Para empezar: Day 1!

I'm actually posting for yesterday, but I didn't have the internet, so today is the day to start! Well, we arrived at the Madrid airport after being in the air for nine and a half hours, it was good to finally arrive. We had a difficult time trying to meet up with the group. Miscommunication in another country is not good! We finally found him after about an hour of wandering around, then loaded up on the bus and headed to Alcala de Henares. It's about 45 minutes away from Madrid. We arrived in la Plaza de Cervantes to meet our new families! My roommate is Lyn (I love her! She's great.) and we live with Gloria y Santi (short for Santiago) and their two sons Jesus (14) and Miguel (19). They're all really nice and extremely accommodating. They understand that our Spanish kind of sucks and want to help us in any way they can. When we finally got to the house, we took a shower, got unpacked, and had a lunch with Santi. In Spain, they have a small breakfast of fruits, cereals, or breads, then they have a huge lunch in the afternoon, and a small dinner (usually) around 10 PM. It's very interesting! Also, they have a siesta in the middle of the day around 1 and it lasts til about 4. It's a real thing! All the shops around town close down so people can go home and take a nap. I guess more and more people are steering away from this because they've realized that they can have more business, but we couldn't find many places that were open as we were walking around. Ok, back on track. So after we ate, we were both extremely tired, but we knew we couldn't go to sleep, so we decided to go explore. We walked the city to see what we could find. It was a lot different than I expected! I don't think they have any kind of public cleaning here. There's nasty garbage thrown everywhere. Also, graffiti is a big problem wherever you look. One thing we noticed, though, is that it was only on buildings and other things that hadn't been painted already. We walked by a pre-school that had paintings of kids and such on the outside, and it wasn't tagged, but the other buildings all around had been tagged. Very interesting... Also, they don't really have single houses. Everywhere you look there are apartment buildings and condominium complexes rising up into the sky. Some are old, some are new. Luckily, our host mom told us that we're in the safer part of town and they never have problems here. I guess that south of the main city is a different story. A couple of people from our group are living down there, but hopefully they won't run into any problems.