My adventures have officially begun! I woke up around 9 Wednesday morning to take care of last minute preparations before my 4:40 plane. Despite a delayed departure on my first flight from Reagan National Airport on Wednesday, I arrived in Madrid Thursday morning a full half hour before the scheduled arrival time. The flights were smooth and I’m sure mom and dad will be happy to hear I didn’t get lost in an airport or miss a flight (they had their doubts about my ability to navigate the airports, or, well anywhere really, on my own!). Frankly though, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t had some doubts about my navigating abilities as well, especially as this was my first time flying solo.
After arriving in Madrid I met up with the rest of the JMU students to take a bus to Salamanca, where I am staying for the first six weeks of the trip. The bus ride took somewhere between two and a half and three hours. The ride was beautiful, passing rolling hills with a backdrop of mountains in the distance. The hills were so much apart of the landscape, especially around Madrid, that we often drove through tunnels constructed into the sides of them. Unfortunately I missed much of this portion of the drive as the exhaustion from my 24 hours without sleep started kicking in, and even though I was fighting hard to stay awake, I started dozing off every few minutes.
I snapped awake after seeing a road sign for Salamanca, erroneously believing we were only a few miles from the city— we ended up driving another full hour, so I was very wrong! During this time we passed miles of farmland and grasslands. Towns here were few and far apart, and we often drove for about ten minutes at a time before seeing another sign of civilization, aside from the occasional farmhouse or field of cows. Each time a town or small city came into view in the distance, I immediately concluded that's this was Salamanca. We passed about five "Salamancas" before finally arriving in the actual city. After hours of sitting on planes and then a bus, I guess I was just ready to be there, especially after the road sign had deceived me into thinking we were close.
Upon arrival we met our host families and separated for the night. I am living with two other girls from the program and one older Spanish woman named Escoli who is our host mother. She lives alone in a small apartment about a ten minute walk from the Plaza Mayor and a fifteen minute walk from the University. I am sharing a small bedroom with one of the other girls in my house. My host mother made us a light dinner of chicken and vegetable soup when we got to the house. She is extremely sweet, though she talks very fast so I don't always understand what she is saying. One thing I did understand was her frequent insistence that we eat more during dinner. After dinner it was still too early to go to bed, so the four of us—me my two housemates, and my host mother—took a walk around the city. At the end of our walk we stopped in a café on the Plaza Mayor where our host mother bought us drinks and a tapas plate with four little beef kebabs. When we went back to the apartment at 9:30, the sun had just started to set.
Hasta Luego!
Aubrey
