I made it to España!

After the longest flight of my life, I made it safely to Spain. I had a nine hour flight to London, which actually went very well. Everyone on the plane was nice, the food wasn´t bad, complimentary cocktails and wine is always nice. The only things about the flight that weren´t good was that someone in my section had a horrible gas problem through out all nine hours of the flight and that I couldn´t seem to find a comfortable position to sleep in, resulting in less than an hour and half of sleep.
Although London Heathrow is a nice airport, I had a horrible experience there. The lady at the ticket counter in Denver told me that when I arrived in London that I would have to from terminal 5 to terminal 1. So once I got to terminal 5 I took the shuttle bus to terminal 1, where I had to go through security (which I found a bit odd since I had already been through more intense security in Denver, where they took away my peanut butter because you apparently can´t have "pastes" in your carry-on). So once I get through security I am looking around to find the British Airways counter and I can´t seem to find it. I approach another counter and ask the lady there where the British Airways counter is and she tells me that I am at the wrong terminal and will have to go out and go on the shuttle to terminal 3. I barely make it to catch the shuttle and once at terminal 3 I have to go through security, again. I am running through the terminal trying to find either the ticket counter or a monitor that says which gate my flight to Barcelona departs out of. I find a monitor that says that the gate that need to be at is closing. So at this point I am literally running through the airport pulling my suitcase, trying carry my backpack, jacket, scarf, teddy bear, and laptop which I didn´t have a chance to through back in my bag, and the whole time running, pushing my way through the crowd, knocking over babies, just trying not to miss my flight. I make it to the gate and there are 4 sub-gates, which I ca get to by running down a flight of stairs, and of course my gate is at the very end. I make it to the counter completely out of breath and the ladies that are there to take my ticket look at me like I am completely crazy and I barely made the shuttle to take me to the plane.
My flight from London to Barcelona went better than my adventure in the airport. I had a row to myself and was able to take a short nap. Once I got to Barcelona, I thought that it would take me longer to get out of the airport than it did and I was surprised that they just took my passport and stamped it and just walked through custons with no problems. I have not had as easy a time both going to Mexico or returning through customs in the U.S. (Mexico was scary because there are officers stations throughout the airport with riffles and customs in the U.S. is must very intense). I didn´t know that the airport in Barcelona is split into two terminals, so it was a bit confusing trying to find the train station to get to the main train station where I would take a train to get to Castellon, but a guy saw that I looked confused and told me that I had to take a shuttle to the main terminal and once in the main terminal had to take a skywalk to the train station. I fell asleep for about 30 minutes on the train and woke up afraid that I had overslept and missed my stop, so I was unable to fall back asleep. Fimally, I made it to my stop, where my host family was waiting for me.
My host family seems very nice. My host mother´s name is Dori, my host father is Antonio and they have a two year-old named Jorge. Antonio speaks English pretty well but Dori does not, which is okay for me because I decided to live with a family because it forces me to speak Spanish more often than if I lived with other students. I have learned from them so far that there are words and phrases that I use that they do not use here (for example the word for juice that I learned was "jugo" and here they say "zumo" and my host mother also had no idea what I was talking about when she asked me what I usually eat for breakfast and I said oatmeal). They also have a different eating schedule here than what I am used to, but I knew that before I cam- they eat lunch around 2 or 3, which is their larger meal, and eat dinner around 10. Although I knew beforehand that they use metric, is has been a bit difficult to remember that. This morning Antonio said it was 15 degrees out, I had to remember that it was not the same 15 degrees that I am used to.
Another thing that I forgot about was that their outlets are not the same as in the U.S. Antonio did leave an adaptor in my room for me, but then I remembered that the charger for my laptop has three prongs, not two. It´s little things like that that I don´t really have to think about on a day to day basis that are different here.
So far my experince here has been a good one. Dori and Antonio took me into town (they live on the edge of town) to see a parade for San Antonio, the parton saint of aminals, so people brought their pets and walked in the parade, alongside horses. Afterwards we walked around the city and they showed me the main points and we went back to the house and had paella for lunch, which was not my first time eating it, but it was my first time eating it with rabbit. The rabbit wasn´t bad, but definitely different. After lunch was siesta, which I needed still to recover from my journey here. We then walked down to the port with one of their friends and came back, prepared dinner and then some more friends came over and we hung out and had dinner.
All in all, the little time that I have been in España has been a good one. I can´t wait to see what I learn in the next five months!