First Week Fun!

Hola Amigos :P

Wow, it’s been an amazing couple of days here in Spain since I last posted! Thankfully the weather has finally calmed down from scorching hot to just moderately uncomfortable. My poor Canadian body had to make some very quick Brazil-esque heat preparations.

After my first 2 days, which really solely contained minor forays from Ana’s house and some sweet sleeping off of pretty intense jet lag, I was ready to start figuring out what is turning out to be quite an amazing city! My third day here Marta and I went out to a tobacco shop and I bought my new transit pass for all of Madrid for around 50 Euros per month, pretty good when you consider a pass for only buses in Victoria would be $80. That night, I met up with my fellow university students from Canada downtown for our first (and might I say delicious) Spanish paella, it’s worth it to be eating meat full time again just to be able to have that!

The next few days were a blur of preparation for school and getting used to the city. On Monday, Universidad Carlos III offered a little welcome event and orientation. This led to my first true test of Spanish transit...what a gong show. Even with instructions from Ana, my transit path took me down from the bus station to the train “Cercanía” station, which was a hive of trains going all over the place. Needless to say, confusion set in and I became very happy that I had been smart enough to give myself around 3 hours to make the hour long trip to school :P By the time I figured out which train I needed to take I arrived right on time (not to mention I didn’t even go the wrong direction once!). I think that Its going to be reat to be able to take this train to school every day though as it passes through a pretty beautiful area of Madrid and is great for people watching.
There is not really any class this week for us exchange students other than a more in-depth orientation on Friday, which is actually really good because I have been focusing on trying to get all my paperwork and bureaucratic mumbo jumbo out of the way before classes really get going!

Anyways, I hope everyone is doing well!

Mucho Amor,

Rob