School

Hola!
Well I just had my first two days of classes. I've been to each of my four classes so I thought I'd tell you a little about them.
My Hispanic Cultures in the US Today class is on Mondays and Wednesdays and it seems very interesting. The main point of this class is to improve our Spanish skills through class discussions and stuff. The whole class is taught in Spanish and our readings are in Spanish. The best part of this class is that we don't have a book! All of our readings are online and we have 400 pages of free printing at the NYU computer lab if we need to print them out.
My other three classes all meet on the same days- Tuesday/ Thursday.
Spain Today is very similar to my first class. We are learning about the politics and culture in Spain but the main point is to improve our Spanish skills. This class had a very cheap course packet with all our readings in it. Only 7 euro, thats like $10, books back home are never that cheap!
My Spanish grammar class is Intermediate Level II. We have 2 small books (also pretty cheap) and kind of a lot of homework but I think it will be easier then classes at NYU. For one thing, my professor for this class is great! She explains things really well and is very energetic (unlike all my Spanish professors in New York...).
All of the classes I jsut talked about have only 8 students in them. Its great because we'll all get to learn so much more then in a larger class.
My last class is called Masterpieces of the Prado Museum. It is taught in English and has maybe about 20 students.
On Tuesdays we meet in class and at least for today we looked at slides (old school!) and talked about art and stuff. On Thursdays we actually go to the Prado Museum which is in Madrid and has a lot of classical Spanish art. I know nothing about art but when we went around and introduced ourselved only 2 or 3 people had any real background in art history, so I will be fine.
All of the classes have a few short essays, a midterm and a final. (except for the Intermediate Spanish which has 3 tests and a final). There will also be several oral presentations mixed in there too.

One challenge of starting classes has been finding school supplies. I'd heard that there was not as wide of a variety of school and office supplies here.
What I had not heard was that in Spain (and many other parts of Europe) people write on graph paper.
I looked in a few stores and that was all I could find. I finally just bought some small notebooks with this ridiculous paper. Of course, after starting all of my classes and using at least the first page of all of these notebooks, I found a store that sells notebooks will real lined paper for the same price.
Oh well, I'm jsut going to stick with these for now!
Here's some pictures so you can fully appreciate this.

Well, now that classes have started, I do have some homework. It doesn't seem like anywhere near as much as I would have in New York though!
There are a few exciting things coming up. On Friday we have and "Out and About" in Madrid where they give us a list of places to go to (like stores and resaurants in certain neighborhoods) and we explore in small groups. Also, sometime next week my roommate Michelle and I are going to a cooking class!