Antes que el diablo sepa que has muerto...

I was given a tour of the university today. For a brief moment I finally saw all the foreign students in one group before we split up into small tour groups. There is about 90 of us. The interior of the university is amazing. Pretty much like Harry Potter's school on crack. Imagine Harvard or Yale or Edinburgh's interior but with gold everywhere. The old library, the auditorium and the capillo gotica are especially amazing. Too bad I can't take photos cause flash fades the old paintings. I gotta hand it to the Jesuits, they sure built some sweet buildings.

I think I've had coffee in a café every day since I arrived here. Bilbao is known as the best place for a cup of joe in all of Spain and I believe it. The food in restaurants is A+, but in the residencia cafeteria it's pretty poor. Which reminds me, my residencia ('dorm') is a bit different from American dorms, and my mom said it might be good to list the differences. If you have or are living in an American dorm please stop reading here, jealousy may consume you to the point of irrational and perhaps dangerous behavior.

Good Things About A Spanish Dorm:
· We have daily maid service
· Each dorm room (habitacíon) has two rooms (excluding bathroom), two sinks, a hallway within the dorm lined with closets, two desks, three closets, an wardrobe, wireless and internet jacks, smoking allowed, a bathroom, two cork boards.
· A chess club
· A library
· A movie theater
· A lending movie collection in the thousands, a cafeteria, a parking lot underneath the dorm, a gymnasium, a computer lab, a small eating lounge, a music hall with instruments to play, one lounge with lots of televisions.

Neutral Things About A Spanish Dorm:
· Visitation from outside the dorm ends at 11.
· The basketball courts for the dorm are not actually in the dorm but quite a walk away.
· Big trouble for being drunk in the dorm.

Bad Things About A Spanish Dorm:
· The food in the cafeteria is absolutely awful. You wouldn't believe it.

And that's it. There are some other rooms that I haven't checked out, maybe I'll do that today.

Actually, since I got my student ID today, I'm gonna head over to the university and check out an antique book from the Rennaissance era just to look at it. Okay, that's not true, books that are that old are kept in a high tech secure library as of a few years ago for preservation purposes. You have to get special permission to access those books. But hey, anything from 1700s onward is fair game, which is still a lot older than most libraries in America - excluding the Athaneum.