Ok, post number dos.
Classes have been going well. There is no such thing as homework really. It's assumed that you'll do the readings and follow along in class as the professor speaks. It's said that there is no interaction between the teachers and the students in classes here, but that's not true. It's certainly less of an engaged session than your average Gettysburg class, but the teachers do interact with the students and have them participate a bit.
I'm taking all my classes at the university, minus Spanish grammar, but some of my less fortunate friends are taking classes taught by the IES program (that's the program through which I am here). Those classes are more Americanized, and the program forces the teachers (professors from the university) to change their curriculum a bit and give the Americans a lot of homework, written assignments and even midterms! Those are unheard of here. So those kids have exams this week. Ha!
As for me, I'm having a blast. I haven't traveled very much (funds are tight), so I'm mostly saving that for spring break and my time after the semester ends. But what little I've done has been enjoyable. Last weekend was the opening of the Carnaval season. There were amazing festivals in places like Seville and Cadiz, and very impressive though somewhat smaller versions in places like Salamanca. So last Saturday my friend Justina and I headed for Ciudad Rodrigo, a small city about an hour from here. It's pretty well known in the region for its Carnaval parades, costumes and the traditional running of the bulls. So we had fun watching people be dumb and run from bulls, which is a very dangerous sport even if you're a professional, which most them are not. We dressed up too. It's like Halloween here (also very big actually) and you can wear whatever you want. I was a pilot/sailor and Juste was an Eskimo. The only thing really pilot-like about me was the hat. The rest of me was more sailor than anything (thanks for the peacoat Dad).
The most interesting part of the day was the bull fight. We scored some free tickets from a friend who couldn't go. The fight is held in a little temporary stadium that's erected in the Plaza Mayor of the city. It's tight, uncomfortable and cold if you were on our shady side. The bull fight was not exactly what I was expecting.
Actually I'm not even sure what I was expecting, or if I was expecting anything at all. It was pretty brutal. I had had a lot of discussions with Spaniards about the controversy in the EU and in Spain itself about the bull fights, and I had decided that I wouldn't form an opinion about them until after I had been to see one in person. Well, I still can't really form an opinion. There are a lot of solid arguments on both sides of the debate as to whether they should be banned or not. I tend to lean towards the side of those in favor of keeping them. The thing is, up until the few minutes when the bull is brutally tortured and killed, it lives an incredible life. It's treated like a king, allowed to roam free in the pastures, eats naturally, no hormones or medication of any kind. The bulls serve only one other function besides the running, and that's to impregnate the cows. But it doesn't take too many bulls to impregnate a cow, so most of them are killed anyway for meat, etc. And a lot of natural untouched pasture land around here is set aside for these bulls. If there weren't fights, there'd be no reason to keep the bulls, and no reason to leave thousands of square kilometers of pasture land untouched. Another argument is that if your against the bulls, then you should be against meat in general. The conditions in which most animals live in meat processing plants are horrible, way worse than any these bulls will ever see. The same goes for leather products and dairy farms. But generally Spaniards are meat eaters so if they are against the bulls, they are (in one argument) being hypocritical.
Whatever, I still can't make up my mind.
Well, March should be a fun month. My birthday is part of it, of course, but the program also has lots of free invents for us too. Last night they got us tickets to a concert of Fito & Fitipaldi, a pretty big band here in Spain. It was awesome! But my hearing won't be back up to spec for about a week.
Th-th-th-th-thth-that's all, folks! (Had to throw Porky in there; Spaniards love pork.)
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Friday, February 5, 2010
Watership down
Many may wonder why I´ve chosen this name for the blog, and still more may wonder what the deal is with the titles I give to my posts. Well, I recently discovered in my "Intensive Spanish" course that the name Spain, or España, is adapted from the Roman name for Spain, Hispania, which itself was adopted from the Carthaginian name Ispania, meaning "Land of the Rabbits." So that was one of the first really important and interesting facts I learned about the country in my first week here. So I´m going to try and relate all my posts in one way or another to rabbits, just to keep a common theme going, even if it has nothing to do with Spain. Watership down is a cartoon movie about Rabbits, for instance. British rabbits... I´m cool like that.
Maybe I should start this post by copying the email I sent to my immediate family upon arrival. It gives a good summary of my trip here and the first couple days. I´ve never been to Europe before, so this is all pretty exciting.
Ok, before I do anything else today, I need to update my family on life on the Iberian Peninsula.
(This may eventually become the first entry of the blog, which I don't know when I'll start. I'll also put up photos maybe tomorrow. Can someone forward this to Kristin and Mary, as I can never remember their emails?)
