Dear readers of my blog (hahahaha yeah like there are any),

So first of all I apologize  for having been probably the laziest exchange student ever when it comes to writing my blog, by now more than three months have already passed in Spain, and during them I have wrote about 3 posts, which basically makes this blog totally unnecessary, so I'm just gonna delete my earlier posts and start for new.

I'll never be able to catch up with everything that has happened here during my stay, since I've so brutally neglected my blog, so I'm just gonna try to write some basic facts about my family, friends, the place I live in and my life in general, to be (maybe) able to actually start updating my blog regularly from now on.

I live in a village called Soto del Real in the province of Madrid in Spain, about 40km north from Madrid City. Soto del Real has about 9 thousand habitants, so not a very large place, but large enough to have a little centre and two high schools, which is very big compared to where I live in my homeland, Finland.
I go to the public high school and my carrera is art, which I enjoy tremendously. The other high school in the village is a salesiano, a catholic school, where my host sister attended until last year when she decided to change schools and is now attending the same school I go to. More later on the school.

My family has 6 people in it: my mom Estela, who is a elementary school teacher, my dad Juan Antonio, who works at a car-rental at the airport, my 20-year-old sister Cristina, who is studying physical education and child care (or it's called Educación Infantil y Física, for short INEF) at the university (UAM) in Madrid, a 17-year-old sister Teresa, who is one grade above me in the same school and our two husky dogs Taiga and Vaki.
My host family is in general very happy, sporty and happy and I love them very much. They love the mountains and they do nordic skiing (yes I know, what are the chances, I leave Finland to go to sunny Spain and I end up spending every vacation nordic skiing at the Pirinees at -10° C). The Sierra de Guadarrama, a mountain range, passes just by my village, so I can see the mountains from our living room window and I can go hiking there whenever I feel like it.

My host family also has a small bungalow and a caravan in a camping area in Jaca in the community of Aragón, right by the Pirinees. We go there skiing whenever we can, or just sightseeing, because the surrounding villages are full of castles and all sorts of cool ancient stuff.
Just the other weekend it was puente (whenever a holiday is on a thursday or there is only one day between two holidays they take the day in between off as well and have a little miniholiday that is called a puente, a bridge) and we had a 5-day weekend so they took me to the north for the first time and we went skiing. We passed to Somport to the French side of the Pirinees where there are pistes for nordic skiing, and skiied for two days. Then it started raining and we had to move to sightseeing and I visited a ton of places such as the fortress if Jaca (la Ciudadela de Jaca, which is the shape of a pentagram and is oddly surrounded by a ton of deer, although it is situated almost in the centre if Jaca), the monastery of San Juan de la Peña (which is a monastery inside the rock and I found it extremely cool, full of beautiful stone artwork and historic objects. and we had the best guide ever so I didn't even mind the horrible coldness of being inside a rock) and the village of Medinaceli in the province of Soria (which has a Roman arch from the 1st century AD, a very cool castle that we couldn't enter but that kind of gave me the creeps because the only thing a saw inside from a little crack on the door was an ancient-looking cross, and then a little church. There was absolutely no-one except for one nun in the church in the village during our visit and it was very windy and cold and the whole village was made out of old stone houses and very narrow streets so I was pretty much terrified during the time we walked through, but oh well kind of cool in a way).

So far I've had a good time here, and I already have really good friends, and my host sisters are the best, they are already like real sisters (yes we fight, hit each other and call each other names). The thing that I have to say for every upcoming exchange student is that they have to be prepared to the normal daily life and routines: you have to do your homework and study (or at least sometimes), clean your room, help around the house and sometimes just get plain bored like you do in your normal life. Sure you will have plenty of adventures and new things, funny moments with the language and cultural barrier and a lot of attention from people, but you also have to work hard to make friends and truly adjust to the new environment, so don't expect to be having a year of vacation and new adventures every day.
So I hope that someone actually reads this so my writing will be worth while, or then I'll just have fun memories for the years to come, either way I will try to write more soon and give more details on the school system (which I have A LOT to say about) and other things.

Taataa my darlings,
P