I Want to be a Pirate

     So, I've been in Spain for almost a week now and I think I'm adjusting pretty well. I can communicate fairly well with my host family and I'm steadily falling more in love with the city around me. Something that is hard about being here is actually getting up in the morning. I'm always so sleepy! I don't know if this is due to jetlag or what. Since Michigan is six hours behind Alicante if I wake up at 8am it's about 2am in the time zone I'm used to. It might also be hard for me to get up in the morning just because I like sleeping so much, who knows.

This is a picture of the directors and the
 rest of the people from CMU when were were
wandering around the city after orientation

      I had my orientation on Wednesday, so I got to see the University of Alicante. The campus is pretty big and it's filled with beautiful plants and buildings. I'll get lots of pictures when classes start next week for sure. When I went to orientation, they explained some basic things about the program, classes, host families, money, transportation, etc. Then we had a short tour of campus before setting our computers up for the wifi (though I didn't bring my computer so I'll have to do that later). Later that day, we met up with the two directors of the program (both conveniently named José Ramón) and they showed us around the city and took us out to dinner. I cannot stress enough how cool these two guys are and how grateful I am that they're here. They have taken such good care of us, it's great. 

       Thursday, I returned to campus to figure out my schedule a bit and we met a Spanish student that can help us with our phones and technology, if we need it. For lunch we stopped at a restaurant called 100 Montaditos and we had these little, itty bitty sandwiches which were really good.  I was going to meet up with a couple of people later to go to the beach, but, me being me, I arrived late and missed them. I wandered around the beach for a bit before I came back home for the night (the beach is probably going to get its own blog, it's beyond beautiful). That night, my host family had a friend over for her birthday. She spoke really quickly so it was a challenge to try and understand what she was saying, but for the most part I got the general idea of what everyone was talking about. 

Here is a picture of
one of the moro groups.

       Okay, get ready! It's the moment you've all been waiting for! I'll try to keep this part short, this blog is already long as it is. So, last night the directors of the program took us to a festival in a little town about 45 minutes from Alicante called Villena. The festival is a celebration of the history of the city (and the country, to a certain extent), how it was conquered by the Moors from Africa in 711 and then how it was reconquered by the Christians in 1492. It started yesterday and goes until Monday, I believe. In the middle of the town they had a huge stretch of road closed off and tons of people were marching in the streets dressed as moros (Moors) or cristianos (Christians). The costumes were beautiful. One of the directors said that the people get new costumes every year and that they can cost up to 1,000€. It was incredible to see how much effort and emotion was put into the festival. It made me wish that we had some equivalent in the US. 

So this is a picture of some pirates,
who I think were classified as Christian..
I want one of their outfits. 

       The area that we went to is known for having castles from the 11th and 12th centuries around the towns. I think we saw two or three on the way to Villena and then there was one above the city. Today they were holding battles today between the moros and cristianos. The history of the area is really rich and I hope that I can go back soon and see the castles up close. 

        
          Well, I think that's enough for now. With classes starting next week, I know that I'll have many,  many more adventures to share.