Toledo (not Ohio)

There are 5 other American girls who are working through the same agency as I and living with families here. Last weekend, we went to the city of Toledo. There is a beautiful cathedral there (I believe they started working on it during the 13th century). Also, if you click the link above, you can see a famous painting of the city by the Greek artist El Greco, who lived in Toledo. The city has tons of tiny, winding streets, and beautiful old buildings. The hills are enough to give anyone buns of steel, too. We really enjoyed our trip there -- it was only about an hour from Madrid by bus.

Switching subjects -- I thought the only sport that Spaniards cared about was soccer, but it turns out that my host family also loves college basketball. There is a university here in the city whose team was in the playoffs last weekend against a team from Barcelona. It was too expensive to go to the game, but since Concha´s brother works for the university, we went to watch the game in their gym with a bunch of other fans. Our team lost, but afterward everyone still crossed the street to play in a huge fountain. (I guess it´s a tradition...I didn´t go in the fountain, because I felt like a fraud!) But it was a lot of fun, because I love basketball! And I definitely learned some new Spanish words from the men sitting behind us... none I could repeat here, though!

Okay, have to run. Thanks to all of you for your e-mails and messages! I´ll update more later.