Lengua class is really gross, Lengua class i hate the most (and other positive ramblings)

If any of you manage to get the reference in the title, I will love you forever. Just saying.

Anyways.....hmmm whats been going on the last couple weeks? I feel like i'm actually starting to understand the spanish language. Well, Kinda. There are moments when i'm all "effthisidon'tunderstandanything" and then there are moments when i'm all "yayicanactuallyunderstandstuffhellyeah" It's a bit of a rollercoaster.

Remember that book that I have to read for Lengua class that I talked about? well, I hate to answer questions about it. My teacher was not very feliz con mi trabajo. I don't think she gets that I don't speak spanish!! I'm legitly concerned. Well I have to read another book and i'm hoping it goes better this time....Ojala.....

Last weekend I went to Madrid with some amigas. It was quite fun. We pretty much just walked around the city and took pictures with random statues. I even ran into an Australian lady on the street and chatted her up. It was nice to speak english with someone. My spanish friends looked so very confused. It was great

Tomorrows Halloween. Apparently here, Halloween isn't a big deal like in the EE.UU. But i'm sure it will be fun

Buenas Noches Y Buena Suerte

Annelise

Today and Some Thoughts About Tomorrow

So I decided to write about today. Don't really know why but here goes.

The morning began interestingly. My host mom (who works at my school) overslept so I ended up getting to school late. In retrospect, I should've woken her up but oh well. The first class I had today was history. The teacher is usually super bitchy to kids who show up late but she was suprisingly nice to me. Maybe its my foreign charm ;)

Next was Economia (econ). It wasn't a particularly eventful class. As usual my teacher talked alot, I didn't understand anything, and I giggled at how my classmates pronounce "Adam Smith"

Next was supposed to be math class but my teacher didn't show up so we got to hang out outside near the basketball court and talk. A classmate of mine had a sandwich and bit it to be in the shape of Spain. I wish I had gotten a picture of it. And then we she started to eat it another girl said "Oh no, You just ate Gallicia!"

Next was Recreo (break) I walked around the street with two other girls, bought a Coke, and delt with the fact that my new boots were killing my feet. fun stuff :)

After this class was Lengua (Spanish Class) I don't like Lengua cuz I don't really do anything. A few weeks ago my teacher approached me and told me the lessons would be imposible for me. So now I read books in spanish during class and don't participate in the lessons. Its pretty hard to concentrate when the teacher's blabbing away.

Next were my two english classes. First was Oral English. We did this activity to learn about roommates and apartments (or should i say 'flats' since the class is all British English) I like this class cuz I feel smart for once! The next english class is reading and writing which is kinda boring. We read a story about Spaniards that moved to Australia and how they were shocked that there are more sheep than people down under. Later I read a story in the workbook about culture shock. I laughed because I could relate to everything that the author said in the story (hes a Spaniard who lived in Scotland for a year) Everything he said about food, language, and homesickness was sooo true. While reading the story i kept saying "amen to that" in my head.

Anyways, i'm sure all of you know that tomorrow is October 20th. Theres an event page on Facebook that says that tomorrow many people will be wearing purple to pay respect to the victims of the recent suicides due to bullying based on sexual orientation.
I don't know what its like to be bullied for being gay, but I do know what its like to be bullied. It sucks. Ok, that was a bit of an understatement but its true. You feel lonely, angry,and you wonder what you could've possibly done to deserve such treatment. The truth is, no one deserves treatment like that. I really wish we would stop teaching kids that "sticks and stones" bullshit. Words hurt. They hurt like a bitch. I think we all need to realize that its perfectly normal to be hurt by words and how to overcome them. I only don't necessarily believe that bullies persecute people because they feel bad about themselves. I think they bully for kicks, just to make themselves look powerful. And then you have the 'unintentional' bullies who say mean things to people for the sake of being 'funny'. Nothing is funny about making someone hurt. Some people are so fucking stupid.....
Well, I'll be wearing purple tomorrow. I can't decide on my purple hoodie or my new purple shirt. I have some time to decide.

Until next time!

