'and here in Spain I am a Spaniard'

Bienvenidos a España, y un viaje del bus del cuatro horas. One awesome thing is that I'm finally in a country that uses the metric system, so my stubborn quirky way of understanding distance, speed, temperature, and even hours (all post times are my local time, whatever it is on any given day, but all posts change together)  is now normal. It's 23 out, and we're sies horas ahead of EST. All this said, the following comment should make sense: I swear that we were going 60, 70 tops the whole time when the speed limit was 120.

The flight over wasn't as long as I expected, and I had my first food improvisation practice complete with non-vegan excursions. We had a chat about identity crisis, but my organic hemp day pack is a nice surrogate for veganism for now. We landed, hopped on the bus, and then drove to Zaragoza, settled (the nice man at the front desk, when reading my passport to hand it back to me, said in Spanish something like, 'Your name is very difficult to pronounce, so, Maria!'), ate, debriefed, and acknowledged our collective tiredness and broke for the rest of the evening. I see sleeping, swimming, and unpacking--not necessarily in that order. Right now, though, the tinto de verano from lunch is making everyone's siesta lovely, I'm sure.

Blunders:

--Walking into an open window when all that I was trying to do was carry my 13 kg backpack duffle and 6 kg day pack up stairs.

--Accidentally shocking myself by somehow mysteriously holding my adapter that has too-wide pins in the socket.

--Thinking that the soap was, in fact, chocolate, but thank goodness I didn't eat it. Who puts chocolate in the bathroom, anyways?

*BUT I totally organised the set-up of my wireless connexion in broken Español.

Seeing the Expo will prove to be very interesting, as will the rest of these studies. The countryside on the way here was just as much a story of the poor people living along the autovia as was anything else. The random tracts of green grew to surprise me, and the little red flowers and bunches of purple flowers delighted me. I wished to walk barefoot in a summer dress and straw hat, picking flowers, and then lie in the hayfield under a scraggly tree eating fruit from Aragon until my eyes closed.