Wow, so it´s been a long time since I updated last.  basically the time since my last entry was spent in such lovely places as Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Florence, and Venice.  Not posting new pictures yet basically because I don´t wanna pay for internet and  I will be home VERY VERY soon to do it from there.  Speaking of which, I COME HOME IN FIVE DAYS!!!  Everybody better be ready...i expect banners, balloons, parties and the like.  Ok, so maybe a welcome home IM will do, but banners would definitely be appreciated.  So I finished my first of 3 finals, grammar.  So one down 2 to go.  I have to finish editing my Latin American paper (6 pages in Spanish analyzing  a novel I read in Spanish--go me!) and then study for my poli sci and latin american lit finals, both on Wednesday.  Wednesday night is our going away dinner after which I´m sure much craziness will ensue and then Thursday is a free day for packing.   We´re leaving from Salamanca at 4am saturday morning in order to get to the airport in Madrid in time for the people with the earliest flights.  My flight leaves at 9:15 am Spain time from Madrid-Barajas, then I go to London-Heathrow, then to JFK where I get to wait for SIX HOURS and then finally to RDU at 11:35 pm NC time.  I will be traveling for basically 25 hours, from 4am sat. morning to the equivalent of 5:35am sunday morning, whoo hoo.  But it doesn´t really matter because my parents will be waiting at the end of it all and I will be back in the STATES!!!

I´ve truly had a great time in Spain, despite my random whining.  I can´t believe I´ve just spent 4 months living in Europe and traveling all over everywhere without having to do much work and getting Wake credit for it!!  It´s so awesome...I feel like I´ve learned a lot...about Spanish and about myself as well.  I´m not gonna get too deep right now, but it´s definitely been a semester of growing up and learning some stuff about myself.  Ok, so that´s about it for now, see yall very very soon!  Lenora and Lauren...FIVE DAYS!!!  LOVE YOU ALL!!!!!!   

Hey everybody...look, i'm updating again!

So we went to London last weekend...it was absolutely amazing.  I had such a great time and it was very refreshing to speak English to everyone and read signs in English and all that good stuff.  My Spanish stuck with me more than I thought it would.  We were putting our bags away on the plane to London and this British guy asked me, in perfect English, "Do you want some help with that bag?" to which i responded "si, muchas gracias!"  After getting a weird confused look from him, I realized I wasn't speaking English...so freaky, but kinda cool at the same time.  I love London...i really do.  I want to go back, maybe grad school? Why not study European History in London, sounds like a good plan to me!   

In other news, I'm done with class for the week!   Tomorrow morning we leave with the wake group for Galicia in the northwest of Spain.  It should be a good time, a weekend in a 4 star hotel sounds good to me.  Next week is going to be devoted to reading and writing papers, i PROMISE!!  I have 3 papers, 3 books, and a presentation to have done.  The papers aren't technically due until the end of the semester, but I would really like to have them done before we leave for Italy in 2 weeks so that I can have fun there and will just have to study for finals when we get back.  We'll see how that goes.  I feel like I have all this free time here but I just never seem to get anything done.  That will have to change so that I can finish this work and enjoy the rest of my time here.  I'll be home in 4 weeks from Saturday...that's so insane.  I truly am having a good time here, but it'll  be good to get back too.  OOOH, I did some present shopping yesterday  hehehe...can't wait to bring back stuff for everybody.  Love you all!  Ok, I guess that's about it for now.  Have a great weekend everyone!!!