Buenas Noches y Buena Suerte

Annelise

Press 1 for English

Alright, I know I haven't updated this in forever so this is gonna be a long post :)

soooo remember that Rotary meeting that I talked about in my last post? well let me tell you what happened. I walked in slightly late, without my blazer, and when we were supposed to say our tutors name I said the wrong name!!! asdfsadfasf embarrassing! but i did get to hang out with the other exchange students in host club, which is always fun :)

A couple weeks ago, I went to Segovia with my fellow californian, Lauren! (did that just rhyme?) It was a fun daytrip with our host dads. They hadn't met each other before but I think they bonded. It was a proud moment for Lauren and I. Anyways, We went to the ancient Roman Aqueduct which was super big and cool. It reminded me of one of the things that I love about Europe, which is all the ancient architecture and what not. We basically spent the whole day walking up flights of stairs and looking at castles. We went to one part of a castle exhibit thing we discovered some glass device from the Middle Ages that looked like a bong. Oh and a midevil jock strap as well.....nice

The weekend after that I was off to Jaen once again with my host mom. It was fun cuz i got to see and hang out with my host brother who I hadn't seen since my first week here! As usual we had fun times walking around town, looking at churches and rocking out to Katy Perry (and explaining him what the lyrics meant, let me tell you explaining what "epic fail" means is pretty tough)

This past weekend was a nice long four day weekend. love.
Spain's national day thingy was on Tuesday so i guess the spaniards figured to give us that monday off as well. I hung out with Lauren, went to work on a science project with some classmates and went to the movies to see Saw 6. Freakiest.Thing.EVER.
Despite the fact that it was dubbed in spanish, I could actually understand the majority of it, granted that 99.9 percent of the movie is screaming.

Well yesterday I went to the Piedad (the lady in charge of my host club) 's house. The other exchange students from my area came to chill and talk. I can honestly say I forgot a ton of spanish due the english speaking.
The reason why the meeting was put together is because my host club is planning to make a float for the Three Kings Day parade. I'm super stoked for it!
All of us exchangers are gonna dress up to represent a certain country (the theme of our float is world unity or something like that)
I decided to go back to my roots and represent the Netherlands :) My grandpa is gonna be so happy hahah
Speaking of which, my school is doing an end of the year trip to the Netherlands. I am SO going! I've always wanted to visit the "motherland" and see where my family comes from (cheesy.........)

"So Annelise, hows language coming along?"
Thank for inquiring, devoted blog follower ;)
Language has been improving alot lately. I've been in spain for a little over a month and I feel like i'm actually starting to pick up Castellano. I'm no where close to fluent (there are moments when I think 'ugh why doesn't spain speak english')
As odd as this sounds, I have alot more sympathy for the mexicans in san diego that don't know english well. Alot of people don't realize this but, going to a country that doesn't speak the same language as you is harrrrrrrrrrrd. There are people here that speak english but no one who speaks it as a first language like me (except for the other exchangers)
But I just got to stay focused and motivated to learn so I can get by and become a Spaniard as best I can..
Another difficult thing I've had to deal with here is studying.
Bottom line, Studying sucks. No matter what language you speak, what country you live in, or what kind of school you go to, Studying just flat out SUCKS
But studying in a foreign language is well.....something else
I have some pretty tough topics to study (philosophy, ancient european history, Econ. etc)
Its for sure hard to focus. Thank God I have students in my class that are willing to help me if I have problems with understanding.

Well my fingers hurt from all this typing so I'm gonna conclude this post. I promise i'll upload pictures soon and update this more often. Adios!

Buenas Noches y Buena Suerte

Annelise

insert witty title here

Hola! :D
I have nothing else better to do so I figured I'd take a moment to write another post. The main event that happened since my last post is the inbound orientation this past weekend. So on Friday, all of the exchange students living in Spain met up at this college in the Madrid area to talk, get to know each other, discuss rules blahblahblah. I'm kinda thankful that I had a short commute, just a twenty minute car ride. A lot of other students had to fly or take long bus ride, I feel thankful :)
The orientation weekend was pretty fun. Although to be honest we didn't do a whole lot. The official buissness of the weekend (rules, introducing rotary people and such) only took up 30 minutes of the two day excursion. Most of the weekend was just talking to people, which is always fun. I met sooooo many new people. Most of them were from the US, a pretty good amount from Canada, a German girl, an Austrian boy and a Taiwanese girl. I ended up spending two hours playing Telephone and this weird guessing game that I don't remember the name of with 10 other american kids. We were all assigned roommates to spend the nights with. My roomates were a girl named Megan from Virginia and Jenny from Taiwan. Plus we hung out with the girls in the room next door cuz we were connected by a huuuge bathroom! Overall it was a good weekend. Since I spent that whole weekend speaking english i've sort of forgotten how to speak spanish :P which kinda whooped my ass when school started again.

speaking of school, i've had two days of school so far. My first day was a hell of a lot better than I thought it was gonna be. The schools a tad ghetto (everyone dresses like cholas and cholos.... i thought I had left San Diego....) the people are super duper nice and i've made a couple friends already!

