Off to a good start

Last night was the second Cafe Ingles event. It was really cool to get to talk to so many Spaniards in English and Spanish. Oh, by the way, the house flooded last night because of all the rain in the street. That was a fun clean-up project... Really put the Semester off to a good start!

And we got a new refrigerator in our apartment-- one that works! So exciting!

Some observations on Spain:

1- There are very few convince foods to be found here. No one bakes with cake mixes or frozen biscuit dough, or even condensed soup. In retrospect, it's probably a good thing for their health-- they probably consume a lot smaller quantity of sodium and preservatives, but it makes it harder to cook things that I'm familiar with.

2- Lights in the hallways of apartment buildings are not on all the time. They have switches in all the halls that when pushed, turn the lights on for two minutes or so, and then they go out again. I'm sure that keeping the lights on when not necessary saves the dueños (landlords) a lot of money on electrical bills.

3- Traffic rules and road construction are just different enough to be quite confusing. The highways here don't have exit ramps. Rather they have roundabouts, and the cars all go in the same direction, and exit the circle at the proper cross road. This makes it extremely difficult to sleep on the busses we take on our excursions with the language school. Also, the crosswalks aren't at the intersection of the roads, but back a little bit, so that there has to be a stoplight in the middle of a straight-a-way. That's one thing that I think makes much more sense that in America. Finally, the traffic signals make a beeping noise when it's time to walk. It's supposed to help blind people, but I've found it to be helpful when I zone out while waiting to cross the street.

4- A Spanish deck of cards is different than an American deck. The suits are: clubs, swords, cups, and coins. Also, the numbers go from 1-12. This might make it different to play any card game that I already know...

More observations to come!!