Well, things have definitely gotten more interesting since Tuesday!
Classes are going well -- midterms start next week, but I feel like we've barely had class... I'm not worried about art (seriously, we just have to be able to describe how the colors in the paintings make us feel and stuff like that), and Medical Spanish isn't going to be as awful as I originally had thought, since most of the medical terms are things I've already learned thanks to Kinesiology.
I want to take a second to appreciate how amazing the weather is here. Even when it's chilly or windy or less than 80 degrees (which it isn't often), it's still gorgeous. The sun is pretty much always shining. The people here are always happy. It's a great place to be going to university, and I'm sure it's an amazing place to live for an extended period of time.
So, I suppose a quick rundown of the past two days is in order.
Wednesday: definitely a day for homework. I spent a good chunk of the afternoon studying for Medical Spanish and trying to cut chunks out of my enormous list of vocabulary. We've also found an awesome little cafe really close to the school, so between my morning and afternoon class a few of us always head over there and have a café and tell awful jokes and eat our bocadillos before heading back to la universidad para finish all of our studying (except TJ, because he NEVER HAS HOMEWORK). We also discovered this wonderful store called "Quality Beers" -- it's exactly what it sounds like. They have beers from all over Europe, including some locally brewed stuff, and they also have an America section (woo) with a ton of IPAs from California, and also Sam Adams Boston Lager, of course. The Quality Beers people were super nice and told us we spoke Spanish well, so that was awesome too. A bunch of us were supposed to meet up for tapas, but Will and I somehow got turned around a little bit while walking there and everyone had already finished by the time we met up with them. I think we're trying to go again to a different tapas place tonight, so I might actually get a chance to try something.
Thursday: SUPERGUAY. Went to class, went to the café, went to my other class, and received a text from TJ as I was leaving class that simply said "Come 2 beach". Of course, I "went 2 beach", but it took a solid hour and a half to run home, say hi to my madre, drop my stuff off, go catch the bus to the beach, and then find everyone. But, when I got there, everyone had just started playing beach volleyball so that was awesome. We're all pretty awful, but it was more awful in a hilarious way. After we finished that, we hung out in the water for a little bit (THE WATER IS AWESOME, it's a bit saltier than the Atlantic so you can float really well, and it's really shallow for a decent distance out, so you can go out pretty far without drowning. We all headed home to eat dinner, and Rach, Katerina, Jane and I ended up meeting up at Beer to hang out and see our favorite bartender, Fani. She ended up talking to us for a while about her life and her son and her family, and she is seriously such an interesting person. She was saying how her son is about to start preschool this year, and she's singing him up for English classes in the afternoons so that he can have the opportunity to learn English at a young age (she speaks Spanish and Italian, but only a tiny bit of English), and I found that so awesome. I guess in the States we really take knowing English for granted, but don't really think about the fact that it's so widespread as far as business goes. Lots of Spanish people are really excited when they find out you speak English -- they all want to practice their speaking. Of course, that doesn't help when we're here to practice our Spanish, but whatever. I think it helps break down language barriers when both parties in a conversation know two of the same languages instead of one person knowing one language and the other person knowing two -- it's easier to look for words that both people know because you have access to two people's entire vocabularies in two different languages. If that makes sense.
So yep, that's been my week so far. I have my second class of the day in... sixteen minutes. I was going to study, but that sort of didn't happen. Oh well. I'm excited for it to be the weekend -- we're going to Peñíscola tomorrow so that's an entire day at the beach yay! And probably studying on Sunday, since I have exams at the beginning of the week.
Hasta luego!
No comments:
Post a Comment