Entry 1: June 19, 2012

I woke up this morning to what I thought was my alarm. Turns out it was my friend calling and wondering where I was. It was 9:20, and I was supposed to be at the university at 9:15 for my first day of class. I live 20 minutes away. I jumped out of bed and got to school as fast as I could, but I was still pretty late by the time I got there. I knew the building I had to go to, but I didn't know what classroom or even what floor. I started listening for Meredith students' voices to figure out where I was supposed to be, and fortunately and found them before too long. My friend had texted me that the professor wasn't upset, but I had never been late to a class from sleeping late in my life, and so it was far from reassuring. Fortunately she wasn't mad at all and used my situation to learn more vocabulary about alarms. I really enjoyed the material we covered in class that day and the first two hours flew by. We had a 30 minute break and then had our second class that was all conversational and I enjoyed participating in the class.

Later that day, we had a workshop on traditional Gallecian dance, where we learned about the instrumentation, the history, and the lyrics and dance to some samples of songs. It was really fun!  Afterward, we all went to a local restaurant and ate churros and chocolate, a well-known dish that is served at virtually every restaurant in Santiago. It was still early when we finished, so a few of us went shopping and exploring downtown before dinner. There was a beautiful park that we happened to find that had an incredible view of the city. It was a great ending to a first day of classes.