Rain, Nausea and New Apartment

Hey everyone,

Florian and I both moved into our new ‘homes’ yesterday. For the time being, we are separated, as he decided to move in with the host family (damn luxury life for Florian, as all services are included: cleaning, washing, cooking, etc) while I wanted to move into an apartment with 3 flatmates. Depending on whether Florian still wants to separate from his luxury life in a week, he may move into this apartment as well, as one of the girls will leave. Let’s wait and see, he sounds pretty happy there so far ;) Even though I’d also like to have him around, but let’s see. Right now it feels funny that he is not here… after being together for 24hours/ 7 days, I kind of miss him ;)

Well, at least we see each other pretty much all day at school. Today was our first real introduction day. It started at 7:30am… which meant that we had to get up at 5:30am… way too early if you ask me. Nevertheless, it started with some basic introduction for the intranet (moodle, etc) and was followed by some ‘basic introduction tests’…. Ahahaha… well, we didn’t expect it to be tough, but suddenly we were in the middle of a math test that was written in Spanish, followed by a Spanish test designed for Colombians (so concerning understanding and writing). It was hilarious! During the math test, we were still able to understand small exercises etc, but in the real Spanish test, I was lost and I think I can speak for Florian as well ;)

Then we finally received our schedules …. As expected, we did not exactly get what we enrolled for and suddenly the 6 selected classes in English (out of 7) changed to 4 classes in English and 3 classes in Spanish. Great deal… if we didn’t need to pass the tests ;) Well, tomorrow we meet with Edgar anyway and see what we can do about it. But after all, if the classes are in Spanish, we will take them in Spanish. It will definitely be a challenge ;)

Yesterday we already had the first rain since we were here, but today it seemed like the world will come to an end. It was raining cats and dogs, and then it even started hailing. But not like normal, this were really big ice cubes (at least for what we expected to see here).

In this rain we had to take the university bus back to the city… and it is already a torture when it is not raining, because the streets are already kind of interesting, plus we drive down the hill). But today, both Florian and I stepped out of the bus with a very queasy feeling in the stomach. It only needs to rain and the craziness on the street exceeds the regular craziness here even more. Let’s hope it will not rain so often ;)

To fight the nausea, we went to a late lunch with Laura: to our favorite restaurant  so far> Patacones! It serves plantains with whatever you choose to eat it with. Florian and I love it in all varieties. But the funniest thing is that Florian especially likes to go for ‘el chef’, which means he gets plantain with chicken wings, etc … and a ‘side dish’ of gloves :D

Btw when walking down the street, it is quiet a big act to keep track of everything that goes on. First of all, you need to watch out that you do not get run over by a car (okay, the sidewalks are incredible high (at least double the height of the ones in Germany)… Unfortunately, we haven’t found out the real reason for this yet, but it could be to protect us - the pedestrians ;), but when crossing a street, you need to have a watchful eye… The next thing is to keep an eye on the people around you, and hold your purse/ bag tight. Additionally, the streets as well as the sidewalks are uneven anyway, but they also like to suddenly have really deep holes. So you better have the eyes on the floor, because otherwise you will break your leg every 10 meters by falling into one of those …. And if you can handle all these things at once, you can start practicing to look at buses that might drive into your direction and walk while waving to catch one ;)