What are my plans?

Hello everyone!
Since lots of family and friends have been asking me to keep them posted about Spain, I thought it would be fun to have a blog for anyone to see. And since I'm supposed to be keeping the director at Pitzer and other exchange students updated through sakai (a communal internet site at the claremont colleges), I figured it would be really easy to update a blog at the same time. This will also act as a personal journal to help me remember the things I've done.

For anyone that doesn't know about our travel plans...my family and I fly out of LA on Tuesday evening to London and from London we are flying to Lisbon, Portugal. We're staying in Portugal for about 2 days and then we fly to Madrid. After that, we're traveling all over Spain and it will most definitely be hectic. I don't even know the exact order or number of days we'll be at each hotel, but we're visiting roughly 8 cities in Spain (Toledo, Seville, Cordoba, Granada, Barcelona to name a few). We also plan on making a day trip to Morocco (wow!) and a day trip to Gibraltar, which is an English city. Pictures to come...

We will be taking a number of flights, train rides, and rental cars around the country until we finally end up in Leon on September 3rd, which is where I will be spending my semester (Leon is in the northwestern region of Spain and isn't a huge city; the population is maybe 140,000). My family goes back to the states a couple days later. I will be living with a host family for a couple weeks and then there's a week-long orientation at the Universidad de Leon for international students. After the orientation I will most likely be switching hosts because at the orientation students are able to fill out a questionnaire and pick a family to live with. Then in the beginning of October, I will start an intensive 11-week Spanish course at the University's language school. The course sounds really advanced but I'm hoping that my Spanish will have improved by the time it starts, since I'll have already been in Spain for a month and a half. The course ends on December 20th (or 21st?), and my flight back home is on December 22nd. Whew!

It's possible that I will have some sort of internship while I'm abroad, like during the afternoons when classes are finished. But some of my plans are uncertain and won't get figured out until I'm there. It's all very scary/exciting. I'm sad to leave right now because I miss Pitzer a lot, but I know that it will be an adventure and I'm lucky to have the opportunity to go. My Spanish should be excellent by the time I come back, and I'll probably meet some really different yet amazing people. If anyone wants to send me e-mails, my address is lindy_bornstein@pitzer.edu and I will update if it changes. I've discussed phone conversations with a couple friends, and I will update once I know more about making phone calls in Spain. I'm not sure how often I will be able to update this blog, since I've decided not to bring a laptop (my current one is dysfunctional), but I know the University has lots of computers and there are also local internet cafes...so it's fair to say I'll update at least once every 1-2 weeks (in the Spain timezone - a 9 hour difference I believe. And actually this was written on Sunday night, definitely not at 7am). I expect e-mails from friends too pleeeease! I miss Pitzer life.

Adios, happy reading.