Testing, Shopping, Sleeping

Today was the placement test for the intensive language course, and then my main group of friends here and I went shopping for a bit, returned to the house for lunch which was salad, bread, delicious cheese from Galicia, lentil soup and mushrooms, although I only tried one mushroom and gave up.

Afterwards everyone took a siesta, poor kathleen is fighting a cold and I was just plain tired, so we slept about an hour and a half before meeting the other girls to buy cell phones. We got them pretty cheap at a phone company called "orange", they were 19 euros and included 12 prepaid euros worth of calling. The funny thing spaniards do here is instead of actually receiving a call and getting charged, they will call and hang up so the other person sees a missed call, and it will signal a "yes" or, "I'm here". They call it giving a "toke". Like, for example, if I said I wanted to meet up with someone at the post office at 5pm, I would get there, call the person and hang up, or "give them a toke", and they would know that I was there. Or, if I call and leave a voicemail and say, give me a toke if you want to do this, I would see their missed call as a yes. It seems a little unstable if you ask me, but is kind of brilliant at the same time. So we will be using the "toke" system to save our prepaid minutes, but of course if we can't get ahold of one another, we can always leave a voice mail or text each other.

After the phones we went shopping in a different area of town which was fun since we hadn't visited it before, and there were a lot of little boutiques.

Tomorrow we will visit the cathedral here in Granada which is very nearby, closer even than our school. Our other roommate from france, Camy, is going to come with us as well. Hopefully the cathedral is either free or cheap, especially since we have international student ID cards that are supposed to get us discounts. We shall see if they really work!