I know I haven't talked to any of you much, but what a hectic orientation week this has been. Not only did we have an intensive Spanish course for about six hours a day, but then we also had excursions, day outings, tours and some homework! Not to mention you have to walk everywhere so a lot of my time is spent walking between whatever activity we have with the program, (tours of the faculties, hot chocolate and churros, etc) and making it home for meals with the family (Paella, chicken, pork lots lof meat). Some kids are living in a dorm on campus, but most are with host families. There are about 45 kids in the program, and if they live with a host family, they most likely have a roommate. Mine's name is Nathan Osborne, a junior from Penn State. He's a really nice guy. We have fun, and have spent a lot of time together in the first week. Our first night here we went out for a beer so we could talk and get to know one another. It felt very adult.
Our host family is very nice to us. They're a fun little group, and not strangers to having americans in their house. It's not at all uncomfortable to have us there. Mari, (or Rosa, or Maria Rosa) told us they've been doing this for over ten years, with various programs, and have had everything from Japanese kids living with them to Swedes. Salamanca is a hotspot destination for students who want to study in Spain from other countries. The campus has about 35,000 students, and at any given time around 5,000 of them are foreigners. Lots of Asians, especially.
We had course counseling and have chosen our classes, but we have a bit of time to decide if we like them or not, and can drop them and pick up others. Right now I'm signed up for 4 courses at the university, all in addition to the Spanish tutoring we get all semester. So at the university I have Comparative History of Spain and Portugal, (very interesting), Linguistics, Semantics and Spanish Lit of the 20th Century. So I'm essentially taking 5 classes. Shouldn't be too bad. This is Europe, after all, so there really isn't homework, just tests every once in a while, and if you haven't been in class to listen and take notes, too bad.
The trip here wasn't too bad. The flight was nice to Britain, and I sat next to a guy a bit older than me who is in his first year of Med School in Scotland. His parents are Indian, and he had lived all over the place, including Scotland, before they settled in Arizona when he was still young. He had traveled all over the word himself, and was very intelligent. He had spent the Christmas break in Philly with his girlfriend (in Grad school at Penn) who lives in Rittenhouse Square, by the way. She apparently got lucky with the apartment. So he had an interesting life story.
After we landed in Hethrow, the captain informed us most British Airway flights were canceled. They aren't used to having so much snow in London, and couldn't really get adjusted to the two weeks of it they were having. So I walked the airport for a while. It was soooo hectic. They had a whiteboard with flight numbers of canceled flights right off the plane, but mine wasn't on it, so I wandered around till I found some BA counters, and an employee told me my flight was canceled and to get in line. I was about 30th in line, and soon so many people had settled in behind me that the line wrapped through the terminal and out of site. It wouldn't budge. Only two counters were open for BA (American Airlines and 3 other airlines all had countless counters, and were manned, but they were empty of waiting passengers. It didn't make sense to any of us why they couldn't just change those counters over to BA... Whatever.) Eventually the concierge people started walking up and down the line with cellphones in hand, calling BA reps, checking tickets and putting people on other flights. Eventually she came to me, and along with two elderly couples and a British man, she took us out of line and booked us on flights for later that day or in the morning. I had fun translating for her to the one elderly couple, who was from Barcelona. They smiled a lot and thanked me, and the British guy was very impressed with my ability to speak Spanish, and as we talked, he called me "My boy" several times. So British, I loved it!
BA gave us a 5 pound voucher to buy something to eat on the concourse. So I got a croissant and some fruit, and spent the next 6 hours or so in and out of sleep, watching the screens for my flight number.
When I finally got on the plane, I was a little apprehensive because of the snow storm. The captain reassured us that BA was a very safe airline, and for that reason they had canceled so many flights and waited for the weather to clear a bit. They de-iced the wings and we waited for a while, before the 2 hour flight to Madrid. When we finally landed, I was a bit unnerved again. It was very cloudy, and I didn't even know we were so close to the ground until through the fog I saw a highway beneath us (800 feet beneath us). I thought we would crash because the copilot had made a point of reminding us where the emergency exits were before our descent. Thanks copilot. But we landed without a hiccup, much to my relief, and waited a long time on the runway before they got us to the terminal. I spent the next several hours trying to report my second checked bag missing, and finally fell asleep on the floor in front of a ticket counter, with about a hundred other people. In the morning everyone from the program arrived, and I met my Lithuanian friend Juste in the terminal, the one who spent last semester here and liked it so much she stayed. And we took the bus to Salamanca!
And you know the rest, for the most part. Eventually my bag was sent to my home.
So it´s been an interesting time since that first week. I like my classes, and I´m slowly but surely making Spanish friends and practicing my linguistic skills daily.
I think I´ll cut myself off here, as I´m sure you´re tired of reading. In the future I will attempt (as always) to make more frequent and less lengthy posts.
I insist that I knew next to nothing about this country before coming here, and I still know embarrassingly little. But heck, that´s why I´m here! So I learn a little bit every day, about the language, about the culture, or the history, or something that relates all three.
Maybe I should start this post by copying the email I sent to my immediate family upon arrival. It gives a good summary of my trip here and the first couple days. I´ve never been to Europe before, so this is all pretty exciting.
Ok, before I do anything else today, I need to update my family on life on the Iberian Peninsula.
