Bed-rest

Upon my return from the hospital, I was placed on bed-rest for about a week. This was miserable for my very high-energy personality. The very first day, I failed. Kevin, being constantly wonderful, had sent me several letters and I wanted to send him a response that I had been working on throughout my hospital stay. So the first day back, while my host-mom was taking a nap, I decided to pick up my prescriptions and find the post-office. Turns out, the post office was further than I thought, and I spent over an hour going there and back, but I'm glad I went because my letter was too heavy and needed double stamps.

Then my next pharmacy adventure was that for one of my medicines the hospital sent me home with a plastic syringe to use, but when I went the pharmacist was asking me if I wanted the kind of that medicine that I injected into my arm. Apparently the prescription was not specific in which form the medicine came in. I eventually called my director to explain to her that I inject it into my nose, which is what he thought the doctor wanted as well, and that I already had the "apparatus" that she was asking about. Turns out, when I went home to Ana, that I needed to get a nebulizer, haha. So THAT would be the "apparatus" that I needed. Oh medical Spanish, how you throw me sometimes. Another reason why its great to have a host-family.

Me and my nebulizer

Upon returning to my building, my host-mom was walking out to walk the dog. And she was pretty surprised to see her child, straight out of the hospital, wandering around, when she thought I had been napping the whole time. Woops.

So I'll be honest, I was bored out of my mind during those bed-rest days. Facebook was my friend as was Skype. Granted, I did sleep a lot of them which is probably why the whole experience is only a vague memory. I got to watch Spanish television some. I watched the Little Mermaid in Spainish. Except I set the subtitles to "Espanol" (like in Latin America) and set the language to "Castellano" (like in Spain). Which led to some surprisingly very different subtitles compared to what they were actually singing. I still love those songs. One thing that's odd to me is that a lot of appliances are in English, like the DVD player and the microwave, but people here just know what the buttons do without speaking English.

The Little Mermaid

An advantage of being on bed-rest was spending time with my host-family that I probably would not have otherwise spent. My host-brother and sister were both home often (Guillermo and Marta), as was Ana. And they all were able to tell me things about Spain and the culture here that I would not have known otherwise. For example, Guillermo was watching sports one day and I joined him to watch the Handball World Cup. Apparently this sport is quite big in Europe, though I'm fairly certain I've never heard of it before. I always thought hand-ball was like what you play in raquet-ball courts. Apparently not. Its actually like on a soccer field, with soccer goals, and includes GIANT men running all over the place and jumping crazy high and throwing a ball. That's about the best description I can give as this point. BUT Spain won the World Cup, which is apparently a pretty big deal as the stadium was going nuts. And since Spain won the Soccer (futbol) World Cup 2010, I guess that Spain is doing alright in sports these days.

Spanish Handball Champions

At least I was productive in that I worked on around four scholarship applications and attempted to teach myself some of the schoolwork that I was missing. So I went to the first three classes, and then the last two classes of my month-long grammar/culture course. I have yet to make up all the work, but they seem pretty flexible with me. Technically I'm not even getting credit for the class anyways, other than elective credit, but seeing as I've already paid for the classes, I at least want to learn the grammar. I am here to learn Spanish, after all. When I returned from being sick, everyone at school was confused as to what ever happened to me for so long. At least I was not forgotten...

In terms of API, I missed out on the trip to Granada. I was most upset about this because it is very high on my list of travels, and because I had already paid for the trip. Unfortunately, I was in the hospital, so there was nothing I could do. The weekend of February 1st, I had a five-day weekend and my friends all went to Seville. As I was still technically on bed-rest I knew that I was unable to go with them, but I was so disappointed to stay back in Madrid...alone. But then I decided to make the best of it and explore and shop on my own. Heck, I'm in Madrid. I cannot be disappointed about things. This trip is whatever I make of it.