Beginning of the break

So today is officially the first day of our break from classes, and almost everyone from my group is gone on trips to various places. I was still able to entertain myself pretty well though. In the morning I ate a late breakfast and just hung out in my room until lunch, reading and catching up on some things I wanted to get done. After lunch, I met again with Cristina, my intercambio, to practice Spanish. I really like her, and she's really easy to talk to because she's a talkative person, which I normally am not, so that helps me out a little haha.

After that, I met up with two of the girls who are also around for the break and we went to see Toy Story 3 in Spanish. It was really fun! It helped that I had already seen it so I knew the story, but I found that after awhile I didn't have to concentrate too hard on it and could understand quite a bit of what they were saying. The ticket was only 5 euros because I got a discount with a student card I have, which is probably about equal to what a movie costs in Vermont, but in comparison to other places, like Baltimore, I'm pretty sure it's cheaper, even taking the exchange rate into consideration. The snacks were definitely cheaper than in the U.S. though. I bought a drink and small popcorn for only 3 euros! I was so excited!

The other day in class I got a taste of the differences between classes in Spain and at home (although our classes are for international students so they're not exactly like normal Spanish university classes). In Spain apparently it is normal for teachers to single out students who did not do well on tests, because when my professor handed our tests back, she pointed out by name the 3 students who did the worst on the test. We were shocked by this because in classes at home grades are always completely private if you don't want anyone to know, and the teachers never tell the class a specific person's grade. But here it's just common practice, and it was a surprising to find out.

For those of you interested in food, I figured I would give a few examples of food we've eaten in each post so there's not one big long post only about food. I'll start with what I had for lunch today, which is something we've had before so I have a picture of it.

This is two eggs, rice and sausages. Eggs and sausages are things I'm used to eating for breakfast but here they are lunch and dinner foods. I really liked this meal, so I was excited I got to have it a second time.

Dinner last night was also a meal we'd had before, so I also have a picture of that:

It's a mini pizza that our host mom made for each of us. Obviously pizza is something we are very used to eating in the U.S. but this had a different flavor than I was used to. It had some kind of meat on it with a barbeque sauce kind of flavor, and it was sweeter than most pizza I've had before. It was really yummy!

Ok, i guess that's it for now, sorry this post was not very focused haha. I'll hopefully write again at least once this weekend, and also give more food updates.