2nd Day of Class- Karaoke!

As obvious by my lack of posts... I've been extremely busy these last few days figuring out what classes to take, exploring madrid, and organizing myself. So I guess I'll start back at Tuesday morning. I had my first History class which was really a toss up as to whether or not it would be interesting, but it turns out that the teacher is extremely engaging and easy to understand. She talks fast but enunciates very well which makes a huge difference. I think I'm really going to like the course because I've never been a big history person. I understand that in order to advance forward we have to learn from the mistakes of our predecessors and that there are great similarities between events of the past and those of the present.. so there are many lessons to be learned. But simply I don't find it that engaging or interesting, but I guess it really depends on the professor. All of mine to this point have been very boring. But this class uses newspapers and magazines as its primary resource and really studies much more recent topics and issues. It seems like a very dynamic class. Then right next door I had my next class called Cuento which is simply a literature class studying short stories in Spanish and the teacher seems very interesting though he is a little hard to understand at times. But the class was absolutely PACKED.. twice as many were there that could fit in the room so he is going to divide the class into two sections. Luckily my section is at the same time in the same room so I can still make it.
After class I went on a short run and then Sean and I met up to go to the gym..it's nothing special there, no life time fitness.. but I desperately needed to go! it had been about 3 weeks and I was beginning to feel like shit. After all the exercise I definitely felt much better and much more energized. At the gym there was some random guy that kept spotting me and helping me put things away. I hope he didn't have the wrong idea..
Got my wallet back! Everything was in there.. .but the money of course.. and unfortunately the debit and credit cards were already canceled.. I ended up staying out at campus for a long time because after I finished lifting and getting my ESN discount card, I met up with all of my Erasmus friends at a pool which was inside one of their residences. It felt amazing to jump in the pool after feeling like there is a perpetual layer of sweat glazing my body due to their egregious lack of A/C I now know why the rest of the world uses so much less energy than we do.. I ended up staying out there with them for a while until we walked back to campus to grab something to eat and pick up some sangria for our botellon (pregame). That night there was a big karaoke party down in Madrid and not too far from my house. By dinner there was just 3 of us because the others had already eaten and needed to start getting ready, but turns out that at dinner Kasha has a sister who lives just 10 minutes outside of downtown Munich where Oktoberfest will be and is going to invite 5 or so people to stay with her there.. I guess it pays to branch out and find new friends. I actually really have much more fun with my Erasmus friends than I do with many of my friends from BC in Madrid.. some of them are just downers.. So it's hard to decide who to spend more of my time with because I know I'll be traveling with all the BC kids a lot of the time and so I don't want to estrange myself from that group.. hopefully I can find a happy medium between the two..
Karaoke was so much fun and I had my first Mahito (Def spelled that wrong) of my life. It was soo good. We also have a new addition to our "group." Her name is Carolina (but said with a french flare) and she seems really nice. She got here late for some reason but she seems very nice. After a couple hours of karaoke I got a little bored and began to get a bit tired.. because you can't really dance that much and there were too many people and it was too loud to really talk.. kind of like Fr. Hymes description of a cocktail party if you ask me.. so after a few hours we ended up leaving.. partly because Coco had a bit of a headache probably from the alchohol and smoke in the bar.. Spaniards ...and French people smoke soooo much.. I'm sorry if I get lung cancer while I'm here, but it's impossible to avoid all the smoke. I think sometimes there is smog above the city just from the smoke... just kidding and actually there is never... NEVER clouds in Madrid. I don't know how the plants survive here. It's like a desert. But the weather is tremendous. Much better than Boston's or Detroit's. After we left I ended up walking home from Atocha for the first time and realized how fast and easy it was to do so.