Me gusta España mucho!

I made it to Spain! I have been in Salamanca for 3 days now, and I am loving it. The pace of life here is so leisurly. Everything closes down at siesta time so everyone can go home and rest. Then everyone (and by everyone I mean everyone, old people, kids, everyone!) comes out for dinner around 10 and stays out late hanging out in the plaza mayor (an amazing plaza in the middle of the city, it has won the best plaza in Europe mutiple times!) When I first got here I walked around very "American." Fast and in a hurry with a place to go in mind. I would get funny looks from people I passed and I couldn't figure out why. Then I realized that people in Salamaca walk at a leisurly place. They take in everything around them and they are never in a hurry. It is amazing how much more I take in the things around me when I walk at a Spanish pace :)

On my first night here I got to watch Spain win the world cup at the plaza mayor. It was amazing, people went crazy when they scored and I got it on video! I will post it when I can.

My typical day so far starts with school from 9-1. Then I go home to do some homework. Once my homework is done I haul myself to the pool (they have many beautiful public pools) to take my siesta in the sun. There is no air conditioning so it is cooler to be at the pool. If I am not at the pool then I am walking around the city, taking in the sites. At 7 I have cultural class at school. After class some friends and I go to find a good place for dinner. After dinner we walk around until we get tired.



I have met so many people from around the world, which is very fun! Most people know English, but we try and practice our Spanish as much as we can. In my class I have two people from Australia, one from Holland, and one from Turkey. Class is hard but very informative. The teachers refuse to speak English and so it makes for an interesting time when they are trying to tell us what a word means, we are learning though!



The weather here is amazing! In the morning it is cool at about 65 degrees. Once the sun comes up it can get up to 100 degrees, I love it!



This weekend I am going to San Sebastian with my flat mates. We plan on sitting at the beach and eating all of the local seafood, it should be amazing. It will also be my first time staying in a hostel, so wish me luck!



I still haven't figured out how to put my pictures on the school computers, but if I do I will surely post some.



I hope everyone is doing well back in the states. I will post when I can, unless the pool is calling my name :)

A preview to Spain

When in Spain I will be staying in the city of Salamanca, It is to the left of Madrid close to Portugal:

Here is a picture of the city:

It's beautify huh?

The school I am studying at is called Don Quijote, they have a lot of language schools all over Spain and Mexico. Here is the promotional video:

There, now you know where I will be staying and studying. I am sooo excited!!!

Countdown to Spain . . . 0 days!!! (i'm probably on the plane right now as you read this . . .)

My first 5K

This summer it has been hard for Jill and I to find time to get to the gym. It takes so long to drive there, workout, then shower and head to work or home. We decided that instead of going to the gym this summer we would go jogging instead. Jogging is nice because you can do it anywhere that you find convenient. For us it is convenient to jog at 6:30 in the morning at Jill's house (well maybe not convenient, but the only time we could find.) Jill lives right on the light rail so we can jog close to her house, shower at her house, and then I can go straight into work on the light rail. It has been a good system to keep us working out.

After a couple of weeks of this we decided that we should run a 5K. Having a goal would help us run harder because we knew we were building up to something. We signed up for the Hot Dam Red, White and Boom 5K that took place on July 3rd at 6:30 in the evening in 90 degree weather!

Here we are showing off our free tee shirts:

And we're off:

Our goal was to run it in under 30 minutes. We didn't pace ourselves really well in the beginning, so we ended up at 33 but we were happy with that. Here we are running really fast at the end, once you see the finish line you can't help but run fast!

We were definitely hot and tired!

But we were happy that we had finished!

(thanks to Chris for being our photographer!)

We plan on running another one in Late September/October. This will make sure that we keep on working out when I get back from Spain, and will give us another goal to work toward. We are definitely going to train better next time, and we will try and remember to pace ourselves!

Countdown to Spain . . . 2 days!!!

Twins Game

Along with getting free lunches, working at a firm this summer has other perks. We get to do lots of fun events, like tour a brewery, attend a judges panel and meet the judges, and many other things. Last Thursday we all got to go to a twins game to see the new stadium.

