When talking with my friends last night, they mentioned that the young people from their church were going to take a day trip to Toledo. I was assured that while Madrid doesn't seem like a very Spanish city, in Toledo, you feel like you're in Spain. So I woke up at 8:20am so I could get ready and be at the church by 9:30. About 25 people from the church went. We car pooled down there (it's about an hour or hour and a half drive). When we drove up, we saw an amazing fortress which is the old town. It's a walled area of the city with really old looking buildings. I was so excited and assumed that we would park and I would get a chance to come back and explore and take photos, etc. That didn't happen, so that was a bit disappointing. We arrived and parked and regrouped. I assumed that we would break up into smaller groups, explore, and meet back at the cars at a specific time, but instead we all stuck together as a massive group. That arrangement had its benefits as well as its drawbacks. Main benefit: I could talk to all of the people in the group rather than just get to know the small group I ganged up with. Main drawback: it took forever to get anywhere and I couldn't explore the things I wanted to. For example, according to Rick Steves, the only really interesting thing in Toledo is the Cathedral (which is the first cathedral built in Spain). We walked to the outside of it, but didn't get a chance to go inside. As for the benefits, I met lots of great people. One gal is teaching English here. She's from LA and went to USC. One fellow knows four languages (including English and Russian - he's originally from St. Petersburg) so we talked a bit. There were three other Russian speakers who were originally from Ukraine. We talked a lot in Russian - two of them hardly speak any Spanish at all even though they have lived here for 6 months. About 5 of the people spoke English well enough for them to converse with me in English and the rest was in Spanish. Unfortunately, talking in Russian completely confused me so it made it very difficult to think of Spanish words when I wanted to talk, so I didn't do much talking in Spanish. Who knew that I would come to Spain to practice my Russian? It's actually a good thing, because in a few days Ivan's dad is coming to NYC to visit us and he'll be there when I get back. I was concerned about switching immediately from Spanish to Russian, but now it's like no switch at all. I'll just keep talking in English and Russian!

Back to the recap of my day: we returned from Toledo very late. I had a quick snack and went on the computer to write my recap, but then remembered that tomorrow is my last day with our friends and I wanted to try to transfer their e-mail contact list from one computer to another, so I did that instead. In the process, I managed to break a few things (now an error message pops up if they click on a certain folder). Eventually I discovered that the problem is one computer has Outlook 2003 and the other has Outlook Express 2002. And they are not compatible. I finally found a website explaining what I needed to do and in the end got it working, but then it was 1:30am. I was exhausted and decided not to write the recap and instead went to bed.

Labels: Spain, WWW2009