Last weekend, Bobbo (my dad) and Rita (his girlfriend, who shares my opinion on old art and who made that fact abundantly clear to my host mom, who doesn’t share said opinion) brought their Grand Iberian Tour Experience Extravaganza to Madrid to see the sights of the capital. They were treated to such highlights as the Corte Ingles supermarket (twice), Starbucks, Italian food, and me being grumpy because I hadn’t eaten in like 45 minutes.

It was great to have them around, and not only because they left me all of their extra euros upon their departure. While I was guiding them, I got to explore a fair bit of Madrid I hadn’t seen before, namely the weekend breakfast buffet at the Ritz. We were severely underdressed and outclassed by about two tax brackets, but I like to think that we made a respectable impression on whoever had to refill the station with waffles and mini hamburgers. It was also a pleasant turn of events to be able to see the city through the eyes of two people almost as misanthropic as me.

On Saturday night, after just a little bit of coaching on proper etiquette, I brought Bobbo and Rita over to my host family’s apartment where they had been invited for dinner. Aside from the aforementioned awkward art antipathy affair, the whole thing went shockingly well. With minimal translation help from Diego and me, everyone was able to hold a normal conversation over a very nice dinner. Rita showed off some Spanish, while my host mom revealed to me for the first time that she speaks quite a bit of English and may have caught a bit more of my Skype conversations than I had imagined. Thankfully I, along with my guests, have only good things to say about her and her cooking.

In the week since the ambassadors from Union Street left, things have started to get busy. After more than two months of an extremely low workload (or at least an extremely low amount of work done), things are starting to ramp up at school. Because fall semester finals happen in January, December basically becomes time for midterms. In the past week, I crammed, was tested on, and promptly purged from my memory over 1300 years of Spanish history, and can now begin teaching myself all of sociology for an upcoming exam.

At the same time, I’m trying to put together my living situation for next semester. I’d like to live in an apartment with other international students, so my first move was to post an ad in the Facebook group for exchange students at Carlos III. My first respondent? He went to Redwood, and we played golf against each other’s teams in high school. Small world. No offense to the kid, but I think my first choice would be to live with people from just about anywhere except Larkspur CA. Unless of course it’s Sol of Sol Food, in which case I’ll start hoarding plantains for January.

On one of our family expeditions to the supermarket, we found the ultimate American dietary staple, Sriracha. We bought a little bottle for something equivalent to the price per ounce of gold, but it’s been so worth it in the context of Spain’s notoriously unspicy food. I showed it to my host family, who proceeded to burn the absolute crap out of their collective mouths. Once the crying subsided, they quickly came to appreciate the spiciness and now herald me as an ambassador of great culinary genius. My host mom keeps surprising me by putting it on my food, which will become a problem when I’ve corroded away my entire digestive tract, but in the meantime has been much appreciated.