Nov 1st - All Saints Day

Today is a national holiday for Spain, therefore many businesses and organizations are closed.  We just past our first 30 days in Madrid and I must say that we are thoroughly enjoying ourselves.   But a few observations are in order.  We’ve achieved several of our basic goals, such as getting into Spanish lessons and getting library and museum cards.  So on that front we have really made progress, on the other side our reading comprehension is much higher but our language capabilities are still very lame.  We can definitely get by in the markets and restaurants but when it comes to responding to almost any questions or observations by the Spanish it’s like we do a brain dump and all of our vocabulary flees.  To be fair we have only 30 days of immersion and a bit of language study before leaving, we feel as if we’re making progress.  We just have to learn patience with ourselves; it seems that together we can function pretty well.  Deb grasps things that are totally obscure for me and I for her, but for other things it’s total incomprehension for both of us.  Still I don’t believe we’ve yet met a really rude person here, most of the problems have been self-created.  Luckily we can laugh about them, so far; and we hope you can too.