September 8, 2009

There goes the neighborhood.

Well, I made it here. I´m still wrapping my mind around the idea that I will be living and studying in Madrid for the next two or so years. For a while I wasn´t sure I would actually ever make it here.

A few of you might know that I was two days late arriving in Madrid. Yep. Two whole days. Sarah made it right on time though. You see, we came on separate flights. We were going to leave on the same day and arrive with a difference of only a couple of hours. That was the plan. It didn´t happen that way though.

The original plan was that since Sarah´s program started a month before mine (hers on Sept. 3rd and mine on Oct. 5th), I would join her around mid-September. Might as well earn a little extra cash instead of sitting around beautiful Madrid doing nothing but writing blogs and drinking coffee and Rioja. You know, do something productive. However, I couldn´t find any work at all in Fort Wayne, so I decided to come with Sarah. Problem was she´d already gotten her plane reservation, and I had to go on a different airline. I know this sounds weird, but it´s the way of the world in these troubled times.

I got held up by severe weather and missed my connector to Madrid by, literally, minutes. So I stayed the night in a crappy Best Western in Atlanta and ate dinner with a guy named Gabriel, who was in the Air Force and was trying to get back to base in Tampa. Next day, my flight was overbooked. I gave up my seat for 600 Delta-dollars, a free hotel and free food. I missed Sarah, but we were only going to be in orientation most of the time, right? And now, we got a free flight.

So I end up getting her finally. Obviously. I think my first words in the Admissions Office were, ¨Hi, I´m two days late.¨They were all waiting for me and were glad to see I made it. Now I have job prospects for tutoring English and will start working with undergrads in the Writing Center next week. And, by the way, all I missed the first day of orientation was a big talk about alcohol abuse and rape. Sarah filled me in, so now I know what to look out for. (She won´t pull any of that funny stuff on me.) Sarah´s into her fourth full day of classes as I write this and likes her profs so far. She mostly hangs out with the Masters students and sits at our table during lunch. She tells people she´s dating an upperclassman. She´s so cool and over the undergrad thing...