Monday night almost our entire group was going to a bullfight. I was never interested in going but all of my friends were, and I didn´t want to have nothing to do. I´d just heard how bloody and gruesome they are and that just isn´t my thing. A guy in the group said, ¨Come on! It´s the culture, you have to experience it!¨ To which I replied ¨Smoking and drinking are a part of the culture, too, and I´m not taking part in that either.¨ I teetered on the fence, but then I went to a museum instead...only to find that all museums in Europe are closed on Monday. Major bummer. But I´m not sad I didn´t go. Then I went home and had Family Home Evening at our director´s house. They had made us chocolate chip cookies and popcorn and we were all so desperate for American food that we made ourselve sick hogging it down. We got home and our dinner was on the table, but we had to ask to eat it for lunch the next day because we were too full. But actually, we only ended up eating a third of it, because the other portion was this fatty caserole that had been sitting on the counter uncovered for at least 36 hours and I had no interest in eating microbes, so we wrapped it in the foil that had covered our food and chucked it.
We got our first papers back yesterday for our classes. Very interesting. In our first class, history and culture, she handed back our homework and everyone had gotten B´s!!! Being the overachievers that we are, my girlfriends and I were freaking out. She can´t give us all B´s! We did exactly what she said! Etc. Etc. She finally said that B meant Bien, and our fears were calmed. We´re just hoping that we weren´t supposed to be getting an E for Excellente. Then we got our first grades in our second class. This guy is totally crazy. He read all of our grades aloud to the class. Embarrassing, especially since he had not graded as easily as he said he would. Today, he actually passed back our papers and he told everyone what they did wrong, in front of the whole class one by one. He would read a section, tells us he didn´t understand what we meant and then ask us to explain it. Then he would tell us we were wrong and pull some obscure term out of his butt to explain what we should have done. He seriously expects us to know a ton about Spanish literature, but we´ve only studied it a semester, and he is a terrible teacher so we won´t learn a thing more from him. We all enjoy berating him on the bus home.
Later on, my neighbor Melissa said the bull fight was really cool and not that violent. But then Leslie described how one had vomited blood and other such disgusting details and I was one again pleased that I hadn´t been there. Most people went just to say they went, and I don´t need the bragging rights that badly. Today was really cool though, because we went to a flamenco ballet in Madrid! The theatre was pretty small and we were really close to the stage, so we saw everything maybe a little too well. Don´t get me wrong, I enjoyed it, but it wasn´t the most spectacular thing. The dancers kept messing up and talking to each other on stage. There was this one heavier dancer that was always so dripping in sweat that it would fly off of him in drops when he did turns and soak through all of his costume shirts. He also liked to keep his shirt open to display his ¨impressive¨ amount of chest hair. There was another male dancer that we were pretty sure was really a teenage girl. His/her looks really could have gone either way and they always kept their shirt all the way buttoned when all the other guy dancers would have them completely open. They had some amazing flamenco guitarrist play during breaks and sometimes while the dancers performed, which was really cool. But the best part was this 65 year old lady dancer with a tremendous ego. We think she was their choreographer and that she only agreed to do it if she could perform. She would come out on stage in a racy costume and dance some highly excitable number. Her face was intense, she would stare at the audience, yell and stamp her feet. Total diva. She kept making eyes and beckoning to one of the guys in our group. She danced three times and she would take extra bows and wave her hands to encourage more applause, then when we gave them to her, she would get this immensely self-satified look on her face in an, ¨I´ve still got it after all these years,¨ kind of way. She killed me.
One last note before I head off to the bus stop. To all of you who are worried about Ricardo, don´t. He really isn´t that bad. I mean, I´m not exaggerating his behavior, but it is laughable and therefore tolerable. Yeah it would be better if he was completely nice and reliable, but I´m having fun and whatever weird stuff he does just gives me an interesting story. He isn´t ruining my trip or stressing me out or anything like that. Besides, he has been in the hospital for about a week now, I think it has something to do with his liver, so when he gets back he´ll probably be resting and not around very much. Sorry to worry you all! I´ll write again soon.