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<\/a>After a lengthy layover in Amsterdam, I came to Madrid, capital of Spain and home to 3.3 madrile\u00f1os. I had booked a hostel<\/a> that day in Chicago, so went on an epic quest across the city to find it. I did, and fell asleep promptly. Naturally, I slept through the two redundant alarms I had set, so I was forced to shower and eat rather quickly.<\/p>\n The people of Madrid were extraordinarily helpful on my trek to the bus station\u2014from giving me change at the subway station to helping me find the correct route. One woman, Carla, even guided me to the right bus station. In the spirit of paying it forward, I helped a Spanish lady and her daughter decipher their bus tickets. So, despite the overcast skies of Madrid, I headed into Valencia with a sunny (albeit sleepy) disposition.<\/p>\n Upon arriving at Valencia, I placed a call to my host mother, Mery (she dislikes her given name: \u201cHilda\u201d). This was my first phone conversation in complete Spanish, and I was still disoriented, so I interpreted her as saying \u201cMeet me at the Cinca Roja.\u201d The Finca Roja<\/a> is a local landmark near the house for the taxi driver\u2019s reference\u2014as Calle Honrato Juan is a rather obscure side street.<\/p>\n After the taxi driver found the apartment in a small red book of maps, I spent my first 10 minutes in Spain fumbling with a padlock protecting my luggage from the ladrones known to frequent hostels\u2026naturally, I locked the combination securely in the bag and promptly forgot it. And thus began my time in Spain.<\/p>\n Life here is hard to translate. Food, for one, is eaten at 8:45 (by early morning people like myself), lunch at 2:30 in the afternoon, and dinner around 9:30. Sidewalks start emptying around 1:00 for the cycle to begin again. The weather is phenomenal\u2014right now it\u2019s a sunny 82 with a gentle breeze (the beach is calling me).<\/p>\n It\u2019s the little differences that make the experience. Milk doesn\u2019t need to be refrigerate. Crying children make more of an \u201ceeeeeeeeeee\u201d sound than an \u201caaaaaaaaaaaaaaa\u201d sound (school started yesterday; my pseudo-niece, Sarita, was not enthused). Iberico ham (in the States priced somewhere north of $50 a pound) is served regularly on epically proportioned sub sandwiches.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most strange thing about the trip so far is that I\u2019m different. Political correctness doesn\u2019t seem to have quite as strong hold in Spain (or, at least, not in the American sense), and people are accustomed to openly staring at anything they find interesting. It\u2019s a slightly disconcerting feeling to sit on a bus where everyone is staring at you.<\/p>\n Of course, fundamentally, people are the same. I\u2019ve certainly enjoyed the company of the few locals I\u2019ve had the opportunity to meet, and enjoy discussing cultural differences with my widely travelled host family\u2014Mery is Peruvian, and her children have all studied English abroad. So I\u2019m well-situated to discover this new world.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve already seen quite a bit of Valencia, from touring with friends to unintentional hikes (doesn\u2019t help that street signs are in a local dialect, if present at all). There\u2019s always more to do and see, so my ever-increasing knowledge of local spots should yield an interesting post later this year\u2026 but for the moment, I\u2019m back to la vida espa\u00f1ola. Hasta luego!<\/p>\n The similarities between \u201cextranjero\u201d (foreigner) and \u201cextra\u00f1o\u201d (strange) are becoming increasingly obvious. I am in a different world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-study-abroad"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/13\/2010\/09\/CIMG4308_21.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/30"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/studyingabroad\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/13\/2010\/09\/CIMG4337_2.jpg\")
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