I have classes in econ, contemporary history, contemporary social science, english (love it), spanish literature and language, philosophy, and PE (hate it)

School, obviously, is super duper tough. I thought high school back home was hard but its a lot harder in a foreign language. Thank God that i have classmates and teachers that are willing to help me. Thanks to my friends in philosophy class, i now know how to say the word "owl" in spanish because they were commenting on how the teacher looks like an owl.

English is boring yet hilarious at the same time. My teacher is pretty good cept for the fact that she used weird British slang that I don't understand and pronounced the word "creative" wrong. She had me read sentences to the class today. I was kinda embarrassed. Anyways, I read some dumb sentences about going to New York and drinking coffee with some guy named John (my teacher wrote them, not me) The class kept telling me to repeat the sentences s.l.o.w.l.y It made me laugh cuz it reminded me of..well.. me during spanish class when Bayless would have one of the native speakers reading vocab lists to us.

Spanish is coming slowly but surely. It sucks, I feel like i've lost a part of my personality. I love talking. I could talk and talk forever about anything to anyone. Here my vocabulary is so limited I can barely be the Annelise that I was back home. I'm feeling optimistic though. I first started thinking about this in my english class when my teacher asked us to write three adjectives to describe ourselves. The first one I put down was "silly" she looked at it and said "I don't really think this suits you" Anyone who knows me knows how much of a goofball I am. Its so much harder to be my goofball self in spanish. Once I learn spanish i'll be better...i hope

Its also been quite rainy here. During Econ class, I heard to booms of thunder and then it started pissing down rain outside. This means that summers really over :(

I'm going to a Rotary dinner tonight. I hope its fun and that there won't be as much smoking as the last one

Buenas Noches y Buena Suerte

Annelise

Que Tal?

Sorry it's been a while since i've posted something here. I promise I won't neglect this poor little poor little blog anymore :P

Anyways..... hmmm lets see what have I been up to the past few days?
Well last week I went to dinner in Madrid with Nacho and my host mom. We had delicious paella and this weird fish thing that I didn't like. While walking to the restaurant Nacho showed me the corner where all the tranny prostitutes hang out and the best place in Madrid to get a tattoo. Good to know :)

This past weekend I went to Jaen in Andalusia, which is where Nacho lives, to visit pretty much everyone on the mom's side of the family. My host grandma was nice except for the fact that it was kinda hard to understand her. In Andalusia they speak spanish oddly. My host dad calls it "Spanish with minimal effort" For Example, Adio=adios ma=mas como sta=como esta

On Saturday, I went to the Alhambra with Nacho and his cousin Inez. It was a fairly short drive from Jaen to Granada. We passed the time by rocking out to Ke$ha and Katy Perry. (ohh this is completely random, but in spain they don't write Ke$ha's name with a dollar sign. weird right?)


The Alhambra is basically a series of old Arabic influenced architecture. Super beautiful! I thought it was funny that there were hoards of japanese tourists there taking pictures with a sterotypical peace sign. Nacho and I had fun imitating them in pictures :)

The day we went to Alhambra was on September 11th. It didn't even strike me until Nacho went to go get the admission tickets and the ticket machine said "11 septiembre 2010" I didn't really think about it that much. I just remembered what it was like, how long ago it was, and how young I was. In a weird way its nice to know that while everyone back in the states was being super nostalgic and sad, I was having fun in Granada.

The only bad part about this weekend adventure is that Nacho has to stay in Jaen :( I'm gonna miss having someone around close to my age to talk too and help me with spanish, but i'll see him again eventually. Now that I live with just the host mom i'll be learning alot more spanish

Yesterday, an american exchange student who is staying with my host mom's friend came to the house. Turns out shes also from California (San Louis Obispo to be exact) Her name is Lauren and shes really cool. She lives like five minutes away from me but shes going to a different school :( Later we went to a local Rotary Club meeting at a restaurant. Basically it was Lauren, myself, two other exchange students from America, and a bunch of old spaniards smoking cigarettes. All of us exchange students kinda sat there bored due to the fact that all the meeting was in spanish. When the rotarians would laugh super hard at a joke, we would all just sit there.... I can't wait for the day when I can actually understand jokes in spanish.

