El Viaje

Estoy aqui en Espana. It's pretty hard to believe I'm sitting in a hotel in Madrid right now. I mean who would have thought coming to Madrid would mean 30 degrees, snow, and 20 mph winds? I thank North Dakota for making me accostomed to this :) The flight over was interesting. My itinerary was:

Fargo->Chicago->Frankfurt->Madrid--14 hours total.

Here was my 9 hour flight in a nutshell

• Baby crying two rows behind me
• Small Asian woman in front of me who needed her seat back the whole time
• Flight attendants bringing food and beverage every 30 minutes
• My water bottle leaking on my seat so my butt was wet
• A flight attendant waking me up two times from my (scarce) slumber so that I could show her that my seat belt was buckled
• I tried watching a movie on my laptop only to find that in the first 30 seconds of the movie there was a sex scene and I felt extremely awkward because I know everyone could see. That was the end of my attempt to watch movies
  

But here's where the fun begins. I get to Frankfurt and am going through customs where I first get taken aside to get patted down. A German worker proceeds to take everything out of my backpack and then throws it back in to get rechecked (of course not in any order at all). Jokes around (in German) to one of his co-workers. Makes me re-check my laptop. Two men in suits ask me to follow them to a closed room where they check my laptop with some crazy machine. And then they finally let me go where I catch the bus by about 20 seconds. Thank you Germany!

So for the next few days we are staying in Madrid and meeting everyone in our program. We are here for a few days and get to go see some of the sites and explore while getting to know everyone. I can't really describe my feelings right now. I thought I would be really excited but I don't think it's really hit me yet that I'm in Spain. Jet-lag probably doesn't help either. But this is where the adventure begins. And I'm looking forward to every minute of it. Bienvenidos a Espana!