Apr 21st - Apr 27th

Dear Diary,


JUST KIDDING! -- My Loyal Readers!


It was a pretty mellow end to the week last week. Wednesday and Thursday like usual I did not have class which is nice because the 16 hours Monday and Tuesday are tiring. Ok, you are right, I did not go to all 16 hours last week, doesn't mean it is exhausting though!

On Wednesday I hung around the house for the first bit of the day...First bit of the day being from 2p.m. onwards. I am not sure why but my sleeping schedule has been all sorts of turned around this last week or so. I made lunch, and when the roommates got home we all ate together. Also, Carlos the neighbor came by to join us for lunch. Today was Catarina's graduation day for her Masters program that she is doing. I did not have anything to do so I went with Carlos and sat through the painfully boring ceremony. After the graduation party, Catarina, Carlos, Rita and I all went out to dinner with a few other friends from the girls Masters program. It was a nice day, and I think that Catarina was glad to have some one there to clap for her seeing as none of her family were there.

Thursday, I actually got a bit of homework done! I know it sounds funny coming from this mouth, but I had to get an assignment in on Friday, so I knocked it out Thursday. Apart from the homework I went to dinner with Javier, Marc, and Amy. We went to the usual Indian place in Lavapies, good as always! I was debating whether or not to go out Thursday night, but decided not to because of class Friday.

Friday class, although not my favorite thing, went by relatively quickly. On Fridays I have Financial Management and the practical class teacher is a girl from Taiwan. She is not very patient, and her English is very broken so it makes for a difficult class. I was excited that I found this class in English because it is a major class of mine, but I would guess that if it were in Spanish I would understand better than this ladies broken English. Friday night I decided to have all of my friends that wanted to come over to the house. Rosarinho and Catarina both went home for the weekend so it did not matter how loud we were or how much fun we had! When I say all my friends that wanted to come, it ended up being like 6 of us! Others were busy writing papers for their senior project (Alvaro, and Isaac), some were lost in space because of significant others (Vicky and Pitu), and well I guess that basically wraps up my list of friends here! We had a great time though, we ordered food from La Llama, a great tapas bar, my favorite, and brought it home so we could eat and drink in the comfort of our own house, at our own pace, without a restaurant packed shoulder to shoulder with smokers. Marc had a friend of a friend in town, Joy, because she was running the Madrid Marathon Sunday. It was funny when he introduced her because right away I knew that I recognized her from somewhere. She was the president of a club that I am a member of at ASU, but rarely attend! We had a blast, we ended up staying in for the night due to the marathon runner, but fin was had by all.

Saturday morning we were all a bit slow to get up and at it, but once we did I headed over to Marc's house to have lunch with the family. Javier, Marc's dad, came home with a brand new charcoal barbecue so we lugged it down to the back yard and built it while taking in the beautiful spring day. It was the picture perfect type of grilling day, the neighbors were all out, the kids next door were playing soccer and running around, not a cloud in the sky. It took us a while to get the whole thing built up because it was pretty big, but man was it worth it. Javier grilled up some chicken wings, drumsticks, and a couple different types of sausages. We also had grilled asparagus, and a Caesar salad. MMMMMMM, did that hit the spot. Saturday night I met up with Joy to grab some gels and so on because I told her that I would meet her at the half marathon point and give her them, and cheer her on. Later that night I ended up meeting up with a friend of mine form last semester, Timon. He came to visit over the weekend from Germany and we went out with a friend of his from back home and a mutual friend of ours Kim. It was a fun night and it was good to get to see him, but getting home at 6:00 am is rough when you have to be at the half marathon point by 11:00!

I woke up and made it to the half point about ten minutes before Joy got there. I gave her her gels, and ran along side her for a few kilometers before breaking off and heading directly back home and to sleep! She was doing well, and I know that she finished which was her goal. Later Sunday I had to meet up with my from Financial Management. We were supposed to meet at 6:00 pm but neither of my group members showed up until after 7:00...yes this is normal in Spain. The thing that I am not sure is normal is what happened afterward, we worked on the case study for about an hour...well I should say Marco and I worked on the case study for about an hour while Lara sat and chatted on her computer not paying attention. A couple of times I would ask her random questions about what was going on and she would give some answer that had nothing to do with anything! Not exactly what most would call participating. To add insult to injury, after we were a little over half way she tols us she had to leave because she was meeting up with her boyfriend to see a movie...now let me get this straight, you show up over an hour late and now you want to leave before we are done to go to a movie. I promptly told her no, the project is due Monday and we needed to finish it. We ended up working for another 10 minutes or so before Marco had to get going too. We divide the rest of the work, I was going to do part that night and send it to them, and they were going to meet up the next day to finish it, print it and bring it to class.

Monday was a normal day, my first class was canceled and International Finance went by rather quickly. When I arrived at my Financial Management class, neither Lara or Marco showed up, and when I looked through the stack of projects that were already on his desk, ours was not there. I should have known that they were going to screw this deal up. I talked to the teacher, and asked Lara to send me the final project she turned in because Marco didn't have it. Needless to say, I am still waiting for a response. Well it was not the best way to cap off the Monday but so be it. There was some good that came out of the Monday, I bought a ticket to go to Italy in two weeks for Martin, one of the Italian cousins, graduation party for his Masters. It is going to be some river rafting weekend up in the alps. Should be a blast!

Well, I hope this finds everyone doing just wonderfully.

Much Love from Madrid,

Phil