Leaving for Spain in a couple days

¡Hola! A few weeks ago I discovered how to make my teclado (keyboard) do accents and upside-down exclamation points and accents, so I'm dorking out and using them all the time, now. The novelty will probably wear off within a week of living in Spain, I'm guessing.

Anyway, I'll be leaving for España the morning of the 27th. I'm stopping in Chicago and Madrid on the way to Seville for my 10-day orientation. After orientation is over, I'll be off to Cabra, which is the city I will call home for the next eight months. Cabra is in Southern Spain, in the province of Córdoba and the region of Andalucía. I'll be a language and cultural teaching assistant at a bilingual middle school and somehow managing to live off 700 euros a month, ¡ay! Fortunately, my piso (apartment) is relatively cheap, especially because I'll be living with two other girls. The cost of living in Cabra is lower than it is in Southern California, not that that's hard to beat since it's ridiculously pricey to live in SoCal.

I decided I wanted to go to Spain partially as a tactic to delay reality and decide what I really want to do with my life, also because I want to solidify my Spanish language knowledge since I've been studying it for years. Living in Europe also appeals to me. :-) When I come back from Spain, I hope I'll have more of an idea of what I want to do. Right now, I'm thinking I'll get back into feature writing or go to grad school and specialize in some communications field. I also have to figure out where exactly I want to live, but that's another story.

On the agenda right now I have finishing packing and getting all the loose ends tied up here at home. I have no idea what my life will look like a week from now, but that's all part of the fun. I'm not too freaked out about throwing myself into the deep end as far as new places and people goes, since I have lived in 5 different states in my life ~ Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, New York and California.

Soon I'll post pictures of my soon-to-be new apartment in Cabra and post more información about my upcoming orientation itinerary and whatnot. Adiós.