and the classes begin...

Tuesday 2/10/09

So today was the second day of class. Between yesterday and today I have now gone to all my classes once. These are the classes I am taking:

empiezan las clases

Lengua español, nivel superior B – last week (during orientation), we all had to take placement tests for our spanish language grammar classes that everyone is required to take. I have no idea how, but I somehow got placed in level superior B, which comes after level intermediate, advanced a, advanced b, high advanced a & b, and superior a. the only levels after me are bilingual and perfect, so I don’t know how this happened. But I’m excited because it should definitely be a challenge that will improve my Spanish language skills drastically. Already on the first day I learned several useful things such as common mistakes students make when they write words that don’t actually exist in the Spanish language, and other subtle mistakes and cultural differences that I never really learned in my previous Spanish grammar classes. It definitely seems like a tough class but one that should be very rewarding.

Next was Español professional, or Spanish for business/legal/professional purposes. This class seems like it will be very interesting and also useful. It’ll be more Spanish practice in the context of business settings, and we will also be learning about the cultural differences in business practices. Today we did an activity about the Spanish work laws and customs and learned that they sure do get a lot of vacation time here…and it’s part of their laws! We were supposed to watch a movie but there were technical difficulties, so class got out early.

After that was Historia de España, or history. This class seems like it’ll be interesting and fun, learning all the history of Spain since ancient times. We’ll also do a lot of relating our travels in Spain to history, which will be fun. The professor was a little hard to understand (he didn’t really speak as clearly or slowly as the two women professors who I had earlier in the day) but I think I’ll be able to understand him fine in time.

That was it for Monday. I met up with some friends in the cafeteria and we chatted for awhile, got some pastries as snacks, then we headed home on the commuter train. It was so nice having no homework for the night…I know that if I were in Berkeley the professors would have already put us to work by the first day and we would have mountains of readings to do. For the rest of the night I just relaxed in the casa, watched a little Spanish TV to help my comprehension and to hang out with the family, and then I started reading the novel “Harry Potter y la cámara secreta,” or Harry Potter book 2, just for fun. I could read it pretty fast and understand most of it, but what I ended up doing was looking up the words I don’t know in the dictionary. It takes forever but it will drastically improve my vocabulary!

Day 2—I unfortunately had to start at 10 today rather than 12, which meant I had to get up at about 8 am. Unimaginable in Berkeley, but here it’s manageable since I actually go to bed at a somewhat reasonable time.

1^st class was Economía Española, or Economics of Spain. This class seems very tough. The professor does not seem like the liveliest guy and the class material seems rather challenging. Probably for these reasons, only 6 people showed up to the class today! Smallest class ever! The class material seems very interesting though…we’ll be learning about the European Union and integration and the current economic crisis, all from the perspective of Spain. Definitely tough to understand the professor though. Also, I’m not sure if I like being in SUCH a small class, because the professor is able to call on us by name and ask us a question on the spot. And we have to answer it in Spanish. He did that to me once and I feel like an idiot. We had a 5 minute break halfway through the 2 hour class, and when the professor left the room we all talked to each other and realized everyone was confused and lost! So hopefully we’ll get it eventually. I have 2 friends in that class and we’re planning on exchanging notes so hopefully we’ll figure out what was going on.

Final class was Estudios Culturales, or Cultural Studies. This is the class I’m most excited about. It’s a study of Spanish culture through the historical context of the time from the Spanish Civil war to the present, or 1936 to the present. I wrote a term paper on this topic for my history class last semester and also read a novel, so I already have a head start. It seems like it will be taught in a very fun way too, with lots of movies and documentaries shown in class, trips to museums and nearby monument. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one who thought it sounded cool and probably over 40 people showed up to class today! The initial room was overflowing and we had to move to a bigger room. She was only expecting 15 people, since that’s how many copies she made. I definitely want to stick with this class though, I love it already. She is very easy to understand, she speaks clearly and slowly enough.

