I'm here to learn

I did two things today, one that I only knew about since yesterday and the other that I'd been thinking about for some time.

First I went on a free walking tour of the Barrio de las Letras. This is the neighborhood I was most familiar with, and I expected it to go to the places that I knew, but it actually went to several places that I had no familiarity with, so that was a win.

When I arrived they they listened to me say a few words of Spanish and said, sotto voce, "You know this is all in Spanish, right?" I nodded and said, or tried to say, "I'm here to learn."

At two different points we went inside a building. One of them had a room with a glass floor where you could view some archeological find below ground. I don't know what era it was from, but I'm guessing it predated Madrid. This is where it would have been helpful for me to be able to actually understand Spanish.

The other place was a flamenco bar, pictured in the image above. This time I understood at least that a scene in an Almodovar film had been shot here. There were several of these beautiful frescos. https://tablaoflamenco1911.com/en/

After more than an hour, I got tired and broke off from the tour and had lunch. After that, I did the other thing that I had planned on. I visited the school where I will be doing classes for the next 11 weeks. I should have practiced the sentence "I already registered for classes starting on Monday," especially considering that I had planned on appearing like this for some time.

The receptionist looked at me with a pitying expression and said in English, "How can I help you?" And even when I explained in English that I had registered, this elicited very little reaction. I guess I thought they would look me up and find my registration in a computer. She just said, "OK, see you on Monday." So that was underwhelming, but so was I.