Today marks the fourth week since I landed in Spain, and wow does it seem like my time is flying by here! I'm sure there will be enough going on in the following weeks that they will be gone in the blink of an eye too. As much as I miss some things back in the states, I wish time would slow down because I feel the end is coming too fast. My time here thus far has been amazing, which is probably why it is going so quickly. I’m afraid many friends and families may be losing their loved ones to Spain because I don’t think any of us want to come home. I love the city I am in and the people I am with and everything about this experience has been positive.
I thought I'd take this time to say a little about what I've been up to with the group here. I am here with a group of almost 50 students from 6 different universities in the Northwest (Gonzaga, Pacific Lutheran, Seattle U, University of Portland, Puget Sound and Willamette) and we are studying at the University of Granada's Center for Modern Languages (Centro de Lenguas Modernas, or CLM). This first month, we have been taking an intensive language class (Intensivo) at the CLM that we have with students from other programs all over the US, and even around the world (there is a girl from Poland in my class). Intensivo is every week day for 4 hours so it’s a lot of sitting in uncomfortable and small desks. For my class, some days seem especially long because our room is on the third floor and our air conditioner doesn’t work well, so when it’s between 90 and 100 degrees outside, our small room starts feeling like an oven. To top it off, there has been construction going on right outside our window for the majority of the time, so between the noise and unbearable heat, concentrating can be a bit difficult some days. Luckily, I like both of my professors and they are very understanding of how miserable we feel sometimes. The weather has finally started to cool down a bit this last week and it wasn’t as miserable and class actually went by fairly quickly.
Besides our language class, we are also taking a culture class with our program. This class involves not only classroom time, but also group excursions to sites and neighborhoods within Granada and nearby cities. We toured the Albaysin, which is the neighborhood where the city of Granada started, and went up to one of the most popular viewing points for looking at La Alhambra. We went to the city of Ronda and toured some of the popular sites there, including the bullring which one of the oldest in Spain. My favorite excursion was in the city of Cordoba where not only did we get to tour a beautiful mosque that was turned into a cathedral when the Catholics conquered the city, but we got to go to a re-creation of an Arab bathhouse, or hammam. The hammam consists of three main rooms: the hot room (which includes a sauna and hot tub), the warm room (which has a warm pool), and the cold room (which has cold pools). We spent a couple of hours moving between the 3 different rooms, drinking some of the best tea I have ever had, and enjoying a brief – but much appreciated – massage. We all left the hammams in a dazed and happy state.
Of course, we haven’t just been studying and going to school. I’ve been to the beach twice where I got to swim in the Mediterranean and laze around in the sun. And we have of course been checking out the discotecas and the Spanish nightlife, which is much different from what we’re all used to back home. Whereas parties back home are usually ending around 2, the parties here are just getting good then. Most of the times we have gone out, we have checked the time only to be shocked that it is 5 (or later) in the morning and somehow we are still functioning. One of the big nights for going out for all the students studying abroad is Wednesday night because it is Ladies’ Night at one of the discotecas and all us girls get in for free and there are free drinks before midnight. It’s pretty crazy, and we have all been joking that we are going to get back to States and when everyone else wants to go to bed, we’re going to be just getting to the peak of our night and not ready to come back down for a few more hours.
That is about all I can think of to say for now. Sorry I have not been very good about keeping this updated. I’m going to try to write a post at least weekly so just give a little update on how I am. Intensivo ends in a week and we have a break and I am going to Italy so I am super excited about that. I fly into Rome and am going to spend a few days there, and then I’m going to visit my friend Gwen, who is studying in Ferrara. After the break, actual classes will start and I will only have 3 more months, and between classes, going to Madrid, going to Barcelona for a soccer game, and my mom coming to visit, I’m going to be sitting on the plane back to Portland before I know it. Could everyone just come to Spain? I don’t want to go home.
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