May 18th

Tranferring planes in Amsterdam was freaking mass caos, but we all stuck together and made it to our connecting flight. Even though we were just transferring planes we had stand in line, go back through security, and then sprint to our connecting gate.

This had to be the longest and most draining day of my life! When we arrived in Madrid we all expected that we'd get time to go back to our hotel and rest before doing anything, but NO! They immediately took us on a tour of Madrid because we weren't able to check into our hotel until after 2 pm. Most of us dozed off at some point during the driving tour, but we had to wake up at some point because there were several walking parts of the tour. The city and architecture is absolutely beautiful! I've probably taken close to 100 pictures already!

Once we were done with the tour we were finally able to check into our hotel and get some lunch (we were all starving). We still had only a couple of hours to rest until we had orientation and dinner. It was so funny...when we got done with the orientation everyone was asking each other, "Did I start nodding off?" Victor and Corey, the people in charge of our orientation and classes, were very understanding and said that usually is the case during orientation because everyone is so tired from the flight.

After orientation we went out to dinner...and it was awesome! We had about 6 courses, water, and wine. When dinner was over just about everyone went back to their rooms and crashed.