As of today I have completed a week of classes. Things are going okay. The main concern among the nursing students is that the teacher is new (in Spain) and doesn’t seem to know what’s going on really. She clearly knows her shit in terms of nursing, but as far as teaching goes it seems a little more questionable. Also, she’s using the notes from the previous teacher (and the powerpoints and, apparently, the tests). It is also a little confusing to have the same teacher in the same classroom for 3 classes, two of which have labs. And, said classroom is where ALL of my classes are. I have high hopes that she’ll get it figured out. Yesterday I got my bike back (Morgan was gracious enough to bring it to me). That always makes things nicer, but I do spend a lot of time going in what amounts to be circles since I’m still not very oriented.
One of the things that makes Madrid nice is the narrow, curving streets. This also makes it pretty confusing to get around. The bike helps a lot with this and if you can see in the picture there aren’t usually curbs on narrow streets, so riding the wrong way is not totally insane. If you check out a map, you can really tell. I was really surprised by how Madrid looked when I got here. I think that mostly speaks to a lack of really considering what it might look like. It’s nice too because it means that the buildings are small – maybe 15 apartments. Madrid seems to be a pretty human scale for being a city of 5.5 million. In general things don’t go too far voer 6 floors (except for the 4 towers of Mordor – the link has cool time-lapses of the construction, but seriously, that shit looks so out of place) You really only feel the press of the people if you ride the metro at the wrong time or try and drive during the day.
