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I have an important announcement to make: I am finally a student again! That's right. While you all were enjoying a relaxing Labor Day holiday I was hitting the books. Yes, friends and family, I have returned to classes at last ;)

The semester began Monday for the Cursos Hispanicos program and I my first day of class was quite busy - with 3 classes to attend. My first class of the day (9:30-11:00) was Literatura del Siglo Oro (Literature of the Gold Age). The professor impressed me in his presentation and I think that this is going to be a great class. The Gold Age her covers mainly Renaissance and Baroque literature (2 of my favorite periods). At first I was nervous that the material would be too challenging but I knew more about the gold age than I thought I did - thanks to Mr. Smith's 10th grade European History - so I feel better. It'll be a lot of reading (I picked up the thick packet today) but I think I'll enjoy the reading. I spent the break between class reading The Girl Who Played with Fire (in English, forgive me) and eating lunch in the school cafeteria - decent food in large quantities.

Next class was Lengua: Avanzado A (2:00-3:30). It's a language class, but I like the professor and our first activity was to fill in song lyrics while listening to De amor y de casualidad by Jorge Drexler (happy memories of songs with Senora Ruddle). We did some activities built around this song, learned some vocabulary and some common grammar mistakes. The song one Jorge wrote to his son while his wife was pregnant - and it basically tells the boy about the family he is going to meet when he is born. So, we did an activity asking our classmates about their families and using some grammar of the song.

After another 2 hour break, I ended my day of classes with Historia de Espana. The professor for this class seems great and it seems like it will be relatively basic which will be nice. I think by the end of the class I'll have a basic understanding of Spanish history without being too bogged down by work this semester.

All of my classes so far seem to understand that we are in Spain and a huge part of our "schooling" this semester is going to happen outside of the classroom. As a result - I only had a small amount of homework for each of my classes. This is great because Tuesdays are free days (no class) for me and I didn't want to be overwhelmed by homework if I wanted to travel.

I returned home last night, tired after a full day and stayed in for the night - working on homework and visiting with Elena.