Ok, so forgive me, this entry is more for me than for anybody else, but I just need to write some stuff out to see if I can make more sense of it…and vent, venting will definitely be happening.  I’ve been feeling sort of homesick lately, okay forget that, REALLY homesick.  I’m having a great time here, and I’m getting to do some incredible things, but I just really miss my family.  I could talk to them for hours on end, but none of us can actually afford to do that.   I’m sorta getting tired of Spain…this country’s starting to get on my nerves, if an entire country can really annoy a person.  It’s just getting to the point where all of the things that originally I told myself to be patient with because, “it’s just a different country and a different culture and it’ll be an experience” is really starting to get old.  The other day I had to explain to my madre how time zones work, as in the fact that the US has more than 1, and that Canada is an entirely different country, not just a really big state.  It’s not that I really mind explaining this stuff it’s just that when I tell her stuff, she doesn’t believe me.  She just looks at me like I’m stupid and changes the subject.  Today at lunch my hermano (the 21 yr old super-annoying one) tried to start an argument with me about Iraq.  Arguing with him or even discussing anything with him is basically pointless because he already has his opinion and all he wants to do by “asking” me about stuff is to tell me what he thinks and how he knows more than anyone in the US.  Every conversation with him comes down to the basic point that to him the US is awful and everything in Spain is so much better than anything we could ever do.  And yet he still plans to come to the US when he graduates so that he can get a job because there’s so much unemployment in Spain?  Hmm, interesting how he bashes the US all the time but then plans to come use the country for a job…just one more thing that gets on my nerves. 

This past Thursday my Latin American Lit professor spent the ENTIRE class talking about how awful Bush is and how stupid the American people are for voting for him again.  All of this was based on the fact that she saw Fahrenheit 9/11.  Right, way to base your entire argument on a Michael Moore film.  No Michael Moore movie can be considered a documentary considering the fact that he cuts everything and takes things out of context to make whatever point he wants.  Not that I completely agree with everything Bush is doing, but considering she’s never lived in the US and doesn’t know what it’s like, she’s really not in a position to judge.  She actually made the comment that you’d have to be stupid to be in the 18-30 age rage and vote for Bush.  Hmm…thanks for calling me stupid, ‘preciate that.  And don’t get me started on Zapatero.  She was saying that when they have a bad leader, they change.  Well, the only reason Aznar and the PP didn’t win the election again is because Al Qaida blew up some trains in Madrid and the Spaniards got scared.  And Zapatero certainly is not the greatest.  My madre and entire family here hate him and can’t wait till the next election.  Interesting huh?  Ok, enough politics…

  I miss all of you so much, y’all are absolutely amazing and I do truly miss each one of you.  Every time I get an email, a postcard (thanks so much Luke!), phone call (Lauren, you’re amazing for always seeming to call right at the exact moment when I need to talk to you and I love you, chica), or a PACKAGE it just makes my day, my week, my month, heck, my semester!  We were talking the other day about how no one back in the States understands how much a simple email means to us over here.  We get one and freak out and write back immediately and then wait anxiously for the next one…it’s really pretty sad and pathetic when you think about it, but oh well.

So I have less than 6 weeks left here, 5 weeks from this coming Saturday.  I think that’s sorta causing some of my homesickness.  We’re close enough to coming home to be thinking about it and getting excited about it, but there’s still a while between now and then that it’s sort of depressing as well.  Close but not close enough I guess?  This weekend we start traveling again though, which always seems to make the time to by faster.  WE GO TO LONDON ON THURSDAY!!!! I’m so freakin’ excited.  It’s gonna be a good time, except it will also be crazy expensive considering the dollar keeps dropping.  It takes almost 2 dollars to equal a pound, and the pound doesn’t have any more buying power.  Like eating a McDonalds’s would still be like 4 pounds, but that’s $8 for McDonald’s!  Ridiculous, truly ridiculous.  But they’ll be speaking ENGLISH and I think that it will be good for me to get out of this country for a little while.  Next weekend we go to Galicia in the northwest of Spain (Santiago de Compostela and I’m not sure what other cities) with the whole Wake group which means a weekend in a 4 star hotel and 25 euro a day “for food”!!! Then after that is Thanksgiving weekend and Manolo, the program director, is taking all of us out for dinner on Thursday J  Thanksgiving in Spain should be interesting, apparently we’re getting lamb or pescado (wow, totally just wrote that in Spanish without thinking…I meant fish) because he said it would be crazy for us to eat turkey in Spain since no one knows how to cook it and it wouldn’t be good. 

