Week of firsts

Two days after I arrive in Spain I'm in school.  I was excited for school at first, meet new people learn new things, study a different culture.  It was only after I sat in the auditorium for a start of year meeting I began to remember, in order to make friends I have to intereact with strangers, interacting usually involves some form of verbal communication.  The meeting goes on for two hours, the person next to me tells me how the sweaty, bald, moustaciod man at the front loves to "hablar y hablar y hablar."  I quickly come up with a response representing the extent of my Spanish knowledge, I want whoever this boy is next to me to be my friend, so cautionsly I respond, "si."  Mission accomplished, the boy nods and returns to a semi sleeping state.  The auditorium gathering has taken up the first two classes, I will start the day with English, something that I might understand.  I find my friend from before and ask him, with broken Spanish, why we are in third period, he responds in broken English and motions for me to pull a desk up next to his.  Maybe I can help this guy in English, he seems nice enough and he might need it. I continue discussing what happened in the morning and what will happen during the day, the teacher appears to be getting organized at the front of the class and I don´t realize that the rest of the students are silent.  I thought the teacher would ask for us to be quiet when she was going to start.  Wrong.  "Would you mind shutting up?"  I freeze and look at the teacher like a deer in headlights, I cannot believe what I have just heard.  I face forward and shut up.  "Would you like to come to the front?"  First day, first class, and I get sent to the front of the room, not a great start.  During english the teacher talks for the full hour about how the scores that the students have been getting have been unacceptably low.  I think that maybe this teacher is just especially mean to focus on the test like that, in the U.S I resisted test specific classes as often as possible.  After class students go to their backpacks at the side of the room and grab food.  My friends explains that there is a 15 minute break everyday after third period so people have something to carry them through the day.  Then my friend, Marcos, starts talking to me rapid fire in Spanish.  I smile at him and try to pick up as much as I can, but as I am becoming increasingly aware of, I am just a dumb American.  He ends with a question, something about a type of music I think.  From what I´ve heard I think I like whatever he is talking about and say 'mucho, mucho.'  I am confident in my answer for a half second until he looks at me in a way like 'where the hell did you come from?'  It turns out that what I said wasn´t relavent to the conversation but the conversation was not even directed at me, he had been talking to a girl behind me.  Ouch.  My pride hurts.

The classes were all similar to English in the fact that they all focused on test results.  This makes me both sad and happy, sad because so much pressure is put on these students to do well, and happy because since I would be a liability I probably won´t have to take any tests.  After school my host brother, Cesar, asks me if I want to go body surfing.  Why not?  We get flippers, wet suits, and boards, within fifteen minutes we are off to the beach in our bare feet.  I have body surfed before, and on some fairly large waves, but while he was explaining what to do I realized I had never done anything like this.   
In the end I technically only surfed one wave, the rest crashed into me and rolled me around under water. But the wave I did catch I must have rode 40 or 50 feet, racing past swimmers, children, and people wading in the shallows. On top of the wave I felt weightless, it was amazing. When I landed on the beach I readjusted my flippers and stood up, I was on my feet for all of a half second before I crumpled to the ground clutching my cramped calf. I sat right back in the sand and began to massage my leg at which point another wave rolled on shore and knocked me on my back, while kids who were seven jumped straight into it with smilies on their faces, jerks. It took about fifteen minutes for me to get back out into the surf and when I was finally with my host brother again the waves began to fade away. We went home without catching anything else, but that one wave that lasted half a minute was worth the hour of waiting in the water.
This weeks seems like it has lasted a month.  The city is beautiful but concentrated, I don't know any stores or restaurants, but I know my way around.  I'm about to experience my first week end over seas, I have no idea what to expect, but somehow, hobbling around on my one crappy leg, I think I´ll be happy.