A Good Laugh - Segunda Semana (Second Week)

       Today marked the start of my second week of classes!! Lucky for me I only had two classes, International Marketing (3:30- 4:45pm) and Business Law (6:30-7:45pm). The day started off smooth just like any other day except I woke up and was alone. My roommate had gotten back from a weekend trip to Barcelona earlier this morning and went back to bed. Gloria, however, had to go watch her cousins’ four children (ages 2 months to 6 years old) for the day. International marketing went along as usual. This kid named Oogie in my orientation group who is from Sweden or Switzerland asked me how to say apple (manzana) in Spanish at lunch when he was ordering. HOWEVER, my business law class DID NOT go along as usual similar to international marketing. Last week the professor failed to show up, so after 15 min of waiting, the class dismissed itself adhering to the 15 min rule. This week 15 minutes passes again, and just as everyone was about to ask each other if we should leave again, one of our classmates comes in and says in his Moldavian accent, “The teacher is talking to [blah blah so and so] he’ll be in here at 7pm like he said it’s supposed to start at.” The entire room moaned in agonizing pain thinking why did this kid go FIND where our teacher was??? Meanwhile we had been sitting there since 6:30pm and now we had to wait till 7pm for the class to even start!!  All the guys in this class wanted to punch the kid for doing this and talked under their breath to each other.

       SO, it’s 7:02pm and the teacher finally shows up. FINALLY – after being a WEEK late haaa (I’m so funny…not really).  He does the boring introduction of himself and what he does and how important he is in the world because he is a global lawyer and how old he is (37 almost 38) and how fast he became successful, etc...  Then it comes time for attendance. He promises us we will be out at 7:45 which is when everyone anticipated because we had been ready for class at 6:30. After he gets though the first person in alphabetical order, there is no way he is sticking to his word.  He asks every person the basics: name, school, hometown, major/minor, what you want to do with your life. THEN every few people he would ask what they thought about a business law class. The people who went before me responded with things like, “I don’t know anything about it”, “I heard it was hard”, “It will help with any business knowledge”, etc.

View of the left side from my bedroom.

       Then comes MY TURN! I swiftly get through everything and at the last minute he asks me what I think about this class. Wanna know my response? “I think it’s a pretty late class and unsafe especially for us girls….” (I was totally serious too). Everyone was pissed about how he was changing the class time from 6:30-7:45pm to 7-8:15pm. So my one friend says to me as if I am being dumb, “No like what do you think about the class” and I just said “Yeah yeah I know what he means, I think the class is too late at night now”. At this point most of the class is laughing and I am in the front row so I have perfect eye contact with the professor. The professor responds asking where I live, so I told him “about a 15-20 min walk from campus.” He throws his hand in the air and says “Oh that’s not a bad walk at all, this place is safe!” so I say not where I live (since my apartment is on the brinks of a bad sketchy, ghetto, creepy, drug dealing neighborhood). 
He tucks in his perfectly ironed shirt, checks his sterling silver cufflinks and says boldly, “I work in a bad part of Madrid…. You wanna know where that is?” Then he goes on and says the name of where he works so at that point I’m thinking to myself I have no idea where that is but he’s probably right. To reduce the tension I say in a totally serious manor, “Yeah I know, that’s where I live.”  I even managed to not smile when I responded which is utterly unheard of from someone who is smiling ALL.THE.TIME. He thinks I’m really being serious about this but the class behind me catches on to this little piece of humor and starts laughing so I tell him I don’t really live there right when he says, “you really live there?” He just laughs and laughs and doesn’t know what else to say. Then he responds to my comment about the class being so late with, “sorry the reason it has to be so late is because I have to work”. Why on earth would you even teach a class if you can’t even teach it until 7pm!!!! Beats me. Meanwhile, he didn’t finish attendance until 8:05pm. Half of us wanted to jump out the window because it took so long. But all in all, the professor seems like a pretty cool and knowledgeable guy. I now have to contemplate whether or not I will drop the class because as the saying goes, safety comes first!