school and stuff

Well, the real world is kind of kicking in again... as much as it can, I guess, now that school has started. The "vacation" feeling is starting to wear off and it's hitting me that I'm actually LIVING in Barcelona for 3.5 months.

My classes have all been just fine so far. None of them seem TOO difficult, and I have a couple that should be pretty easy, so hopefully I won't be too bogged down with school while I'm here. I really like that in most of my classes there is much less of an emphasis on tests/quizzes... rather, there is a lot more "field-study" type work. I will be writing a lot of journals/papers about my experiences, which doesn't seem too hard if you ask me... can't really be a wrong answer on those kinds of assignments, which is nice. For my Infant Social Development class, we are each assigned a baby and we make 3 or 4 visits to their home over the course of the semester and record the mother/child interactions. I'm SOOO excited about that assignment... I got paired with a 9 month old baby girl named Olivia. I have to call the mother next week to set up a time to observe... I'm a little worried about that, only because I'm not so confident with my spanish speaking skills. Oh well.

I bought my books for my classes today. In total I spent about 60 Euros... which is maybe 80 or so dollars... on ALL of my books. What a nice change from the 400-600 I usually have to spend at TCU!!

We've had horrible thunderstorms for the past two days... definitely not enjoyable when you have to walk everywhere. It's not exactly comfortable to sit through class in jeans soaked up to your knees and sopping wet tennis shoes and socks. They say that it very rarely rains here, but that when it does, it comes down strong for a couple of days. Elisabeth had all of our laundry hanging outside on the line and it definitely did not help the drying process as they were rained on for 2 days straight. It's supposed to continue to rain tomorrow, but not thunderstorm anymore. I just hope my clothes dry in time for our trip to the coast and southern France, which begins on Friday morning. Oh the joys of not having dryers!

Hmm... what else? We had spaghetti with some vegetables in it for dinner. And some corn on the side. Nothing too strange.

...I can't really think of anything else too exciting... besides the fact that my parents come one month from today! We're gonna spend a few days in Barcelona and 5 or so days in Paris and the surrounding area!

Oh, I feel really out of the loop on American current events, so if anything exciting happens, let me know! I'm gonna try to read the newspaper online once in a while, but we'll see how that goes.

Besos!