The first 2 days

As I sunk into my seat on my flight from Boston to Madrid on Saturday night, getting ready for the 6 hours ahead of me on a crowded with babies crying flight, I was instantly introduced to the concept of language immersion. A woman was talking with the flight attendant and kept looking at me and back at her. I started to realize she was going to ask to if her husband could take my seat so that they could sit together, which was going to say yes to either way. She then approached me smiling and talking in Spanish faster than I could ever describe, all the while I’m attempting to keep up and pointing at my seat and her husband repeatedly saying “aqui?” When all was said and done, they both probably realized that I was a gringo estupido, but they were super nice and her husband gave me a little grin and a thumbs up right before they sat down in their seats.
I arrived in Granada, greeted by our student advisor Christina, with about 7 kids from my program and we all came to hotel inglaterra, which is right near the center of the city. By 8pm that night the rest of our group had showed up and we all went out to a welcoming dinner nearby. The most interesting part of this portion of the day was realizing that there are 16 people in my program… 14 of which are girls. It was a little bit of a shock at first but they are all nice and share the same excitement to be in Europe for a few months, so I don’t think there will be any issues of me feeling left out if I don’t order an apple-tini at dinner when we go out. The dinner we had on the first night was our introduction to tapas, which are small plates of food. What’s unique about Granada is that it is the only place in Spain that gives a free tapa with the order of a drink at specified “bars de tapas, allowing you to eat an assortment of food on the bill of drink orders. As far a tourism goes, we have walked around and seen different plazas, but nothing informative quite yet as it is only our second day. …So that’s been the last 48 hrs of my time here, more to come very soon y Hasta Luego!