¡Bienvenido a España!

I haven't posted a blog in like a month and a half. I guess that's because I spent most of August traveling. I think in 31 days of August, I spent 10 or 11 at home - and most of those were spent getting ready to travel.

BUT. I'm in Madrid. I can't say I'm loving every minute of it, but I am loving generally almost every hour of it. I go out late, sleep in, take naps, drink a lot of wine. Do nothing pretty frequently, which is taking more getting used to than almost anything else about being in Spain. I know I should dare complain about having three (possibly soon to be four) day weekends, but I suck suck suck at free time. I've done some exploring of Madrid on my own, but I'd much rather share the experiences with friends, and as we all have to pay for each individual text message we send and phone call we make, things get tricky. I do enjoy time on my own and really don't mind spending hours on end by myself, but I also want to make friends and get to know these people I'll be spending the next three months with, not to mention I would LOVE to meet some Spanish people.

Not being able to text friends all the time is strange. But I have been skyping with people every once in a while, which is really fun. It's nice to see people's faces that I haven't seen in many months. Hopefully some friends are coming to visit - I look forward to showing people around my surrogate city. Sometimes things here feel like New York and sometimes they don't. School actually feels a lot like high school because it's so confined and groups have formed into kind of cliques rather quickly. There's actually probably at least a dozen students here from other schools as well, and it's interesting to see how they are similar to or different from NYU kids.

I've been thinking a lot about love, passion, sensuality, and temporality lately, but that's no surprise as I'm reading Federico García Lorca's Blood Wedding this weekend for my Lorca class. Spaniards know how to do passion, man. And you can feel it in their writing if you read it in Spanish. I'm reading Blood Wedding in English but we read a couple poems in Spanish and I'm familiar with some Spanish works, and can just tell. It's something in the sounds of Spanish words too. Lots of long sounds because vowels are really important to the Spanish language.

I suppose I should have a lot more to say, like about all the crazy things that happened in August including my brother starting college, but I just realized how tired I am even though it's only a little after 10 here. I think I'm going to snuggle up with some Lorca for a bit and just see how the night goes. More soon though, as I have loads of free time.