Good news! I realized today that I can charge my computer!! The brilliant inventors of mac included a converter on the charger. No wonder it started to spark when I tried to plug it into another converter. It is now siesta time in Madrid and what are we Americans doing? We are on our computers of course! We just had a delicious meal of some mixture of rice and peas, chicken, and pears. These meals are just too too good and Paquita is a very good cook. She is starting to calm down on the offering us huge portions. Funny story about Paquita and food-- Yesterday, our group went on a day trip and had to have packed lunches from our senora’s that morning. So, the night before, Robyn and I made sure we told Paquita very clearly that we needed a sack lunch and that we were leaving at 7:30am. This whole conversation which could take about three seconds in English, took about 8 minutes, due to our lack of Spanish-speaking skills. But we felt very confident about this one and went to bed in peace. However, you have to know Paquita and her sleeping habits. She stays up really really late, like I have never seen her go to bed before us, and wakes up really really late. She makes us breakfast in the morning, then goes back to sleep. So, when we arose early the next morning to go to our day trip, no Paquita. Breakfast was set out, probably from the night before, but we had no packed lunches. We thought we would just wait awhile and surely she would wake up. We even tried to be noisy around the house so surely she would get the hint. Still no Paquita. So we thought the best option would be to make our own lunch finding random foods in her house. Slash it was a good excuse to peek in her refrigerator. We ended up wrapping up two sandwiches in napkins, grabbing two oranges, and taking two prepackaged sweet breads from breakfast and sticking them in a corte ingles bag. Hilarious! Later that day I checked my phone and had 3 missed calls from some random number. Called the number back and guess who it was? Paquita. She said, “Maria!” and started spitting out tons of Spanish. I go into panic mode and only speak in English because I can´t think of anything to say other than si. I”m guessing what she was trying to say was that she was sorry for forgetting our lunches. Then I managed to put together that she wanted to speak to this girl Kristen, who is a student of one of her friend’s, who she knows speaks really good spanish. Kristen then translated everything for me. She said Paquita was really sorry and that we could buy whatever we wanted at a restaurant for lunch. How sweet! But of course, we could not convey to her that we already packed ourselves lunches. I guess she missed the fact that she had 2 less hamburger buns and a lot less turkey in her refrigerator.

So, a little later my friends decided it would be HILARIOUS to challenge me to call Paquita back. We have this little game we started at the begining of the trip and its basically where one person dares or challenges another person to do something, and the person being challenged has to complete the task or they are completely out of the game. So they would challenge me to call Paquita back. You probably get this by now, but I have a very hard time speaking with her and get nervous trying to think up sentances, and speaking on the telephone only heightens my fear. So after much peer pressure, I gave in and planned out this seemingly brilliant excuse in my head on why I called her. I was going to pretend like I meant to call her.

So Paquita answered. I got flustered. I said, ¨lo siento.¨ then, I began to say Sally? pretending like I meant to mistake Paquita for my made-up friend Sally. Realized later on that the name Sally could easily sound like another word in Spanish, because she isn´t familiar with english names. Anyways, what was supposed to be a conversation lasting a very short time turned into a hilarious and chaotic phone call ending in a very confused Paquita. Terrible on my part. Really, I think Paquita thinks me and Robyn are complete idiots.

Anyways, yesterday turned out to be a great day trip. We toured this palace that was built I think by the Hapsburg family. It wasn´t really that extravagant (I have seen much better in Germany), except for the room where they kept the tombs of the members of their family. The rooms and tombs themselves were very beautiful and had all been intricately decorated. Lots of marble and gold.

After that, we drove to another monument, which was a church that was built by slaves that were being oppressed by a tyrant who ruled Spain for a while. I would give more facts, but I´m not really good at remembering those types of things. Ironic, because what was supposed to be a place of worship was built under a very terrible condition. You could feel the anguish that went into that building when you walked into it because it was so dark and morbid. Not what you would picture a cathedral to be. However it was neat going through it and seeing the bigger picture behind it. I wish I could post pictures of the insides of these places, but we are only allowed to photograph the outsides. Again, pictures are coming soon now that I have internet access at my house.

Enough for now, I am about to study in the beautiful Plaza de Espania!

Hasta luego!
Maria