In which AV arrives in Spain

After having taken not one but two red-eyes (SFO-ATL and ATL-MAD), I'm here at the Colegio Mayor Jaime del Amo, which is a glorified frat house in the university district in Madrid. It's where the Fulbright orientation is going to be, starting tomorrow.

I've brought way too much stuff, I guess. The Surly frame was my one piece of excess baggage, and I tossed a whole bunch of other things in the box with it (mostly cycling stuff), but my bigger suitcase weighed in at 67 pounds. I took the metro to the Colegio Mayor, even though I had a lot of stuff; people who were willing to wheel my huge pieces of luggage somehow materialized any time I needed to move anything.

The dorm setup that they have here is pretty nice. My room is tiny, but there's a pool, and there's wireless, which I'm using now. I've got to find a permanent place within the next few days, though, and I'm worried about that since I'll only be in Madrid for two months before heading over to Barcelona (although I'm considering making it a Madrid-Barcelona sandwich and staying here for only one month before heading to Barcelona for my month there.)

Since it's Sunday, and it's Spain, almost everything was closed today, but the Corte Inglés (a huge department store chain) was open, and I bought an alarm clock. The dorm feeds us; there was calamari salad at lunch.

I'm really sleepy, but I wanted to start writing today, just for the sake of starting writing today.