the first month as an american in spain!

first off, sorry it´s been a while since the last post!

this first month (today it is officially 4 weeks since i arrived in spain) has been amazing, with many highlights and just a few glitches. i´ll start off with the glitches, the first was that it took a full week to get my suitcase with most of my clothes (it kind of sucks to make your first impression on your classmates wearing the same  pair of stretched out jeans everyday and sloppy t-shirts (the only thing that was in the small duffle that came through right away). of all the glitches that could have happened, this really wasn´t that big of a deal. the other glitch (which is currently halfway to being fixed) was that my computer broke. the good news and the bad news is that it was less than a month old. yeah, it´s a bummer to loose it so soon after i bought it, but it also had almost nothing on it, which means nothing was lost (every photo that was on it is still on my camera memory chip, and almost all the music is on my ipod). it costs more to fix than to buy a new one, so a new one is on the way.
other than those two hiccups, the transition has been really smooth. i couldn´t have gotten a better host mom (the daughter is difficult-like all 7-year-olds- Ana, more than makes up for it), the people at school are great, and i´m getting adjusted to the classes. i realized this week just how much more i can understand than i could 4 weeks ago. i finally feel like i understand about 90% of what my crazy history teacher is saying (history and literature are by far the hardest classes), though i´m still constantly terrified í will be called on. although i can understand much more, i still have a hard time figuring out just how to articulate what i want to say. literature is difficult because the stories we read tend to change tenses fairly often. the only reason i´m surviving in that class is because my host mom is so amazing. she asks me about my homework every night and has learned that the subject i most often need help in is lit. I read the stories then tell her what i do and don´t understand (usually i understand each individual paragraphs but not how they relate) and then she goes though the whole thing with me. the first night she spent thirty minutes walking me through a story.)
we´ve been on two school trips so far, one to albraccin (a small pueblo in the province of teruel, 2 hours south of zaragoza in Aragon) and a day trip to Leyre (a monastery) and Olite (a pueblo around an amazing old castle), both 2 hours north of us in Navarra. the trips are a nice change in pace because we live in such a busy, modern city, it´s cool to be able to see the more historical parts of the country, and they are also a good time to get to know more of the class and in a different environment.
Next weekend is the festival of Pilar, the patron saint of spain. the entire country comes to celebrate it in the streets of zaragoza. í don´t know much about it now, i´ll write more about it after it happens.

thanks for the emails and letters! i´ll try to post some pictures soon (it won´t be until i get my new computer though).

hope home is good!