They had extra tickets so Chris got to come along.


It was a lot of fun to eat lots of food and hang out with everyone. Here is another picture of the field and Nicole, one of my favorite summer associates. She goes to Mitchell too and she is awesome!

And here is one of Cara and I, she is my other favorite summer. She goes to UC Berkeley. I will for sure miss her once we finish up work on Friday!

All in all we had a great time!

Count down till Spain . . . 4 days!!!!

Rejection and Acceptance

So there is this thing called Law Review. It is a journal that just about every law school in the country puts out. Ours is called the William Mitchell Law Review. It is very prestigious to become a staff member on Law Review and even more so to be an editor. Each year the William Mitchell Law Review puts on a write on competition. A couple of days after finals they give you a packet of a bunch of information and you have three weeks to write a 16 page case note and complete an editing exam. This year 46 students were chosen to be staff members from the write on competition, and 4 were chosen because they have good grades.

My long term career goal is to be a Federal Judge. The first step to this career is to clerk for a Federal Judge when I graduate from law school. The only thing is, to do this you have to have awesome grades and be on Law Review. So of course I chose to put myself through three weeks or writing craziness to try and get on law review. It was long, and it was grueling, but in my head it was worth the chance to be on a journal.

So you can imagine my disappointment when three weeks later I got the "sorry you weren't chosen" e-mail. I was disappointed, but mostly my pride was hurt. I slumped around for a couple of days being sad and disappointed. Then I realized that there is more to life than law school, and that I could always try again next year and I accepted the fact that I had been rejected and moved on with my life.

Then came Friday. I opened up my e-mail to a great surprise. I had an e-mail from the William Mitchell Law Review Editor in Chief. I had graded on to Law Review. To say I was excited would be an understatement. I'm pretty sure my office mates thought that I was crazy :) Safe to say I couldn't do anymore work that day, I had to run to meet Chris and tell him the good news!

So now I am officially a staff member of the William Mitchell Law Review. I can also officially say that being rejected from something you want so bad is an awful feeling, but you will be a much happier person if you learn to accept life as it comes!

Happy 4th Everyone

Count Down to Spain . . . 6 days!!!!

Dumbo

meet Artemis:

He has floppy ears like Dumbo:

They make him even cuter when he runs:

He has a pretty good sniffer

When he does sleep (rare occasion I tell ya!) he sometimes forgets to take his bone out of his mouth (not the most flattering picture!)

He has the cutest blue eyes

He loves to chew sticks . . .

and rocks . . .

and faces :)

God bless D'artagnan for putting up with him :)

Summer Time

At happy hour today my lovely friends:

Jill and Maureen, reminded me about how I have been a HORRIBLE blogger this summer :)

I know they are right, and I could go on and on about how busy I have been working 8-6, getting up early to jog, and trying to get stuff done around the house, but that wouldn't be completely true (I also spend a lot of time watching the bachelorette, and walking around with Chris and sitting around outside) . . .

So instead of making excuses, I'll give you a quick update of my summer thus far, with the hopes that I will get better at blogging before and while I am in Spain!

First we got a new puppy:

Artemis the Weimaraner. Currently 15 pounds of cute, lovable, peeing all over my house puppy :) Soon to be 80 pounds of well trained cuddly puppy (we are sending him to puppy "boot camp" while we are in Spain plus he is going to obedience class with Chris, he should be good to go in . . . about . . . 2 years :))

Next my little brother graduated, I was so proud!

Next I started my job at the big downtown firm. It is fun and stressful all at the same time. Working a full day takes some adjusting too, and now that I am adjusted, my time ends next Friday! It is also bittersweet because they feed us, all of the time, literally I have not bought or brought my lunch once since I started working there! Good because i get amazing food for free, bad because amazing food is not good for my expanding stomach!

This weekend I am running my first ever 5K, i'll try to write about that random experience later! Next week is my last week at work, and then next Saturday (the 10th) I will be on a plane to Spain!!!!