Te despiertes. Hace calor. Te acquestas de nuevo. Alarmas suenan en coro–de tu reloj, tu telefono. Hay mas que veinte rejoles en tu casa. Tal vez dos funcionan.

I was going to try to do this in Spanish but I just took an exam y no se que no se cuanto pero segiumos en espanol…ingles, digo.

You stumble to the shower. It´s going to be cold and you know this because it´s been frigid cold since you got here, with only sprints of hot water. You know you´ll never figure out the hot water heaters in this country and you´re happy with that. There´s too much else to occupy your mind.

In and out of the shower. And I mean in and out. To conserve water, to conserve time in the morning, and to conserve life force. The best way to survive these showers is to let the water bead off of you and evaporate immediately. Overide and overheat your body so that the water cannot penetrate your warm epidermic layer. I did it once. The bathroom was a cloudforest of towels and tiles. It took much meditation. I have not been able to do this since.

What remain of the beaded drops on your body evaporate before you make it to your room, so all that´s left to do is adorn yourself in clothes of the lightest fabric and color so that you might survive the brutal heat and sun.

It reached 114 degrees Farenheit yesterday.

You make it to school before 9am so as not to lose points off your overall grade. You think that´s a bullshit rule that they´re not going to enforce but why would you want to find out?

Grammar class kicks your ass. You learn and you learn and you snore and you snore. But you learn. You try to use what you learn outside the classroom but you take so long to get it out that everyone else snores on you. Or they correct you which is actually nice.

No one survivies culture class. There are only twelve of us in the Spanish-spoken culture class and none of us have made it so far without having collapsed from exhaustion during a lesson.

It´s not that our professor is boring either. He´s an excellent communicator–probably the best I have ever witnessed. But he knows a lot of words, and, he says, the teacher of the English-spoken class knows even more. Poor bastards. My roomate, Elliot, is in that class.

You struggle through culture class long enough to earn your thirty minutes of net time before the Institute closes. You try to answer e-mails, when there are any. Some days you lug your laptop across the Puente de los Remedios (which goes over the Guadalquivir River) and along your twenty minute journey through the laborynth that is Maria Luisa Park so that you can design and create galleries to upload.

Your housemother won´t let you use your laptop in the house–because it takes a fraction of a fraction of the power that the television does, which they leave on the entire day.

You lug your self and the laptop (some days) back across the river. Everywhere there are scooters to dodge piles of dog of horse shit to smear. You make it back to your apartment as soon as you can so that you can climb those five flights of stairs (because they started working on the elevator three days after you got here, and they haven´t stopped yet) just to throw everything down, strip, and fall in to a short siesta.

Your mother comes home and complains about the stairs. Everyday. Then she cooks you something you´ve never had before that is delicious. That´s a lie, we have gazpacho everyday for lunch and that is always terrific.

You laugh with your housebrothers, and with your roomate. You struggle to bed, supporting your stomach–you wouldn´t have it any other way, and neither would your housemother.

You fall into the primary siesta, often the highlight of the day (the night is something else to be spoken of), and you remind yourself, that you´re in Spain, and you´re having the time of your life.

Time for culture class. It will take plenty of Coke, cookies, and questions to make it today. And who knows what to make the trek home under this sun.