first day of classes

Convenient magnetic bike locks

Bridge over el río

I finally figured out what the word I have been hearing constantly in Spain means.  The word was "vale," and it means "OK."  This is good news because I had been saying "OK" in English this whole time, so now I will sound a little more spanish. 


I've learned lots of new words already just from my first day of classes.  Also, I had a spanish professor pronounce my last name perfectly.  I can't remember the last time (or any time) that happened in the U.S.  I hesitated because I didn't realize that I didn't need to correct her.  


I can tell that my spanish is improving just from what I am able to understand and say back to people.  It comes more naturally already, even though I still struggle to remember simple words like "grass" or "desk."  Speaking of grass, I feel like the grass here is different than in the U.S because after sitting in it for awhile after running, my legs got extremely itchy.  My first class today had 10 people, and I thought that was small until my second class which had 5.  Class number three was more normal, 18.  I can't imagine what people from Michigan State are thinking.  They are probably used to classes with 100 or more people.  


My classes seem like they will be very practical in the sense that we are going to learn things like expressions, words, and phrases that are common to native speaking.  In the U.S., we didn't learn a lot of things that are practical for everyday conversation.  In my conversation class, we are going to learn more about how people talk here and in what contexts certain words are appropriate or not.  

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Change of subject now, but I want to make note of how much I love Spanish grocery stores.  Maybe I'm not used to seeing things priced in Euros yet, but even with the conversion everything there is so inexpensive.  I also like looking at the different brands and varieties of food.  They have a lot of different fruit drinks that are combined with milk, and today I bought some kind of spanish Yo-J.  Any type of croissant filled with chocolate is necessary as well.  They have something called Cola-Cao, and I had it a lot when I was here in high school.  You can make chocolate milk or hot chocolate with it, and I think there is caffeine in it as well.  It says something about giving you energy on the label at least.  


There is a machine in my school's building cafeteria, which is more like a lounge, and you can get pretty much any type of hot drink from it ranging from café to hot chocolate to just milk.  There are 3 options for flavoring: no dulce (sweet), dulce or muy dulce.  I'm curious as to what muy dulce tastes like, but it's likely that I will be a frequent visitor to that machine.  


Other random things I have noticed or that we talked about in class:
-Cars do not pull over for ambulances- they will move if they are blocking an intersection, but as far as driving they will just keep going right behind them.  I haven't seen any going extremely fast though. 
-People always wear shoes in the house.  This is strange for me because I don't like wearing shoes inside at all. 
-They almost never have people over at their houses.  People prefer to meet elsewhere and basically only eat and sleep in their houses. 
-There's no clothes dryer here, only a washer.  So all of my laundry was hung up on a rack that is on the porch area outside the apartment. 
-University students often use the word "pasta" instead of "dinero."
-Store hours are basically whenever the manager feels like showing up.  If it says 10 a.m, don't be surprised if it's 10:30 and still not open. 
-In downtown Valencia, they recently installed an interesting type of bike rack.  I'm pretty sure it is magnetic, and the bikes just attach to the bike rack.  It looks pretty slick in my opinion, and a lot easier. 

That's probably enough for now.  I have 2 hours until dinner, some homework might get done. 
Also, I uploaded new pictures I took yesterday during my tour of Old Town Valencia to my web albums.