My Arrival to Spain

So I was telling you that a lot happened my first day. Here's how it went:

My friends and I landed in Madrid and immediately had to call for a taxi to get to our insititute. Since the taxi driver couldn't speak English, we had explain the place to him in broken spanish, which lead him to drop us off at the wrong place. We went around aimlessly asking the locals how to get to our destination and ended up walking about a mile with big luggages until we found it.

We got our housing assignments and had to split up since we all lived somewhere different. This is when I got really scared because it was getting dark and I had to take the metro (subway) for the first time in a foreign country all my myself!

So I had to carry my huge luggage around and up and down 10 different flight of stairs to get on and off the metro. Luckily, a lot of the spaniards were super nice and helped me with carrying it most of the time.

This is the entrance to the subway. When I got there that night, it was SOOO crowded. When the first metro came, it was so packed that people were pushed up against the windows. When the door opened, I thought no one could get in but the people around me just pushed their way through and got in!

It looked kind of like this.

So then the metro left without me and thats when I learned, you just have to force your way through. When the next one came, I was determined fit. The door opened and I pushed myslef into the poeple. The door almost closed on my luggage but I moved it out of the way in time. Then the metro started moving and I felt really awkward because I could feel a lot of people staring at me, probably because I was asian.

This is what it looks like in the station, this picture was taken a couple days later though. Those are some of my roommates, all UC students.

When I finally got back up to the ground floor, I was surrounded by old buildings and spanish people walking around. Like a tourist, I walked around with a map in my hand looking for the street signs for a good five minutes until I realized the street signs were attached to the walls of the buildings.

When I finally found the street that my apartment was located at, all I saw was construction and had a hard time finding my building. So I ended up asking a spanish boy nearby if he can help me (by pointing to a map and making hand gestures) and he turned out to be really nice and did just that. He even helped me carry my luggage up the 4 flights of stairs!

When I got into my apartment, no one was home so I took a quick nap. I found out later that 2 of them were home, they were just sleeping though. And that ends my first day!