La familia

Well by some act of God Siobhan and I were placed with the same host family; a husband and wife as well as their 13 year-old son (Mario, Ana, and Alex).  We are living in a small apartment about a 10-15 minute walk to the University of Salamanca.  Siobhan and I share our own room and so far things are going fairly well.  The family barely speaks any English, so both of us are having the opportunity to speak a lot of Spanish.
We are slowly but surely adapting to the culture and just yesterday experienced our first siesta ( a break period in the day from about 2 to 4 where many of the businesses close, families return home together to eat the main meal of the day and take a very short nap before leaving the house again).  For those of you who do not know, in Spain we eat a very light breakfast around 8 (we have been having warm milk and coco powder) lunch is served at 3 and is a HUGE meal, and then around 9 we eat a fairly decent sized dinner.  The lunch yesterday was absolutely amazing.  It is a little hard to explain, but we had beef that was cooked similar to roast and had half of a hard-boiled egg, a roasted carrot, a green olive, and a roasted red pepper in the center of the cut (I am still trying to figure out how she managed to do that).  In addition we had the Spanish version of french fries and a large salad with a balsamic vinaigrette like dressing.  The salad was very similar to something we eat in the states-lettuce, tomato, onion, green olives- but they also add cooked corn.  For dessert our host mother made us homemade flan...YUMMMY! We washed the whole meal down with a great red wine :) I was definitely very happy to learn that our host mother can definitely cook!
Dinner was sandwiches (it was similar to an egg salad but with fresh veggies and lettuce mixed in), chirizo (kind of like italian supasod (?) no idea how to spell it lol), cheese, and fruit. I liked everything except for the sandwich.  I have a very strong aversion to  egg salad....so needless to say it was hard to get that down and I did not have the heart to tell her I did not like it.  I am simply praying that she never makes it again.

We do not have a lot of internet access at our house so we will be spending a lot of time at school and at the student center that has wifi lol.  I will hopefully be updating every day or so and let you in on the new things that I have seen, eaten, or experienced ;)

Love,
Tayler