Arrived today in the beautiful Spanish city of Almeria. Everything went surprisingly quite smoothly, considering that my plans began with “Fly out unprepared to a foreign country with an unfamiliar dialect of a language that I don’t fully comprehend… be sure to switch airline carriers somewhere along the way so as to add confusion and possibly even a taxi ride to a different airport…”
Somehow, things seemed to work out just fine, though, and I arrived in Almeria on time and with a couple of new friends. I met a woman named Faith on the flight from Evansville, still a little misty from the goodbyes of the day and struck up a conversation there on the plane. She was a nice older lady with a wonderful story to tell and a dream to write a book. At the Atlanta gate, I gave her a hug and my business card and told her to look me up if she ever felt like it. I then enjoyed one of Nathan’s famous hot dogs during a multiple-hour layover in Atlanta.
Our flight out of Atlanta was delayed two hours after we had already boarded the plane because of some mysterious defective part that had gone awry. While replacing it, they were forced to turn off the air conditioning so we got to sit there steaming for a while before we got on our way. People were getting pretty angry but they finally cleared us for takeoff and served a late dinner in the air before everyone settled down to sleep.
Eventually, we landed around 11:00 in sunny Madrid and disembarked there. I had a few adventures in that airport, but nothing that kept me from making my flight. Most notably, I was outsmarted by the door to the bank trying to get money changed into Euros, so I now am walking around with something like two hundred dollars of useless American dollars which I like to call my “emergency fund.” I’m going to try to get it changed at a bank here in Almeria. In the meantime, I came prepared with a little bit of viable currency, so I won’t starve while I am here.
From Madrid, I boarded a Ryanair flight to Almeria, and sat next to two other Americans on vacation to some sort of arts retreat or something, but they seemed to be pretty engaged in one another, so I went ahead and let the jet lag take me under. I woke to look out my window and see the beautiful Almeria coast line coming up at us, and a few minutes later we were on the ground wishing we had already joined the group of people windsurfing in the Mediterranean in the distance.
I met one representative of my host family at the airport and she drove us back to our apartment while speaking thick Andalusian Spanish. I mostly just nodded my head and occasionally would ask a random question when I thought of one. Jackie, another student staying with us was raised bilingual in Spanish and English, so she is handy to have around when the Spanish gets to be too much. Then we also have John, who has been traveling around Spain with his wife for about a month now, but is a part of the same program that we are in.
I later found out that we are not as much living with a host family as we are living in an apartment, and we have a family that comes and hangs out with us. They are fantastic, although I haven’t caught all of their names. Maria del Mar was the one that picked us up from the airport. Her sister (whose name none of us seem to be able to pick out) is married to Jose Maria, and they have two sons, Jose Maria (who is about two), and a quiet little baby who goes by “Na-na.” Maria’s mother also spends time with us.
Things are going well so far. We’ve got some sort of class in the morning to give us an orientation to the city and the program. Should be good. I’ll keep you posted as much as possible.
With Love,
Blake
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