You can call me Willy

Last night an impromptu group from the hostel went to the Real Madrid-Espanyol soccer game, it was awesome! Real Madrid won 3-0 and we got to see some great soccer! (Including a PK goal from Ronaldo, 3 red cards, and numerous yellows.) Tickets were only 30 euros, and even though the seats were pretty high up behind the goal we could still see really well! We kept commenting on how different the stadium was from any US sports stadium. There were no big screens, no replays, not a ton of advertisements, no halftime show, etc. There was also no alcohol in the stadium, so beforehand all the little sandwich shops were selling liters of sangria for 4 euros, crazy?!! Inside the stadium there was a group of fans behind the goal (opposite of where we were sitting) who we deemed the cheerleaders. They were the ones chanting the entire game and even got to moving back and forth together in the stands; it was pretty neat to watch actually. One of the guys who went with us was from Germany, and he's the first person outside of the south, and definitely the first non-American I've met who loves country music! We were talking about music and he said America has all this great music, like Kenny Chesney. Haha I definitely wasn't expecting that!

Today's orientation was really long. For the most part it was just necessary stuff that you have to sit through, but we did have some entertaining sessions on mini-teaching lessons. One of them was from a teacher who was hilarious!! He started out by saying, "my friends call me Willy, you can call me Willy." He was very animated and had us laughing almost the entire time, so that was a nice break. For lunch we had bocadillos (traditional Spanish style sandwiches) consisting of bread (like a mini french loaf) and cheese, bread and ham, bread and turkey, or bread and lamb. It took me by surprise at first that it was simply bread and meat, nothing else. They also had fruit to go along with the bocadillo, so it was more of a meal. During orientation I also met a few others from North Carolina so that was cool. Still have half a day of orientation tomorrow, mainly working to get our NIE so that should be helpful!