Let’s start with the only free day that we have of the entire trip— no traveling, no class, no tours, no nothing. I woke up only a little later than normal to go for a run. I intended to run through a park near our house, but I found a bike trail that I assumed went around the park. I started to follow it and before I realized it didn’t go around the park, I was pretty far from it, so I decided to just follow it anyway. After a while, I lost it because of construction, which was good, because later that day I found out it goes around the entire city. After I got home, showered and finished my homework for the weekend, Rebecca and I gave ourselves a self-tour of the city, and by that I mean we picked the one section of the city we don’t normally spend time in and just started walking. We found a lot of pretty parks and bridges, probably the dirtiest part of the city (since they clean most of it three times a day), and some cool buildings. We walked by one of the main parts of the University and most of its dorms. At one point, we were walking through a park and saw lots of people running past us with numbers on, so we realized that we were walking through the end of a race, which was a little embarrassing. We finished our tour walking along the river, by the business school (go Neeley!), and back to the plaza where we started. After lunch and siesta time, a group of us met up to go shopping, which some of the girls do pretty much everyday. Then a few of us went to the plaza to study and hang out. We ran into Rebecca’s housemate’s friends from France and talked with them for a while. Later after dinner, we met back up again to go out for the night, which was night number five in a row for me (which became 6 the next night, and I have no idea how Spaniards survive).
The next morning my alarm didn’t go off and my roommate slept through hers, so our house mom woke us up 32 minutes before we had to meet over 20 minutes across town for a group excursion, which we weren’t even sure what we were doing or where we were going. We somehow managed to get ready and eat breakfast in eight minutes, allowing us to arrive exactly on time (not that almost everyone else wasn’t late though). We drove on the bus for a couple of hours with a crazy drive that wouldn’t allow food or backpacks in the bus. They stop in a shabby little town where some crazy nature lady with a walking stick meets us. In the town, everyone wanted us as young people to stay because one example was they only have 2 fourteen year olds in the entire surrounding area. As it turns out, we had to hike about a mile to some look out spot for the local nature reserve and then even further to a building to watch birds feed, but that day they hadn’t put out enough cows so we didn’t even get to see anything. After we finally make to back to the bus, we drive down a canyon to find the biggest hydroelectric dam in Europe. We stopped in another little village where they told us we’d be having lunch, so we took our food and walked for 15 minutes after they said it would be 5, to find out that we couldn’t eat there because most of it was private property and they were having a concert that night so we were not allowed to eat in their pavilion. We had to stop and look at a far away view of the dam and the house were the dam engineers stayed (fun fact: it’s currently being renovated to be a 5-star hotel). Then the crazy nature lady proceeded to talk about every type of tree we passed on the way back to the bus, making it even longer. So we got back on the bus to be dropped off at the dam where they assured us we’d be able to eat. We got off the bus, but then they told us we had to walk across first. Halfway across we have to stop and hear all about the dam and how it works, as if we didn’t know how a dam works. By walking across we crossed into Portugal, where we finally got to eat lunch, on cement steps, looking at a cement wall.
We returned to the bus to go to a boat tour of the river. Apparently, our bus driver got lost, so it took way longer to get there than it should have taken. While he was lost, one of the guys from our group got sick and vomited all over the bus, which did not help the situation at all, but it was a little bit of karma going back to the bus driver– so much for no food on the bus. Finally we found it, waited in line, and got on the boat. Going with out luck, the tour was in Portuguese, but we figured out at the end that it was about rocks, so it really wouldn’t have been much better in Spanish. Then there was a bird show, once again in Portuguese, and the most any of us got out of it was that one of the bird guys was really cute. It didn’t seem humane how they kept the birds chained up, and we couldn’t even see most of them, so we were happy to head back to Spain. The bus ride back was miserable because the guy remained sick for the entire three-hour trip.
My Sunday started with quiet time in the park. Then a small group of us went to the local, Sunday market. It was a lot of fun and there was a lot of cool stuff and some interesting stuff (a lot of underwear stands). We bought gifts for people, clothes, and searched for good parachute pants, which are a huge hit here. Later our group went to a bullfight. I knew that they killed the bulls, and I had heard that they were gory, but I guess I never really thought about how they would be gone about. The torero was the very gorgeous Juan del Álamo. We learned a lot about it and it was a very cultural event. Most of the people there were older men. The women, as always, we dressed up and walking around in heels. He killed six bulls that night, but it wasn’t as hard to watch with each one. After dinner there was a firework show because the next day was the day for the patron saint San Juan de Sahagun. We were the only school in the city to have school the next day, but we got over that by looking at it positively, we improved our Spanish.
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