Alright so I went into El Sario where all of the families were waiting. A side note…we got a paper before we got to Spain which told us about the family we would be living with. The family wrote a little paragraph and then each student who has lived with that family wrote something too. Anyway, my parents wrote their part in Spanish obviously and I thought I understood it, but apparently not. I thought it said that they have been married for 50 years so I was looking for an old couple. All of the sudden, one of the girls in our group called my name because my padre had asked her where I was. Yeah, so he’s probably in his 40’s I’m thinking which makes that whole “married for 50 years” thing kinda impossible. My padre’s name is Miguel and I rode with him in his little European car to our apartamento. I was really nervous and Miguel was trying to explain a bunch of things to me, but I barely understood any of it. My madre’s name is Amparo and I have two sisters as well. One of them works at a hospital in Barcelona (about 5 ½ hours away) and the other lives in the house and attends the same school (University Pública de Navarra) that I will be attending. Her name is Maite. They are all sooo nice! I was really overwhelmed when I got to the apartment, but they showed me my room and Miguel gave me a tour of the house. It is a really nice apartment with 4 bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, a salon-type room, a bathroom, and a sort of miscellaneous room where Amparo gives English tutoring sessions. Miguel works in a factory outside of the city that makes brakes for buses and other big vehicles (it took me a few days to figure out what he was talking about lol).
So I started to unpack all of my stuff in my cute little room. It’s a little small (and strange not to be sharing like in the dorms), but I like it a lot. Around 8:00 I ate dinner with Miguel and Amparo. We had bread, salad, pumpkin soup, and the main course was a type of homemade pizza. Everything was really good and much healthier than in the United States. Both Miguel and Amparo kept asking my questions and trying to explain where everything in the house is and how everything works. It was soo hard to understand them! They both talk really fast, and the most difficult part is understanding the accent. Almost all of my professors in the US are either from South America or they have an American accent and neither of those is even close to the northern Spain accent. The one good thing is that they do seem to know a lot of English and they said that if I ever don’t understand them then I should tell them and they can explain it in English. The problem is that I barely understood anything and I don’t want to make them repeat everything so a lot of the time I found myself just nodding and saying “sí” with a confused look on my face. After dinner, we watched Millionario (the Spanish version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?) and the news (I still have no idea what’s going on in Spain lol). I decided to go to bed early to try to get over the jet lag as soon as possible. Next, my first day in Pamplona…