Orientation

Over the past three days, we have had our orientation. The first day was only a welcome dinner on Wednesday with all of the students together.

Thursday, we got our metro cards, exchanged money, some people bought cell phones, and then we had a housing meeting with our housing coordinator Gabriela. The final part of our day was to meet with a student who would take us to our apartment and show us around our neighborhood(barrio). Our student guide was named César. He was very nice and spoke English very well. He showed us up to our apartment and we met our landlady and the building manager. Then we walked around our barrio, called La Elipa, and saw the bus stops, the closest supermarket, and some other stores. We then walked to El Carmen metro stop, one of the two closest metro stops to our apartment.

Our academic orientation was Friday. We took a tour of the universidad, which is quite small compared to any in the US that I have been to. We then took a placement test to determine if we signed up for the right level of Spanish. After that, we had a huge, inexpensive lunch on campus while we waited to meet with Alvaro our program director. I got my class schedule and then we were free to go.