Out and about

This is the first of many joint entries by myself and Sarah (for those of you who missed my earlier blog entries, I am traveling with my friend Sarah). 

Today, after sleeping for about 13 hours (or some of us anyway) to rid ourselves of jetlag, we decided to venture out into the city we call home for the next three and a half months.  Our homestay mother helped us get our bus tickets.  Our homestay father was going to take us but after the repairman came and we couldn't understand what he was saying and somebody blew a fuse, we think he gave up on us.  So our homestay mom took control.  As Sarah P. puts it, she loved us and left us.

Sarah P. learned a lesson from Sarah G. after G. followed the CATA (State College) bus rules and tried to shove her bus pass onto the driver.  Oops.  He so kindly pointed her to the machines behind him.  Then we fell into our seats facing backwards and attempted to construct the following question in Spanish "Where and when do we arrive at Plaza Catalunya?"  After craning our necks for ten minutes, we asked the woman in front of us for directions.  She gave a very detailed answer and another woman chimed in as well.  We understood something about two stops away and smiled like idiots.  But we found the stop!

We were looking for our school and, after getting directions from some empty store or cultural space (who knows?), we stumbled past and back into our school away from school where, without our even uttering a word, knew that we were Americans (this is such a mystery since we were saying sentences like "I so can totally not believe that there are THREE Zaras here!!!) and directed us upstairs. 

We left the school to wander around some more and stumbled upon this:

Our first Gaudi!  We crossed the street and sat on a bench for about five minutes in complete appreciative silence.

Then the real adventure began as we got lost since we were using the million Zaras and H&Ms as our landmarks and got distracted by the Obama bar across the street.  But we found our way again.

We arrived at the bus stop and knew what bus to get on but did not know what stop to get off at.  (Again, we had used stores as our guides.  Now we know better!)  But with a stroke of luck, we picked the right stop and made it back into our apartment building.

Now, our keys are those old keys that look like antiques.  They are very charming but we had some real difficulty opening the door to our apartment.  Ah, well, home sweet home! 

Tomorrow we are off to our first day of orientation!