Being sociable

So I finally met up with some Spanish friends of a friend who live here this evening. We spent a couple of hours chatting and it was great fun. We are going to meet up again tomorrow night. It is great to start to meet people not linked to the school at last! I found it really hard to understand them when they spoke to each other, because they spoke really fast and not very clearly, but when they spoke to me or I spoke to them, they were very patient and slower! I hope that, by the end of my month here, I will be able to follow what they say more easily. It is a very different matter trying to understand "real" Spanish, as opposed to the slow, carefully enunciated Spanish at the school!