Wow...I can't believe that November is only two days away! October has been a whirlwind of a month in which I have found myself continually eating those words I wrote about being bored and wishing I had something to do. Boredom would be a welcome respite from my current hectic schedule. Anyway, no one reads this to hear me whine about my schedule, so I will not subject you all to any more of it.
I had only just arrived in Madrid when I posted my first blog, so I have a lot of ground to cover. So, I started classes on September 21 and just finished my midterms yesterday, October 28. I had to change my schedule several times in order to accomodate the hours of my internship (which I will address in a minute). I ended up frontloading my week by having to attend every class I am taking on Mondays, when I am in class from 9am to 4:15pm without a break. I only have one class on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:30 to 11:50am, and two classes on Wednesdays from 9 to 11:50am. But don't think I just lay around all day after that!
As I mentioned earlier, I had to work my schedule around the hours of my internship with Club of Madrid, which is a an organization composed of ex-Presidents and Prime Ministers from around the world working to provide solutions to developing and transitional democracies, as well as working to help promote human rights and liberty for everyone. I work in the Internal Governance department and usually spend my days editing documents written in English for grammatical and stylistic errors. When I say documents, I mean packets that are being compiled for our upcoming conference. So, they are usually very poorly written as everyone is just trying to get the information down on paper. I work long hours in comparison with the other students in my Internship Seminar class. I go in at 2:30pm on Tuesdays and work until 6:00pm, and I work from 1:00 to 6:00pm on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Due to my long hours, I was allowed to downgrade my course load to 12 credit hours, which is much more manageable.
Let's jump to October 2, when I went on my first overnight trip outside the city to Valencia, which is a city on the Mediterranean coast and is famous for being the home of paella, a famous Spanish dish of rice and seafood. We left early on that Friday morning and were on the bus for five hours. We made a pitstop in a small village where we ate breakfast in an 8th Century castle that had been converted into an upscale hotel. Very cool. Once we arrived in Valencia, almost everyone switched into their swimming suits and headed down to the beach. Everyone, that is, except for me, because I was feeling sick and we only had time to spend about two hours on the beach before we had to be back at the hotel to go on a tour of the old part of the city. Come to find out, the tour was optional, and about half of the group took advantage of that little detail. Thus, everyone else got a nice tan and I got to walk up a steep, narrow spiral staircase to look at an old bell. Great! Oh yeah, I also had to walk down said staircase, and several times only narrowly avoided tumbling the rest of the way down. But, the tour was a good way to get acquainted with what we would find out was the center of the city's nightlife, so my (tan) friends were thanking me later that night for taking the tour. I also got to try the Valencian specialty orxata de xufes (horchata de chufas) which is basically a cold, sweet drink made from tigernuts, sugar and water. It was very good and as the day was rather warm, refreshing, too. I wrote the name first in Valenciana, which is a variant of Catalan - the language of the "state" of Catalonia, where Barcelona is located - and is spoken only in the "state" of Valencia. The next day, we visited Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias (City of Arts and Sciences) which is an impressive string of buildings - designed by world-reknowned architect and Valencia native, Santiago Calatrava - that house Europe's largest aquarium, an IMAX experience theater (all those familiar with it, think of Lubbock's Science Spectrum dome theater) and many other exhibitions we did not have time to see. Afterwards, we had a fantastic lunch of croquetas, tortilla española, potatoes with aioli sauce and paella valenciana, as well as several glasses of rioja. Then, we got on the bus and drove another five hours back to Madrid, but with a break at a truck stop-like place (apparently the bus drivers' union in Spain mandates that they take a 30 minute break every three hours) where I was surrounded by members of the Spanish military who were also taking a rest stop, and who had not bothered to leave their big, intimidating rifles in their vehicles.
