The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly in Granada

Weeelll... We're back in monsoon season here.

Today, my grammar teacher walked into class and said that she has never seen it rain this hard in her life. It's been pouring all day! We told her that it was annoying but that we've all seen a lot worse. We're Chicagoans 'till Chicago ends :-) I did get a good laugh about the fact that on the 10-day weather.com forecast, the three days that it's supposed to be sunny and warm are Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The days I will be in Paris. Where it will be 40º and raining (which, no big deal, I'll be in Paris! But still!). I also laugh because all last summer, I prayed for rain every night while I worked as a pool manager in an unusually dry summer. Where was this rain then?!

In any case, it's been a good few days. Yesterday, classes started back up at CEGRI. It was SO nice to get back to having a routine and having structure after five days of not really knowing what to do with myself. I got to see all of my friends again, too, which was so great! Now I only have one more day of class and then four days in PARIS! I am so excited for the trip and can't wait to see Carolyn, Meghan, and the Hartsells. Oh, and the Eiffel Tower :-) 

OH! An exciting development from today was that Alli and I found a coffee place by school that has AMERICAN coffee to go! It's so rare to find American-style coffee here. In Spain, ordering "café" (coffee) will get you a shot of kind of gross espresso, and ordering "café con leche" (coffee with milk) will get you said gross espresso shot in a coffee mug with the rest filled up with hot whole milk. I'll never forget my dad's face at the Granada airport when he went up to ask for a coffee and came back with a Dixie-cup-sized muddy looking espresso. It's also very rare to find coffee to go here. Usually if you want coffee, you have to go to a café, sit down, wait fifteen minutes for the waiter (you don't tip the waiters here, so they really have no incentive to give you fantastic service. Reeeeeeally makes me miss our favorite Chili's waiter, aka Mr. Sarah Fabbri. He always keeps your Diet Coke full and your chip basket overflowing), then order your coffee, get it in a mug, sit there and drink it, then wait twenty minutes until you see the waiter again to ask him for a check, then wait about ten minutes for the check. It's a process. Anyways, that was a huge run-on-sentence-filled tangent. So this new place is called Café Bella and has any kind of coffee drink you could want to go. The best part, though, is that they have CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES. I have been missing homemade chocolate chip cookies so much and to be able to find them (even if they weren't exaaaactly homemade) was just so exciting.

 

Café Bella is also run by a Scottish lady so you order in English! The funny thing is that I got so flustered when I was ordering. I think I said something like, "Uhhh... Can I have grande, no, large, no grande, coffee American? I mean American coffee?"  Aaaaand this is a perfect example of how my English is slowly deteriorating. I guess it's a good thing for my Spanish skills, but it's starting to get scary! I'm the world's biggest grammar freak. Legitmately. If there's a grammar error on a test I'm taking, I get so distracted by it that I have to fix it before I can answer the question. But there have been SO many times recently where my mom has e-mailed me to tell me that I made an egregious grammar error on the blog! I can't believe it, but I've used the wrong "your/you're", "there/their/they're" and "two/too/to" a few times recently! iamsoashamed! So just know that if I make a dumb error like that, or blatantly misspell a word, or make the second grade error of typing "desert" instead of "dessert" (like I did in one of my Italy posts), just know that it's the Spanish getting to my head! 

Well, I think the Bachelor is just about done downloading, so I'm going to go watch what was apparently the most intense/psycho finale ever. Verrrry exciting!