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