First days of school

So I have officially survived my first week of school. I'm still not used to going to class, doing homework. It's been soo long since first semester at ISU.

I go to the university here, but the actual campus is outside the city. I take the bus to class, and either take the bus back or walk. It's a pretty long walk, but I am going to try to walk home at least a couple times a week if it's not raining.

We have all our classes in 2 classrooms in a main building. There are a lot of other Spanish students there too, but I only have class with the other ISU students in my group. Our professors are from the university, and our classes are taught only in Spanish (most of the teachers don't even know English). I am taking classes for literature, conversation, Spain today, Spanish art, and Spain history.

Since our group is only 20ish people, my classes are small. Some classes have almost all the students in it, but one of my classes has only 7 people. So that's hard to get used to, after taking huge lecture classes at Iowa State with 400 students. But it's nice, and it makes me pay attention, which is hard to do. My mind wanders so much during class because it's in a different language, so it makes me tired to have to focus for that long.

Our homework hasn't been that difficult so far. For the conversation class, we have to do a presentation in front of everyone every Monday. My first one was this week. If you know me, you know that I have absolutely no problem standing in front of any crowd talking in any language. I could give a presentation about the chalkboard for 4 minutes if I had to. This one was easy, we had to explain where we are from, where we live, where we have traveled to. I did mine, no problem, and at the end my teacher didn't say much about my speech, but he told me I talked too fast. Um, what? I wanted to tell him, "Ohh you should hear me talk in English, sir." So I guess I have to slow down in my presentations... :-/

Steph and I eat lunch together after class. Our meals have still been really good, and still wayyy too much food. Yesterday one of our moms was home to eat lunch with us. We had a very delicious meal of rice and ketchup, hotdogs, and eggs (it sounds weird all mixed together, but I promise it was awesome). Our mom brought out another plate with veggies and some kind of meat, which she told us was pig. Steph and I both tried it, I actually took a really big piece. It tasted very different, very chewy. We finally asked what it was, and our mom just pointed to her ear. PIG EAR. Super. I'm not going to tell you what I thought about that, but I can say that we weren't so hungry after that...

I've had a really bad cold all week. It's soo annoying. I hope it goes away soon. Steph and I went to Carrefour, which we actually call Wal-Mart, because that's what it is. It has basically everything. So I bought Halls there, and have already gone through most of them. I can't stop coughing. I feel bad during class, I'm practically wheezing. Hopefully it will get better soon. My moms are so worried, I'm not used to being babied when I'm sick.

Tomorrow morning I am going to Sevilla. It's a city in southern Spain. I'm going with 6 other students, we are all really excited. A 3 hour bus ride, staying 2 nights in a hostel. I'll post my stories from that next week. :) Hasta luego!