Cordoba!

I finally got to Cordoba in the early morning of Sept. 3rd and since our meeting wasn't until 7pm that night I had to hang out at the hotel for a bit. I met a few people from my program since we were all staying at the hotel that night. The people are pretty cool though some of them seem sort of young. I expected myself to be super-social here, but instead I find myself missing everyone a lot and I've been feeling like I have to force myself to talk to people. I don't really feel homesick, I just wish Larkin and my friends were here instead of these random EAP people.
During the first meetings there was a girl that came to talk to us who met her now-fiance here last spring and is now living here with his family (he's Spanish). She kept talking about how great her host family was, and it turned out that I'm living with the same family she was. So despite my crazy aunt, my family is great so far. It's a couple and their cat. Manuel (the husband) is barely ever home (I haven't met him yet), so most of the time it's just gonna be me, Matilde (my host madre) and Taby, who is an enormous, white persian cat. He works at the university, she is a hairdresser and I'm pretty sure Taby is a professional lounger. Mati is really nice and patient with my awful Spanish and explains everything really well, though she does have an Andalucian accent which makes it a bit harder. They skip a lot of S's and D's, so sometimes it takes me a while to understand simple words. It's ok though, I'm actually not as bad as I expected myself to be. Me and her already talked a little about politics and I told her about my family and friends and she seemed to understand me. We watched the news together and I could actually keep up with what they were talking about.
I'm pretty much in the best location in town, my room is great and I even have a little balcony from which I can see the famous Mezquita. I'll be starting a Picasa photo album soon so you guys can see pictures. Cordoba is amazing! I haven't seen any of the sights really, or gone to museums or anything, but they look gorgeous. I don't have internet at the house but there is a cafe with wi-fi really close to here. Right now it's over 100F outside and it's siesta so the streets are EMPTY. I think I really like this schedule. Everything closes at about 2:30pm and opens again at around 5-6pm and stays open till 9-10pm in time for supper. It's really rude to call or bother anyone around siesta cause a lot of people are sleeping or just relaxing in some way.
Well, our language placement exam is tomorrow so I better go study a bit. Hasta luego!