Día 5- Donde está la casa de los libros?

Today I woke up at 8:30am to go to class at 10:45 and to eat breakfast. I really enjoyed my classes to day. In my culture class we discussed the Euro and the reason why people here do not really say gracias or por favor. My professor explained to us that saying gracias and por favor for everything is a way of distancing yourself from people and that is why people do not say it too much. She said that Spaniards think that Americans are too ‘educados’ or proper since we say thank you for everything. In my Spanish business class we just introduced ourselves, which was good because I still have not met a lot of the people here. After class a small group of us had to make our way to the bank because it closed at 2:15pm and we get out of class at 1:30. When we got there they had to buzz us in which is something I had never experienced before. There was a surcharge of 9 Euros to exchange money but I just did it anyway because I was beginning to run out. After the bank I went with my friend Steven to ‘la casa de los libros’, which is huge bookstore because he needed a book. Needless to say, we could not find it and we had to ask around. Because we could not find it we ran into ‘la plaza de los toros’ (where the bullfighting takes place) and the train station which was huge. Those are the pictures that I have attached. Today I also walked up to the top of El Miguelete which is a part of a church. It was hard to climb the 200 extremely steep steps to the top, but it was worth it. After dinner we went to a bar where there was music and flamenco dancing. It was a lot of fun. I had agua fresca for the first time, which someone described to me as being the Valencian mimosa. It was really good. We definitely got weird stares from people and I even think that there were some people that were mimicking us. While watching the show someone stood in front of me so I tried to stand somewhere else so I could see and I got the deadliest stare that anyone has given me in my life. Some people can be rude. Coming back to the dorms was a very interesting experience. Let’s just say that I was very happy to be walking with a group. I was surprised to see how many people were out on a Tuesday night. It is definitely a different lifestyle over here.