My first days

I'm finally here!!

I had a 9 1/2 (!!) hour flight from Portland to Amsterdam, and then flew to Madrid, and then Back north to Pamplona. I am not really able to sleep on planes, so I only got about an hour of sleep that whole time. I left Portland at 1:30 pm (PST) on Thursday and didn't get to Pamplona until 8:25 am the next day. To say the least, it was a VERY long day.

My host family is great! The mother (Isabel) is very sweet, but she talks really fast, and knows NO english, so it is hard to understand her. The father (Tiberio) is also very nice. He is better at talking slowly, and is pretty good at explaining things (in Spanish, he also speaks NO english), until I understand. And, Lidia, my 9-year-old host sister, is ADORABLE!!! She is soooo excited to be able to practice what (little) English she knows, and last night she sat on my bed with her English notebook, trying to teach me the colors and numbers in Spanish (which I already know, but that's ok.) She is always in my room, which sometimes gets just a tiiiny bit annoying, since I don't really know how to politely ask her to leave, but she's so cute that I don't really care. She recently started playing the bagpipes (yes, bagpipes!!) and played a little tune for me, which I will post on youtube, and then (if I figure out how) put on here. Lidia is the best at explaining things, and doesn't use words that are too complicated, and doesn't speak too fast for me to understand.

Today I woke up around 10 a.m. and went into the kitchen to see what I could find for breakfast. Tiberio asked if I wanted milk, and I said "si". Well, the milk here is very different from the milk in the US. Here it tastes like a combination of Soymilk and milk that has gone bad. It is not good. They also heat it up and put sugar in it, but I hadn't tasted the milk yet when I was asked if I wanted to heat it up. Tomorrow I will try it warm, and hope that makes it taste better. With the milk, I had a tiny little thing that they called a galleta, but it looked like a muffin. It was very sweet, and helped wash down the milk -- a little.

After breakfast we went to the store to get a plug so that I could charge my computer. We went to a store called Leroy Merlin, and it is just like a Home Depot. On our way out, something caught my eye -- the word "Oregon." I stopped to look, and it was something by the brand Oregon Scientific. It was cool to be so far away from home, and yet there's something here from Oregon.

Later in the day, Tiberio and Lidia showed me around Pamplona. It is a really cute town, with lots of old bulidings. My school is a very big, old building and it is very pretty. The buildings downtown are all one long building separated into different stores, shops and things. And the streets are really narrow -- classic Europe. There was a renessaince market today and we wandered around for a while looking at all the different booths. They showed me the Mercado (market) and it is totally different from in the US. It is one big bulding, but several tiny little stores within. There's a store to get fish, bread, wine, olives, and everything else that is fresh. It didn't have things like oreos or coke. The little stores look like booths, but you pay for things at whichever store you got them from.


I LOVE Pamplona. It has about 50,000 more people than eugene, a good size. There aren't many houses, mostly apartments. It is surrounded on all sides by large mountains, with the Pyrnes to the North.

Something that I never knew about Spain is that they don't say thank you!! It's driving me crazy. If someone does something nice for me, or they hand me something, and I say "Gracias", they laugh and say "No Gracias." It's so new to me, since in the US we're taught from the time we start talking, to say thank you for everything. It's also different that when you meet someone for the very first time, rather than shake hands, you air-kiss each cheek. I knew that they did that, but I thought it was for friends or family, not strangers.

The spanish accent isn't too hard to understand, when you know they words, and they speak slowly. However, I am already starting to lisp, since Lidia corrects me when I don't. I have even started to do it for English words...aaah!

We just ate dinner which was, I think, veal. Although it tasted an awful lot like beef, so i'm not 100% sure. It's kind of weird to be eating red meat again, but it tasted really good. I'd forgotten how much I like red meat, even though I only stopped eating it in the late winter.

That's all for now. It's 10:19 and Lidia and I are going to watch a movie, with English subtitles, so I can put the english and spanish together.

Lots of Love!!

~~Gwen