Thats all for now.

Buenas Noches Y Buena Suerte

Annelise

Bienvenidos A Colmenar

• So i have been for two days now. Soooo much has happened in this short time. First off, the flights. My first flight to Washington D.C. went by quickly. I sat next to this nice woman who was flying to Maine for a wedding. After that I had a 2 1/2 hour layover in the DC airport. Unfortunatly for me, it was a boring airport with not a lot of things to do. So i ended upsitting at the gate watching a Spanish family of four arguing about what to have for dinner. The flight from DC to Madrid went felt so LONG!! Thank God there was a TV in the seat in front of me. I got to watch two episodes of Glee and the movie Date Night (which I found entertaining, weirdly enough) I thought the excrutiation ended when the plane landed, but I was wrong. I went to baggage claim and sat there for 30 minutes in the 100 degree Madrid air port waiting for my bag to come. Then I found my host brother and father. Being the idiot that I am, I greeted them by saying "Hi" (aren't I supposed to be speaking spanish?!) Anyways, on the car ride to my new home, I was started to realize that i'm finally in Spain! After preparing for it all these months i'm finally here! It's weird and wonderful at the same time. Soon after, I went on a tour of Madrid city with my family. It's so amazing! lots of history, old buildings, (and of course, the shopping) I didn't mind all the walking, even though i was jet lagged and overheated. My brother Nacho pointed out to me all the illegal immigrants from Africa that sell fake purses. interestante....

Upon arrival, my host family made me breakfast: Eggs and Bacon. She also offered me Horchata in a carton! She was shocked to know that I had had Horchata before. I have to say, it was better than any i've ever had at a mexican restaurant. Speaking of food, people eat so much food here!! especially during lunch, the most important meal of the day. My first lunch here I had, mussels, salad, chicken, ice cream and this Brazilian ginger ale. Que Delicioso! For breakfast here i've had a bocadillo (spanish sandwhich) with ham and cheese along with some bread coated with sugar (and horchata of course) For dinner on my second day, I had steak, pisto (spanish ratatouille), banana, the weird mini apple thing that I didn't like, and pineapple yogurt. I am going to be so fat by the time I come home.

Language has been fairly difficult so far. My host father and brother speak english but my host mom knows about 5 words. Nacho acts as a part time translater for me when i talk to my mom but its still no walk in the park. They told me that I have to practice my spanish lisp. this will be fun. I was watching TV in the house and it was pretty hard to understand the dialogue in the shows. I did watch the Simpsons in Spanish (pretty weird right?) and I saw an Ad for South Park in Spanish (even weirder) I think that being around Spanish 24/7 has helped alot. I've learned lots of new words and even taught my family some words. It's a mutualistic relationships for sure!

Well I think i'm going to go to bed now. Keep checking this for new posts!

Buenas Noches y Buena Suerte

Annelise Pell

Packing and Prepping

So it seems that all I've been doing lately is packing and prepping. I gotta tell ya its really REALLY hard to pack for a year abroad. As a girl, my first instinct is to pack dress and pair of shoes I own, even though I've been told to pack very few clothes. I just gotta remember that I'm going to be shopping there and coming home with fancy European clothes. I've found that the best way to pack clothes and save room is to roll your clothes instead of folding them (works amazingly)

Strangely enough, I still don't know when I'm leaving yet! I'm planning to leave on September 3rd. I would like to leave earlier but i want to be in San Diego for my birthday on September 1st.

The wildly intense nervous feeling I had is gone and is replaced by a "I really gotta work hard and get ready" feeling. It truly is "crunch time".

My host sister Cósima left to go to Davis, CA on an exchange yesterday. I love that I'm coming from CA to Madrid and she's coming from Madrid to CA. I think she'll like Davis. Sure, it's no LA or San Francisco but she's close enough to those fun cities so she'll be alright. When I first talked to her about Colmenar Viejo she said "The town is not so pretty, but the people are very partying" Sounds good to me. However, I disagree with her on the prettiness of the town (look at the photo above and see for yourself). Plus, its a 30 minute train ride from Madrid which is gonna be amazing! You can't get much better than the capital city, am I right?

Its time for another random fact about Spain:

The world's oldest restaurant, Casa Botín, is in Madrid. Its been open since 1725

Buenas Noches y Buena Suerte

Annelise