First post from Salamanca!

Hola!

Sorry that it has taken me until today to finally update my blog. The past few days have been so crazy. I traveled the entire day Wednesday and didn’t get into Salamanca until Thursday evening. Although it was a veryyyy long day of traveling, everything went very smoothly and when I arrived in Salamanca, I went directly to the apartment of another girl, Laura, who is doing the same teaching program that I am doing. Laura is so, so nice, and Thursday night after I arrived, we walked around Salamanca and ended up eating some paella at a café. It is so surreal being back in this beautiful city. Sometimes I feel like this is all a dream and that I will be going back to Texas next week. Other times it starts to really sink in that I will be here for nine months.

Friday went really, really well. On Thursday I was feeling a little overwhelmed at everything I had to do, like getting my residency card, opening up a bank account, and finding an apartment. Laura informed me that everything is pretty much closed on Friday, so that I would have to wait until Monday to go apply for my residency card and to open my bank account. I was also getting stressed about finding an apartment. Although Laura said that I wasn’t a burden or anything, I knew she had people that would soon be moving into her apartment and I was just really anxious to stop living out of a suitcase and to finally start settling into a home of my own. Which brings me back to Friday. After I slept in and finally caught up with my sleep, Laura and I went walking around Salamanca to look for advertisements for apartments for rent. We found some phone booths with hundreds of advertisements on them (this is a totally normal way to find housing here, by the way), and I began to get really discouraged when I couldn’t find anything that I was looking for. After lunch we went back to her apartment and I began to look for apartments online. I called a few ads that I was interested in and made appointments to go look at some of them. I now have a really nice one-bedroom apartment that I absolutely love! And it is quite big for Spanish standards. Here are some pictures:

My kitchen/living room!

The living room part of my kitchen/living room

My room!

The bathroom!

Anyway, I miss everyone! I am, however, quite happy here. I don’t yet have Internet in my apartment, but once I do it will be much easier to stay in communication with everyone and I will continue to update my blog as much as possible! Love you all!