9/1/10 La Playa

Today I woke up around 8:45 am to get to breakfast around 9 am.  We have been staying at the Hotel Luna since we arrived, which is in the coastal town Castelldefels, south of Barcelona.  In the morning, the hotel serves us breakfast which includes croissants and pastries and fruit.  Then we have a language class and conversation group.  Our group of about 30 students was divided into two sections and I am in the A section (so I guess Bowdoin has taught me well).  There is a range of Spanish abilities here, including some native speakers and people who haven't taken a spanish class since freshman year of college.  After two hours of class, which has been our routine for the last few days, we have a talk about something pertaining to studying abroad.  Today we went over how our home stay will work and the concept of culture shock.  We get to meet our families on Friday!  The reason that they don't tell us our families right away is that they like to get to know us in person while they make adjustments with which family we get matched with.  After our lecture we had lunch.  The hotel has a garden, and we get to chose from a list of sandwhiches.  I've had the ham sandwich, and the sandwhich with eggs on it.  All the sandwiches are served on delicious baguettes and have a yummy tomato spread on them.  After lunch we have all afternoon until dinner which is served at 8:15 p.m. (early for Spain).  I went to the beach which is about two blocks from our hotel!  The weather was kind of cloudy, but that did not detract from the gorgeous Mediterrean.  I went swimming with a few of my friends from the program and the laid out on the beach and chatted.  Some people brought their homework to the beach, but I did my homework before lunch.  The water is so warm and it is very wavey.  A few people were surfing.  After the beach, we headed back to the hotel to rinse off in the pool.  The reason we have so much free time is because each of us has an individual appointment with the directors of the program about classes.  I had my appointment yesterday and I'm planning to take three classes with the program and 1 class at the university.  My appointment was at 7 p.m. and during my free time in the afternoon my friend Morgan and I walked to the train stations and took it to a town, Sitgan, further south down the coast.  We walked around the town which was a bit more touristy than Castelldefels.  It has been nice going out with Morgan because we make it a point to speak in Spanish on our outings rather than just falling into the trap of speaking English with all of our fellow American students.  Sitgan was an older city with gorgeous architecture and even though most of the stores were closed for the afternoon (for siesta), we found an gelato shop and I got hazelzut gelato on a stick dipped in chocolate.  Yesterday evening after dinner a bunch of us went to the beach and roamed the town, which isn't too busy on Tuesday nights.  Now everyone is just hanging out and taking advantage of our limited wireless internet (one of the kids on the trip figured out how to turn his computer into a wireless hot spot)!  Well I don't know what else to say... living in the hotel isn't too much of a culture shock but I'm sure once I am living with my family and taking classes at the university things will be a bit different.  I can sure get used to living two blocks away from the beach.