Wednesday, October 3, 2007

School Starts

Hey all!

Today was my first day of school! It went very well. The day before we had placement exams and i tested into intermediate III. There are two levels above and i planned to be in advanced I. The placement exam is by no means something that is black and white or written in stone. You can change around easily and unless you are trying to jump a couple levels its not a big deal at all. I ended up going to all the advanced 1 classes today and they were just fine. Im taking Medieval Espana Literature (which is focusing on the 1200-1500s), Literature (poems and writing from the 20th century in spain), Phonetic of Spanish, Grammar, and Vocab.

So im taking five 4 credit classes which sounds like a lot, but its not when u are immersed in the culture and i guess thats what everyone does. Also im taking this class that is required by my program and its taught in english. Its call Cutural Perspectives, where we compare Spain's and US's traditions, styles, and beliefs. I dont have class on fridays which is nice! On Mondays and Wednesdays I have class from 2-6 and then tuesday and thursday i have class from 12-6 with a small break. It sounds like a lot of class, but we do a lot more reading and hands on stuff in class. For example, in phonetics today my teacher read a paragraph outloud and we were suppose to write each sentence down based on the words we heard and how they sounded. In english thats pretty easy because we are good at listening to the words and we know what sounds words make, but in spanish its hard! Especially when you are getting used to the specific accent that spain has where "c"s sound like "f"s and other letters have different sounds as well.

Tonight Caitlin and I looked into going to San Sebastian for the weekend. Its a coastal town, about 5 hours from here on a bus. Caitlin did some reading and it has an amazing aquarium with a huge tank that spands up and across the whole ceiling. We looked at hostels and bus prices and it looks like its a good deal. We are planning to leave Friday early in the morning and get back Sunday late in the evening. The hostel we were looking at is very close to the beach and the pictures looked gorgeous, lets hope the weather is nice! It was rainy here today, but quite humid. I would say its probably 65-70 degrees here everyday and sometimes its sunny and sometimes rainy. very similar to oregon! my room is so small though that its always warm, almost too warm, but its okay, when it gets cold it will be nice and toasty!

Another thing about my classes is that its not just students from my programs, it all foreign exchange students. They are mostly from the US but there are some from other European countries too. I met this girl from North Carolina that is in a lot of my classes. She looked my age but shes almost 25 and shes here because she is done with college but wants to better her spanish to possibly work in a hospital or somewhere as an interpreter or translator. Her boyfriend is from England (near whales) and she met him in Costa Rica. Crazy huh?! He is here studying too, and they have an apartment together. He is pretty much fluent in spanish but he cant read or write it at all. He is fluent from his experiences in living and working in Costa Rica and the gulf of Mexico. Oh and Tracy (the girl i met) she studied in Australia too. The two of them combined are world travelers! But anyways, she was very nice and she has a unique Carolinian accent.

Thats all for now! Tomorrow there is a concert i think im going to. not sure what type of music yet, but its free to students!

1 comment:

Ima said...

Nice additions to the blog, the deatils are great. Have fun in San Sabastian.

Ima