Craziest Week

Oh man, so tons has been going on, as i'm sure you could probably guess, but i am having such a great time here i dont even care that im getting like 5 hours of sleep a night!

On monday, Lena, Tess and I decided to go out and see if there was anything near our area going on at night. Randomly, we came across this Irish Pub. We got there at like 1130 and just missed the band that was playing there, which kind of sucked, but since everyone who was at the bar left with band, we got to know the manager pretty well. His name is Nico and he's from Romania. Anyways, the next night we got a bunch of other girls to go out to the same place and we went to see the band playing that night (its a pretty cool place, actually, free live music every day). There were 10 of us and that was basically the entire audience in the bar (cause honestly, who goes out on a tuesday night unless a. you go to american or b. you're abroad).

The band was fun and we were dancing like locas and everyone had a great time. The next day was not as fun. I decided to walk to school because it's only a mile and a half and that way i can get to know my surrounding area while also getting some exercise. I woke up at 745 and was absolutely dead tired, but it was the first day of classes, so yeah.

The next night we went to the SAME irish pub and at this point i feel so obvious because there's seriously NO ONE else in this entire bar and we are coming every night haha. But this night we got to meet the other bartender, who's cuban and named Jorge. The same band, Walden Uno, played again that night, and since we had told them we were coming back again, they prepared some english songs for us. So cute. After their concert we chatted with the singer for a while, who it turns out is a very nice guy named Andres and he promised us that he would take us out and show us Madrid, since none of us know a n y t h i n g about this city we're staying in. I'm so glad we met people from Madrid! Yay!

Today we went to the Prado, and saw some crazy famous pieces of art like Las Meninas and some of Goya's pieces from the Inquisition. It was fun, but i was so tired that when our tour ended i went right home to take a 3 hour nap, haha. It was much needed and now i feel muy better...ready to go out again tonight! hah. No but really, i think we're gonna go to some clubs in puerta del sol, which is a part of Madrid that has a lot of "ambiente de noche" (nightlife).

On another note, as I'm sure you all know, I was in the paper and on MSNBC! Wooo, exciting. We were watching Obama from a hotel on La Castellana - I don't remember what it was called, but it was very nice. Democrats Abroad had organized the event and there was live music and a big projector to watch everything. Fun fun. So yeah that was unexpected but pretty cool.

Oh, so I realized I didn't write anything about the actual program here, which is studying and not going out every night, haha. We had our first classes yesterday and I had "The immigrant experience" and "Spain and the EU". They both seem like they're gonna be fun...the professors are nice and in my immigrant experience class there's only four other people, so it's pretty much one on one learning.

Alright, well that's it for now!