bailes y cuentos

I'll start out with the bad news: I slept through the Real Madrid Stadium tour I was supposed to go on on Saturday b/c I didn't hear my alarm or anyone who tried to call me. When I woke up and realized I missed it, I was sad/ angry at myself especially because those who went said it was really cool...sigh. Hopefully I am going to a Real Madrid game soon so I can see it for myself! I spoke with some of my friends on skype this weekend and almost everyone is back at school! I can already imagine how weird it is going to be when I go back to UMD for the first time. Everything is so different here...but I guess I have a while until I have to worry about that.

Some good news is I did make it to a mass in a beautiful ridiculously old church on Sunday. Alcala is a world heritage sight, in large part to the church of the plaza de los santos ninos, where apparently two young children refused to convert to Islam and were killed, and are now hailed as martyrs. The streets were filled with people after mass because it was a lovely end of winter day, and I decided to window shop a bit and enjoy the nice weather.

Monday was the usual class schedule, and our culture teacher literally tried to teach us the entire history of medieval Spain in one hour...he was about as successful as you might expect, but still very interesting. I also signed up for a clase de baile on Mondays and Tuesdays at Alcalingua, Mondays we have flamenco and Tuesdays its meringue and other latin dances. Monday I went to flamenco, and our teacher Rocio said she was planning a party for us where she would show us how a real flamenco is done at the end of the semester. She even said some of us might be able to dance with her! Its really fun even though I'm sure we look silly doing it.

Today, I walked outside and was surprised to see some snow on cars! I thought it was getting warmer?! We all scrambled to read one of Cervantes' short stories for class with Mercedes. The story is a famous one about a gypsy who falls in love, but for me it feels like someone asked a 4th grader to understand Shakespeare (I'm the fourth grader). Luckily, it didn't really matter if we read or not because Mercedes took us to the casa de Cervantes which is right by the school, and then to the church of St. Mary where Cervantes was baptized. If anything, it was definitely better than having a real class. A profesora from Maryland came with us on our little field trip and then stayed after class to talk to us about how the program was going for us. We tried to talk to her about some concerns we had, but she was not listening to us at all. We said we wanted more concrete schedules to plan trips around, and she basically called us anal retentive. I'm glad she was so concerned.

Because of our little chat with profesora whatsherface we were late to dance class but it was still fun! We learned some more complicated moves and practiced some old ones too. I hope we can try some of our new moves out this weekend on a real dancefloor!

So now I am back at the casa and just ate dinner. Huevos fritos, jamon y pan. Muy rico. Luckily I don't have too much work so I'm off to read some Dracula and maybe catch up with what is going on in the States.
And for good measure here is a photo of us trying to bust some dance moves over the weekend: