York y queso

Yesterday was my first day of Monday/Wednesday classes. I'm taking "Cervantes y su obra" and "Historia del arte." We'll be reading selections from Don Quixote in addition to other stuff Cervantes wrote (apparently he wrote other stuff). Art History should be fun, too. I've heard the professor is a good one, and he talks v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, so he's easy enough to understand.

So far, my favorite thing about Spain is the way nobody does anything between the hours of about 1:30 and 4:00 pm. I came home from school today, had lunch, and took the most glorious nap of my life, and nobody thought anything of it.

We had tortilla for dinner last night. It was muy rico. They say muy rico here for "tasty." It still sounds really awkward to me.

For "brunch" between classes this morning, I bought an "empanada de York y queso" (an empanada is a kind of sandwich) from a pastry shop. I didn't know what York was, so I asked the lady behind the counter what was in the York-y-queso empanada. She gave me a strange look and said, "Como, York y queso."

Thank you, lady behind the counter. I asked my host family later. I guess it's boiled ham.

The empanada was rico, anyway.

When I came downstairs for lunch yesterday, Adrián was telling his mom about a word in English: "hen." He said it was a gallo, which is a chicken—albeit a male one. His mom was like, "A gallo (male) or a gallena (female)?" I cleared that up for them and explained that the word for a male gallo is "rooster."

Ana said, "Ah—"rooster"—that's like, roast chicken? Roaster?"

I explained that, no, "rooster" and "roast" are two completely different words that have nothing in common except that you can do one to the other.

We're thinking of going to Madrid this weekend. Hopefully, I'll have some slightly more interesting things to share with you after that.

Yesterday's word of the day was tirita, which is a Band-Aid. I wanted one to put on my ankle to stop my shoe from chafing it, so I asked Adrián how to say it and then asked Ana for one. I thought it would be awkward to ask Ana, "If I have a cut, and I want to put something on it, what do you call that?" and then say, "Oh, okay. Can I have a tirita?"

Today's word of the day is actually two words, and they're actually from yesterday.

I hate to miss an opportunity to show off my vast wealth of knowledge, so when my Art History professor asked yesterday what bronce (bronze) was made of, and nobody else in the class seemed to know, it was killing me that I didn't know how to say "TIN AND COPPER, you morons" in Spanish. He kept saying, "¿Nadie sabe? (Nobody knows?) ¿Nadie sabe?" But I knew.

For future reference, tin is estaño and copper is cobre.