(This may eventually become the first entry of the blog, which I don't know when I'll start. I'll also put up photos maybe tomorrow. Can someone forward this to Kristin and Mary, as I can never remember their emails?)
I know I haven't talked to any of you much, but what a hectic orientation week this has been. Not only did we have an intensive Spanish course for about six hours a day, but then we also had excursions, day outings, tours and some homework! Not to mention you have to walk everywhere so a lot of my time is spent walking between whatever activity we have with the program, (tours of the faculties, hot chocolate and churros, etc) and making it home for meals with the family (Paella, chicken, pork lots lof meat). Some kids are living in a dorm on campus, but most are with host families. There are about 45 kids in the program, and if they live with a host family, they most likely have a roommate. Mine's name is Nathan Osborne, a junior from Penn State. He's a really nice guy. We have fun, and have spent a lot of time together in the first week. Our first night here we went out for a beer so we could talk and get to know one another. It felt very adult.
Our host family is very nice to us. They're a fun little group, and not strangers to having americans in their house. It's not at all uncomfortable to have us there. Mari, (or Rosa, or Maria Rosa) told us they've been doing this for over ten years, with various programs, and have had everything from Japanese kids living with them to Swedes. Salamanca is a hotspot destination for students who want to study in Spain from other countries. The campus has about 35,000 students, and at any given time around 5,000 of them are foreigners. Lots of Asians, especially.
We had course counseling and have chosen our classes, but we have a bit of time to decide if we like them or not, and can drop them and pick up others. Right now I'm signed up for 4 courses at the university, all in addition to the Spanish tutoring we get all semester. So at the university I have Comparative History of Spain and Portugal, (very interesting), Linguistics, Semantics and Spanish Lit of the 20th Century. So I'm essentially taking 5 classes. Shouldn't be too bad. This is Europe, after all, so there really isn't homework, just tests every once in a while, and if you haven't been in class to listen and take notes, too bad.
The trip here wasn't too bad. The flight was nice to Britain, and I sat next to a guy a bit older than me who is in his first year of Med School in Scotland. His parents are Indian, and he had lived all over the place, including Scotland, before they settled in Arizona when he was still young. He had traveled all over the word himself, and was very intelligent. He had spent the Christmas break in Philly with his girlfriend (in Grad school at Penn) who lives in Rittenhouse Square, by the way. She apparently got lucky with the apartment. So he had an interesting life story.
After we landed in Hethrow, the captain informed us most British Airway flights were canceled. They aren't used to having so much snow in London, and couldn't really get adjusted to the two weeks of it they were having. So I walked the airport for a while. It was soooo hectic. They had a whiteboard with flight numbers of canceled flights right off the plane, but mine wasn't on it, so I wandered around till I found some BA counters, and an employee told me my flight was canceled and to get in line. I was about 30th in line, and soon so many people had settled in behind me that the line wrapped through the terminal and out of site. It wouldn't budge. Only two counters were open for BA (American Airlines and 3 other airlines all had countless counters, and were manned, but they were empty of waiting passengers. It didn't make sense to any of us why they couldn't just change those counters over to BA... Whatever.) Eventually the concierge people started walking up and down the line with cellphones in hand, calling BA reps, checking tickets and putting people on other flights. Eventually she came to me, and along with two elderly couples and a British man, she took us out of line and booked us on flights for later that day or in the morning. I had fun translating for her to the one elderly couple, who was from Barcelona. They smiled a lot and thanked me, and the British guy was very impressed with my ability to speak Spanish, and as we talked, he called me "My boy" several times. So British, I loved it!
BA gave us a 5 pound voucher to buy something to eat on the concourse. So I got a croissant and some fruit, and spent the next 6 hours or so in and out of sleep, watching the screens for my flight number.
When I finally got on the plane, I was a little apprehensive because of the snow storm. The captain reassured us that BA was a very safe airline, and for that reason they had canceled so many flights and waited for the weather to clear a bit. They de-iced the wings and we waited for a while, before the 2 hour flight to Madrid. When we finally landed, I was a bit unnerved again. It was very cloudy, and I didn't even know we were so close to the ground until through the fog I saw a highway beneath us (800 feet beneath us). I thought we would crash because the copilot had made a point of reminding us where the emergency exits were before our descent. Thanks copilot. But we landed without a hiccup, much to my relief, and waited a long time on the runway before they got us to the terminal. I spent the next several hours trying to report my second checked bag missing, and finally fell asleep on the floor in front of a ticket counter, with about a hundred other people. In the morning everyone from the program arrived, and I met my Lithuanian friend Juste in the terminal, the one who spent last semester here and liked it so much she stayed. And we took the bus to Salamanca!
And you know the rest, for the most part. Eventually my bag was sent to my home.
So it´s been an interesting time since that first week. I like my classes, and I´m slowly but surely making Spanish friends and practicing my linguistic skills daily.
I think I´ll cut myself off here, as I´m sure you´re tired of reading. In the future I will attempt (as always) to make more frequent and less lengthy posts.
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