I think my intercambio experiment might be one of the best things I do while I'm here. I met my new spanish friend last night, he is brave enough to have a car here so that was my first experience riding in a car in Valencia. He has a cockatiel named Elvis, which I found amusing, and also a turtle. I asked him if the bird could talk, but it doesn't. He also likes a lot of American indie music, even though he doesn't understand most of the words. We went to a cafe I had never seen before and had some kind of strawberry juice- I think he and the manager of the cafe thought it was pretty funny that I had no idea what anything was or what I could order there. We talked mostly in Spanish, I had some trouble understanding things that he said in English sometimes but I'm sure that will improve. It will definitely be fun to explore Valencia with a local- he gave me a list of good movie theaters, discos, and restaurants to try.
On another exciting note, myself and two friends finalized plans for our fall break, which is from October 8-17. We will be traveling the 11-17 to Barcelona, Pisa, Rome and Athens. We were able to find some good deals for flights and inexpensive hostels in each location. One of the hostels in Italy has a complimentary spaghetti dinner, and another is located directly above a Gelateria- exciting! We will have 2 days in each city (we're only passing through Barcelona to get to Italy), and it will probably be extremely chaotic but since Rome and Greece (pretty much any city in Greece) are the two places I've always wanted to go to, I'm very excited. I can't wait to see Vatican City and the Swiss Guard (Angels & Demons is the only book I brought with me here and it takes place throughout Rome).
This option of city-hopping turned out to be a lot cheaper than the cruise we thought about booking. It will probably be the only big traveling I do while I am here, hopefully there will be a few weekend trips around Spain as well.
It's hard to believe I've been here for over two weeks now. The homework is starting to pile on heavier, but I have some interesting assignments, too. The topic I chose for my conversation class presentation is "fútbol as a political ideology and the social impact on the population." For my spanish civilization presentation I chose Salvador Dalí; conveniently I went to his house/museum in high school so I have plenty of pictures to work with there.
My running has been going pretty well. I ran a workout at the track which is about 3 miles from my house. It's kind of a hassle to get there and back because the bus takes about 25-30 minutes, so I need at least 3 hours of time to go there and come back. All of the sports here are private, so since everyone in Valencia runs at the exact same time, there were about 150 kids on the track when I went there. They ranged from about 5 years old to high school age, all wearing the same club track uniform. They were all doing different types of warm up activities and stretching. It seems like if you don't play fútbol here, you're running track.
You picked a good subject for your assignment. The Spanish World Cup victory did much to change the attitude of the country. It was the first time since the Spanish civil war that the entire country was united as one. Old wars and regimes die hard. Life was tough in much of Spain until the gradual adoption of democracy in the early 1980s.
ReplyDeleteI'm hoping I'll find lots of articles like that...I'm not sure if there's much of a debate for this topic yet but hopefully just a good discussion.
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