¡Estoy Aquí!

Hola mis amigos y amigas! I am pleased to report that all of my travels proceeded without any problems and I arrived in Madrid at 7:00 am this morning.  I met up with 4 other girls from my program on the flight from Charlotte to Madrid and we had a bit of a wait before the bus picked us up at 10:30.  The director of the first half of the program, Professor Cluff and his wife, were able to find us pretty easily, surrounded by our piles and piles of bags in the waiting area of the airport looking like a group of very disoriented and very tired American girls.  The bus we got on was HUGE, I swear the seats on this charter bus were nicer than the seats on any of our flights.  We then proceeded to Terminal 4 to pick up the rest of the girls and all was well.  We drove for about half an hour on the bus, during which all of us attempted to communicate only in Spanish and succeeding pretty well for the most part.  When we arrived in Alcalá de Henares, the bus stopped across the street from a plaza.  Our director then told us to get off of the bus and grab our luggage from below, we were about to meet our host families! The director's assistant (her name escapes me) proceeded to read off our names and the names of our roommates, hand each of us our school ID and bus pass for the month, and point us in the direction of the present representative from our host family.  Chloé and I were immediately directed to a friendly looking woman standing among many equally friendly looking women.  She introduced herself as Blanca, and then we proceeded to haul our wheeled luggage a few blocks away to a 5th floor apartment.  Chloé and I share a small room with two twin size beds and plenty of closet and dresser space.  Blanca lives alone and more often than not has at least two foreign exchange students living with her, especially students from BYU.  Once we arrived at the apartment, we started to unpack while Blanca made us lunch.  We ate some wonderful pasta, watermelon, and salad made up of tomatoes, onions, and cucumbers.  She gave us pretty hefty portions and also asked us several times if we wanted more, which I expected might happen.  We also met Blanca's nieta (niece) Miranda, who just returned from a trip to the United States with her Mom.  She doesn't live with Blanca but I figure we will be seeing a lot of her.  She is four years old and adorable! She kept going under the table and tickling our feet during the whole meal.  After we ate to our heart's content, we took a crazy long siesta! We meant to sleep for only two hours, but due to an alarm malfunction it was more like four hours.  Once we finally woke up, Blanca made us some hot sandwiches for dinner and we ate arroz con leche for dessert, which I think I have eaten once or twice in my life but I definitely did not remember it being this good! After that we freshened up a little and went to walk around the plaza and the rest of Alcalá de Henares.  We didn't buy anything, but we found a lot of shops that we definitely want to go back to tomorrow or sometime soon, including an exotic candy store and countless gelato y helado shops! My ice cream addiction will definitely not be neglected here.  I still can't believe I'm going to be living here for three months, it seems like some crazy dream that I am going to wake up from tomorrow or a vacation that is going to fly by.  I understand about 60% of what Blanca says to us, but when we met some of her friends earlier they talked so fast I maybe got about 5% of all that they said.  Hopefully I will be able to adjust pretty quickly.  Obviously I don't expect to be fluent by tomorrow, but these three months will definitely kick my Spanish skills into high gear.  ¡Hasta luego, amigos!