Well Spain is just peachy

Okay, so the blog dated Sept. 2 is out of order and should actually be dated Saturday, September 6. If you were confused, that's why.

Not much has happened since I last posted. We started our orientation classes. We're all taking History of Spain, Art of Spain and a composition and grammar class. We're only in these classes for a month and the our actual semester classes begin October 2. The orientation classes are helping get us all into the swing of speaking Spanish though, which is good because we're not doing enough of that right now. This upcoming Saturday night is La Noche en Blanco. Lots of capital cities in Europe have "white nights." It's basically just a night the entire city stays up all night and there are all kinds of free activities, mostly related to the arts. It should be a lot of fun. After that, on Sunday I'm moving in with my host family, so I'll finally be forced to speak Spanish all the time.

One of our professors took us on a tour of the city last week. It was really informative but I think I want to go on the same tour again when the spring semester students arrive. The whole tour was in Spanish, so I only understood about 50% of the information. Here's a picture of the Palacio Real (Royal Palace).
This is a fountain that's in the garden in front of the palace.
Dad, here's an engineering feat for you. This is the first sculpture in the world where the horse is on his back legs. I guess those were really hard to do back in the day b.c of the physics. (Clearly I'm not a science major.) The numbers for this were crunched by (and like I said I was being told this in Spanish, so I didn't fully follow it) either Galileo or by one of his descendants. Or maybe it was Galileo did the numbers and one of his descendants designed the sculpture. Either way, it's the first of it's kind in the world and it has some relation to Galileo. Conclusion: I can't understand Spanish AND I don't understand physics. Oh well, it's a nice statue.
And here's one for Mom. She doesn't need to be told, but for those of you who don't know this the Plaza de España. The man sitting down is Miguel de Cervantes and the two greenish fellows in front of him are his fictional characters Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.