A Day in the Life of ME!

---

April 16, 2015 - Just happened back upon this blog, and saw I had an unfinished and unpublished entry. Here it is (unchanged from 2008):

So, I suppose to get a good understanding of what I do here in Salamanca, and all the cultural differences and stuff, I should tell you what a typical day is like for me in Salamanca.
Most days, I wake up around 9:30. Then I get dressed and eat breakfast. Breakfast in Spain is small, so my host parents usually just have some coffee, but I have cereal or toast (with cream cheese and quince jelly...yum!) and usually a small piece of fruit (In case you wanted to know, my new favorite fruit is fresh figs. The white kind. You have to try one.). After breakfast, I put on a coat and a scarf because it’s freezing here (but even in the summer it's cold in the mornings), and walk out the door. I walk down the road past my favorite bakery (it’s just around the corner from where I live, and the owners are super nice, and the desserts are really good), down Calle Toro (one of the main streets leading to the Plaza. It’s only for pedestrians, and has lots of shops, so I'm there quite a lot), through the Plaza, down another pedestrians-only street, and 25 minutes after leaving my house, I'm in my classroom.
At 2:00, class ends, and I make the 25-minute walk back home to eat lunch. Lunch is huge. We have some sort of meat/fish and veggie dish. It's usually tasty, but it's still hard for me to eat the fish. No matter what we have, the food is always cooked in olive oil. The amount of olive oil Jeny goes through in a week is unbelievable. I don't even want to know. The food in general is good, but it’s blander than food in the US. They tend not to use as many spices/herbs in their foods. The Spanish idea of variety is using different meats and vegetables for the meals. There isn’t really any ethnic food here, just Spanish. I think in the entire city of Salamanca, there are 3 Chinese restaurants, 1 Japanese, 2 Italian, and 1800 Spanish resturants (and no, that was not a typo nor an exaggeration). After lunch, depending on the day, I either take a little nap or go to class again. If I have time, I'll go to the IES center and use internet for a bit. 2 days out of the week I have intercambios (I talk with a Spanish person for roughly an hour in Spanish and and hour in English) in the afternoon/evening. Thursdays I go to Flamenco class, Thursdays and Fridays I go to speak with a 5 year old in English, and sometimes I go out for a glass of wine and tapas with Kelsie. At 9:30ish I have dinner with my host family, which consists of basically the same thing as a lunch would, just with less food.

---