Not too much exciting today. We got up in the morning and everything was closed as usual on Sundays at 8:30 in the morning. Almost nothing is open on Sundays in general in Spain anyway. We had a not very exciting breakfast at Café y Té a chain restaurant in Spain, then went to the bus stop to catch the bus to the bus station for our bus to Madrid.
We had waited for at least 15 minutes and the bus never came around, so we finally decided to just take a taxi. Splitting taxis among 3 or 4 people ended up being barely more expensive than the bus, and we got there a lot faster and knew that we were going to be there on time.
I slept for the first 2 hours of the 4 hour bus ride, and the combination of the warm sun coming in the window, the extremely comfortable big seat, and the vibrations of the bus along the road made it heavenly. We stopped half way where most people got out and bought snacks or stretched their legs and then had the final 2 hours to Madrid.
I attempted to do homework in that last 2 hours, but it was too difficult to read my extremely scholarly chapters about anthropology in Spanish while people were talking around me and I didn’t have the resources to look up some of the words I didn’t know. I gave up only about 20 minutes out and looked out the windows.
It is weird that I am living in a very different country and culture, but as I was getting off the metro to head back to my room and host family here, I had a bit of the sense that I was going home. Or at least as close to home as I’m going to get here.
This evening I went for an hour run through the busy streets and some parts of parks in Madrid. It is so nice to be running on a cool evening with the streetlights illuminating the roads and people walking around everywhere since this city stays, or becomes, more alive into the late evening and early night.
Tomorrow morning I have my interview for where I will probably be doing my internship in a hospital. The short write up I have about it says that I will be visiting with patients and their families, or more likely people who don’t have anyone there with them. I guess there are lots of different parts of the hospital and opportunities and I’ll be given a route each day I go in. One thing I also really like is that it is a well established program and they have things for volunteers to do and I won’t just go in and have no idea where to go or what to do.
It also said that I will have to speak Spanish, and I’m really glad about that because a big part of this for me is getting to speak the language more and practice. Other people in their placements are teaching English or in a publish company editing books that have been translated into English but that just feels like doing more English and not getting immersed into the language and culture as much.
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