El Domingo (Sunday)

Last night, I talked to my host mom Espe about my family and friends. I brought lots of pictures and showed those to her. She told me that she is divorced and works in another city-1 hour away- as a social worker. She works with delinquent youth and helps them with their problems. Her ex-husband also lives near Caceres. He works with children who have to be taken from their parents and put into orphanages. He lives outside the city and has a farm for a hobby.

At 10:30pm last night, I met up with the other students and we went to a cafe for cafe con leche (coffe with milk) and el chocolate (hot chocolate). Next, we went to a concert at a bar that one of the students from Spain told us about. It was basically one guy playing guitar and singing. I could not understand any of the words because it was so loud. After the concert finished, we went to another bar down the street. When we walked in, the first floor seemed pretty crowded so we went up the stairs to the second floor, which was completely empty. Shortly, the bartender came upstairs and we started dancing. It didn't take long before the Spaniards started coming upstairs :) The party kinda came to us I suppose. We heard a couple of English songs which were really fun to dance to. Lady Gaga is really big here. After, we went to a third bar where a guy offered us some free alcohol if we would go there...probably because not much was going on and he wanted us to liven up the party. We left at about 3am and after walking everyone home, I finally got to bed around 4:30am! But in Spain, it's very common to stay out til 6am on the weekends!

Today is Sunday, so all of the stores are closed. Only restaurants and churches are open. This morning, I went to Mass with Lizzy and Courtney. We went to La Iglesia de San Juan. All of the churches here are cement buildings with no inner walls, just cement, which makes it really cold. It was very beautiful though! I could not really understand the readings, and unfortunately we didn't have a guide of the responses in Spanish, but I will look into getting one. After Mass, I came home and had lunch, then took a 3 hour siesta :) I LOVE siestas!

When I woke up, Maria and Clara (my host sisters) told me about their family and friends and the three of us went with Maria's friend Cristina to a cafe. The cafe had an art gallery upstairs which was pretty cool! Cristina speaks quite a bit of English and she wanted to practice a bit, so that was fun! We walked around the old part of the city and they told me all about the history of different places. Hopefully I will get some pictures up soon! There were lots of statues of important people too. I kissed the toes of the statue of San Pedro, which is believed to help you get a boyfriend. My sister Maria told me "I kiss the toes of San Pedro and now I have boyfriend." I love listening to their English too. Today, I taught them how to say sausage.

Tomorrow is my first day of school! I'm kinda nervous about understanding the professors, but I think it will be fine. We might only be at school for like 4.5 hours tomorrow. It rained both yesterday and today but my sisters said it doesn't usually rain this much. Tomorrow will be sunny and that will be nice!