Last night after a huge fiasco we bought our plane tickets to ROME!!!! We don’t really have class the first week in December so we leave Dec. 2^nd and get back Dec. 7^th.  We’re going to try to take trips to Venice and maybe Florence by train while we’re there.  Venice is apparently under an extra 2 feet of water at the moment and there was a train strike in Italy, so hopefully we’ll be able to do everything we want to do.  Then after we get back from Italy we have one more weekend to study for finals, a week of finals Dec. 13-16 and then I come home on the 18^th.  We really only have 13 more days of class before finals.  Crazy, huh?  Hopefully with all the traveling we’re doing time will pass quickly.  I also still have 3 papers and a presentation to get done, and then 3 finals (2 written, one oral in grammar).  I’ll probably be working on all of that during the week and weekend of Thanksgiving.  I want to have everything done before we leave for Italy so I can enjoy our time there and will only have to study and pack (???) when I get back.  Speaking of packing, I’m not really sure how all of this stuff is supposed to get back to the US.  It will be interesting to fit everything back in my suitcases since I’ve bought stuff and people have sent me stuff since I’ve been here…oh well, it’ll work out. 

            I might actually have somewhere to live next semester, so keep your fingers crossed that it works out!  I also got my schedule figured out, too bad I have to take 15 hrs for the next 2 semesters to graduate with everything.  Registering from abroad is pretty stressful, but the fact that we get to register for everything at once before everybody else certainly makes up for it.  I’m taking Early Indian Civilization, Modern China, Intro Econ, Intro Philosophy, and Educational Psych.  With 5 three hour classes at Wake after this semester of barely any work I just might shoot myself in the foot halfway through next semester.  Oh well, wake is wake and I’ll survive.  After next semester I have 2 ed classes, my history seminar (gender, race, class), an upper-level Spanish lit class and some geography class that is apparently a new requirement for the secondary ed social studies minor.  Gotta love it when they keep adding classes and requirements.  It’s crazy that I’m almost a senior…when did that happen?  Seniors are supposed to be old and have it together and know what they want to do with their lives.  I’m none of those things at the moment.  I still have to take the Praxis I, GRE, LSAT and Foreign Service Exam.  Maybe I just won’t graduate.  I’ll stay at wake another year and live on Amanda and Anna’s beanbag…I think that’s a great lifeplan, right? 

            And shouldn’t I be dating someone by now?  People my age are getting engaged, or thinking about getting engaged and I haven’t had a relationship in…well, let’s just call it a long time.  Sorta scary…maybe I’ll just end up old and alone with a dog (no cats, it’s just too cliché).  That wouldn’t be so bad right?  Ok, I’m going to stop right now because talking about dating and guys and relationships makes me want to stab myself in the eye…freakin’ A. 

            Wow, this entry has gotten really long…huge congrats for anyone who actually read this all the way through, y’all must really like me…or just really appreciate an opportunity for procrastination.  I’m thinking it’s probably the latter reason.  For the good of everyone, I’m gonna stop this one here.  I love you all and will talk to you soon.  MWAH!!! 

wow, so i guess it´s been a while since i posted last huh?  sorry about that y´all!  umm...we went with Wake to Andalucia the 7th-12th.  We went to Sevilla and Granada and then to Córdoba on our free day.  We saw some cool stuff and pictures will be up shortly, i promise!  to barcelona this weekend with jules, lindsay, christina, ashley, wes, bryant and chip!  i can´t wait, it should be a good time! 

going through a weird time right now i think.  2 months from today i´ll be home, and it seems like such a short time, but so long too.  I don´t know...there will be a lot going on in the next 2 months to keep me super busy, but I´m worried about running out of money or whatever.   I don´t know...I sent my parents an email asking for money to help me pay for the italy trip in December and i felt soo spoiled...i dunno..hopefully everything will work out and this mood with go away...it needs to go away.  I´m in SPAIN...i know, i shouldn´t be complaining or depressed but hey, it happens.  I miss you all!