station.
Everything was a blur from then on out for about two or three days. We drive about fifteen minutes outside of Barcelona to go to a friend's house for dinner. I meet Cecilia, their host daughter from last year, who flew here to come and meet me on my first night here. It was a really good idea and she was really nice, too. We drive over to my host mom's parents house to sleep. I wake up the next day at two in the afternoon. They are all waiting on my for lunch. They being my host parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. After lunch I went out with the cousins and explored the pueblo. The cousins are all really nice. The next day, my host family and I get on a plane to fly to Mallorca, one of the Balearic islands in the Mediterranean. We spend the whole week there relaxing on the beach, trying to get rid of my paleness, and meeting more of their friends. We went on a really long hike to this beach one day, and another day we went to a popular, public beach and we got caught up in the waves. The water was really warm, it felt great. On Saturday, we fly back, and drive home an hour and half north of Barcelona to our house.
Monday I am supposed to start school, which I was actually quite excited to do, but I go to the school, they put me in a class, about three mintues later they come in and switch me to a different one, and then come in five minutes later, and pull me out for the day. Apparently, I was completely registered, so I couldn't stay. They only had the ENTIRE summer to do this. I had another day to do nothing. But, I was able to go to school on the Tuesday, and it wasn't even horrible. This grade is Lidia's so my host mom knows a lot of the kids, so when one of them called the night before, Fàtima, my host mom told her to introduce me to people. So, I met so many people in the first week, and it was practically impossible to remember all these names. But, it was extremely easy for them to learn my name, so I had these people saying hi to me that I hadn't even been introduced to yet.
I made really good friends with two people who sit next to me in my main class. Both named Marta. Marta F. helps me translate everything from Catalan to Castillian, writes down the notes in Chemistry and then shows them to me, and I in return help her with English, and transforming radicals in math. Its a good system we have. Marta U. invited me to her house a couple times and they took me on a hike to this sanctuary nearby. I snapped a shot with a St. Ignatius statue for all the priests back home. Then, the Marta's and I watch movies downstairs on a projector screen. So far we have watched Across the Universe and Rent. It kinda seems like Thursday's, where we get out at one, are like out movie day.
Anyway, we'll move on to the weekend of the 20/21 where I spent the weekend in Barcelona with the other AFS students for an orientation. On the Friday before the orientation started my family and I went to this really cool King Tut exhibition they were having, luckily they had the audio tapes in English. On the Saturday we met at the train station and had lunch in what can pretty much be called Gaudí's park. That weekend was extremely fun. We got to see all of the friends we made, we played more dangerous, kissing games, spooked some people in a creepy part of the hostel, and had a clue hunting game in Spanish to play.
I can't remember much that was eventful during the following week of school so I'll move on to the 27/28 where I was in Barcelona for the festival of La Mercè. It is Barcelona's major and biggest festival. On Friday night, Inma and Guim and I went in to Barcelona and saw some of the activites, every pueblo of Barcelona had their own float like thing, which would be in the Correfoc the next day. On Friday, they were just parading them through the streets to excite everyone for the following night. On Saturday, after 1 and a half hours not being able to find a place to meet, and a missed train, I met up with a few friends from AFS and we walked around Barcelona. A girl from California, Christina, is one of my best AFS friends from Catalunya; we always get really excited around each other because we both have each other's familiar accent so we talked a lot that day together. Later that evening we met up with an AFS volunteer from Barcelona, who actually knew where to go. He took us through the Correfoc, 'fire walk' in Catalan. It was this long parade of fireworks being set off five feet away from you and being put at the top of the floats so the sparks can fly everywhere. It was frightening and amazing at the same time. Some of the kids stay at the volunteer's house, but a new arrival from New Zealand, Aimee, and me go back to my grandparent's house because we have things planned for the next day. On that Sunday, we go into Barcelona again to watch teams compete in bulding castells, human castles. It was crazy! They got eight stories of people in a tower! Then we dropped off Aimee at the train station, had lunch with some friends, walked around saw a few more show's, most notibly, an air guitar competition. So hilarious. We went home to sleep, and did the 1 and a half hour drive in the morning, going straight to school, we barely made it on time.
So that was a 'quick' look of Month One, I am headed to France in about thirty minutes, so I would finish writing about all what has been going on until today, but I gotta go. I'll start updating about this month next week; I won't make you wait an entire month next time.
*Working on a way for everyone who does not have Facebook to be able to see my photos, and working on a way for people to be able to leave comments on this thing.
