Today is my second day of school and I have a nice eight-hour break (somehow possible) in between classes. I want to write a lot about Barcelona, but I think I'm just going to stick to talking about school now because I still need to organize my thoughts on the trip. And also because the university is ridiculous and I need to tell someone about it.

I expected yesterday to be the typical traumatic first day, and Sarah and I met at Starbucks at 8:15 to psychologically prepare ourselves. Thanks to Sevilla's lacking public transportation system -- there is a monorail-type thing that travels about half a mile -- I have to get up by 7:30 for a 9am class. The sun somehow is still rising when I walk across the bridge, and it's really spectacular to see the city skyline in pink.

Despite being equipped with an embarrassingly large map of the Tobacco Factory, I got lost and showed up late to about every class. But it of course didn't matter because this is Spain and everyone is late to everything. My first class, Contemporary History of the Spanish World, went very well and I'm definitely going to stick with it. It's about half Spaniards, half CIEE students, which is kind of comforting. It also seems like it's going to seriously overlap with the class I took in January. It is completely lecture, though. I tried to ask Carmen the word for "lecture class" the other day, and after I described what it was, she said, "That's class. What else is there?"

Taking Arabic in Spanish is probably one of the weirdest and most confusing things I've ever done, but fortunately they use the same textbook here (an English one printed at Georgetown) and are picking up right where I left off last semester. I considered dropping the class at first, but the professor seemed so enthusiastic about having me there and he's patient when I translate Arabic to Spanish, so I think I'm going to give it a shot. The six Spanish girls in the class are nice and seem fairly amused with me. I get the feeling the university is 90% female.

My third class, History and Technique of Photography, naturally doesn't exist, so I've been shopping for another class. I may end up doing an art history course called Iberoamerican Art in the 20th Century, which sounds great but is unfortunately on Thursday and Friday mornings. And I already have some flights (Brussels and Amsterdam!) scheduled for Thursdays. People don't seem overly concerned with attendance here, though. Ha don't read that, parents.

My other two courses are in linguistics -- History of Linguistic Ideas at the university and Second Language Acquisition at CIEE. I like the latter a lot; it's taught by a professor from the university who seems to really know what he's talking about, and since it's a CIEE class it's very interactive in the American way. It's also a nice feeling to study what we're all experiencing.

Anyway, I'm getting used to the new schedule and I have mixed feelings about how quickly time is starting to pass. I'm going to sign off because little kids keep coming up to my table and staring at my laptop. Hope life is good.