bleh...culture shock?

Hola todos...Aquí estoy en España...and i'd really rather not be...i think culture shock is starting to set in...everything is so very different from what I'm used to....starting with the weather: it's been about 40 the past several days--that doesn't sound like it means anything too important, until you realize that 40 in Celsius is like 104 degrees fahrenheit...yuck! And, air-conditioning isn't too horribly prevalent.
Next, the food...very different...Breakfast is always pan tostada and cafe; normally it would be cafe con leche, but that just wouldn't be a good deal for me...so, every morning we each get a small loaf of bread, cut in half and toasted, plus our beverage...then "lunch" comes at like 3 in the afternoon...and is always very oily, even if it's salad! And, of course, Salud (my senora) tries to make us eat WAY too much, although she herself would never think of eating similarly sized portions of the same food...and, i'm fairly convinced that she thinks olive oil is like a health food, and is convinced that it doesn't have "grasa" (fat), or at least not like the fatty American foods (oh yes, my normal diet has so much more fat than all this completely oil-saturated food! agh!) Yesterday, it was pretty good actually, we had calamares--pretty much octupus rings instead of onion rings...Salud said she bought a medio kilo of calamares, so it shouldn't be difficult for Karla and I to eat the whole plate full; she then went back and said that maybe she had purchased the whole kilo after all....2.2lbs of deep fried octopus...yeah, that doesn't sound like too much for two petite girls in one meal at all! Then, at 9:30 we eat supper...it usually starts with soup--yummy--however, it is then followed with a plate full of food and mas pan, and then probably some fruit...but, you had better not go to bed right after, because as Salud says, eating then sleeping is a great way to get fat...but we can't not eat--it's not an option...grr...

Besides the weather, lack of air-conditioning, and too much food, it's not too bad here...This weekend the 4 of us Northwesterners poked around the shopping area and then looked around at some of the sweet old buildings that are in the center of town...there's a giant cathedral (that was built on a mosque) and the giralda (watchtower) that we're thinking we need to get the tour of, and there are the Alcazares Reales (which is like some old fortressy thing) that we're also thinking we need to see, and there's the Archivos de Indias that has all the stuff that Colombus brought back from the Americas--might also be worth a peek...Classes start today, so we'll see what i think of them later on...I went ahead and dropped a class so that i would have more free time...hey, it's my last semester!!

Hope everyone's having a great time back home!!