Settling in

The first morning in Cádiz, I woke up early, I met up with Claire and we both headed to the University, only a short walk away to sort out registration. We walked along the sea wall, blown away by how pretty it was, this was the first time that I had seen Cádiz in the light and it certainly lived up to the pictures on Google! When we arrived at the uni, only about 5 minutes away, we tried to register despite not having received an acceptance letter like we should have. But there was no problem, we were allowed to register after giving our names and the woman at the international office looked us up on a list to check that we were expected. Unfortunately my welcome folder hadn’t yet been prepared so I was sent on my way with a map and assurances that I would receive an email when it was ready.

Claire and I spent the rest of the day exploring Cádiz, and picking up a few bits of shopping, all the necessities so that there was some food in the flat and sufficient toiletries. Despite having bought some food we decided to have some food at a local café, for both of us a sandwich and a drink cost €10, bargain! After the meal I headed back to the flat to meet my landlady, Ana and await the arrival of one of my flatmates, Alice. After her tour of the flat Alice did a little unpacking and then we headed to the nearest shop to pick a few essentials up for Alice. In the evening Claire came to the flat with Kath, the other girl from our Uni who arrived that day, we went out for dinner in a small restaurant near Plaza de Mina where my flat is.

Following the meal I returned home and Alice and I watched a film on TV after exploring all of the channels available to us, one of which is MTV – that will be nice at some point, something familiar. We had a pretty early night as Alice had been travelling all day. Over the next couple of days we explored more around Cádiz, including the Parque Genoves, just outside our university building, finding dinosaurs in Spain was not what I had expected. We sampled a few local cafés during the day and went out for drinks with other Erasmus students on the evenings. We have met people from all over, some Czechs, Germans and other English people mainly. We met most of these people through Claire and Kath, or from the ESN Cádiz website, Claire and Kath met loads of people from their hostel The Melting Pot, which everyone except the locals seemed to know!

Settling in has been a lot easier than I thought it would be, I have been very busy but it has been easy to keep in touch with my parents, they keep popping up on Skype every now and then to say hi which is nice. The flat has been easy to get used to, the main bit that is still odd is that most things are closed from 2pm to 6pm which is a bit annoying when I forget that I can’t just pop out if I need anything. But it all just takes time I suppose, one thing I can get used to is the siestas! Love it!

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