The good thing about starting early today is that I was done by 1 pm! My friends and I decided to try something different besides the school cafeteria for once…and we found this amazing sandwich shop just off campus! You walk inside and there are handwritten signs everywhere listing literally hundreds of combinations of sandwiches. It’s a very small store, with just one counter, a refrigerator, not much space, but somehow they offer several different types of cheese, salmon, chicken, turkey, tons of sauces, fresh avocados, different types of bread, it’s amazing. A lot of the sandwich combinations are named after customers who invented the combination. The 2 ladies who work there are sisters, and they are so lively. They are always joking around with people (all in Spanish of course) and they call all the girls “bonita.” The prices are very reasonable too…I got a sandwich that was probably over a foot-long, with an entire wheat baguette, lots of fresh chicken, an entire avocado, lettuce and hummus, all fresh ingredients, for only 4 euros. Imagine buying a sandwich like that at Subway for the equivalent…or less than $6….yeah, not possible. So good. It was a very long wait but definitely worth it. And, for a change it was actually sunny and nice out today. Yeah we still had to wear our pea coats and jeans and scarves, but we could actually sit in the sun and enjoy our sandwiches.

A great first two days of classes. Yes, I will have to get used to the whole classes in Spanish deal. It seems like my hardest class will definitely be econ. I already have a good amount of reading for that class…over 30 pages. After lunch I went to the library to try to find the books (the prof. says not to buy the books but just to use them in the library). This was definitely more of a challenge than I thought. I looked on the catalog and found where the books were supposed to be. But I had no idea where those places were. I asked the guy at the info desk in the best Spanish I could, but I felt like an idiot. One of the books is at the Leganes branch of our university, which does me no good. For the other one, I figured out that I needed to go upstairs to find it. I went up one floor, asked, found out I had to go up another floor, finally I was there, found the book I needed. Then I realized I had no idea how to say “check out.” I did the best I could…I basically asked in Spanish “Can I take this book to my house,” and the guy answered, “Si, puedes prestarlo.” So I figured it out, but then had problems with my ID card and had to go back downstairs, explain the situation to the guy down there and sounded like an idiot again. Had no idea how to ask him if I could “renew” the book after a week so I had to ask what if I want to keep the book for longer. I figured out that it’s possible to renew it online, but the guy doesn’t know how…or something like that. Being a foreigner is harder than I thought, but it’s definitely a good experience. I am learning different ways to communicate when I have no idea how to say something or what word to use.

Thursday 2/12/09

Today was the last day of the first week of classes. What a week! It was also our deadline to submit our final list of classes to our program director, and after this we can’t make any changes or drop any classes. Registration is different here…unlike Berkeley where you sign up for your classes months before classes start (and likely end up on at least a few wait lists) and can add or drop classes for weeks, here you just attend whatever classes you want during the first week but have to make your final decision on classes at the end of that week. There is also no size limit on classes. So for classes like Estudios Culturales, which ended up being bigger than they expected, they change the room and make minor modifications on field trips and whatnot, while other classes like econ end up with 5 students.

I faced a tough decision today…since it was the day to make my final decision on classes, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to remain in my super tough econ class which would count for an elective for my economics major in Berkeley. After thinking about it some more and looking at my remaining requirements, I finally reached my decision…I decided to switch the economics class to a colloquial Spanish course. Colloquial Spanish seemed very useful for my time here in Spain, since it teaches Spanish as it is actually spoken, not how it is written in literature and formal class assignments (as I’ve been taught thus far). As is the case with English, I realized that colloquial Spanish is a lot different than the Spanish I’ve been learning. I’m hoping that with this class I will actually be able to carry on conversations with the Spaniards I meet, which will improve my Spanish immensely. I decided that my primary purpose here is to improve my Spanish language skills and learn about the culture and history of the country, and both of those goals will be more easily met if I am not bogged down with an excessively hard economics course. Economics is a tough subject in English, let alone in a foreign language with all new terms and a mediocre professor. There are many economics courses I am looking forward to taking when I return. I am still on track to graduate on time, and with the two history classes I am taking here I may be able to double major in International Political Economy by only taking two more courses when I return.

So my final list of courses is: Spanish language superior level, Spanish for business/professional use, colloquial Spanish, history of Spain, and Spanish cultural studies (focusing on the period of time after the Spanish civil war).

After I finished class for the day, I felt rather exhausted from a week of Spanish overload. I was looking forward to the trip to Córdoba and Granada that I would be taking with my EAP program this weekend. Even though the bus would be leaving at 8 am on Friday morning, Ashley, Vanessa and I decided that after a tough week at school we would like to relax, go out and have some fun at least for a little while and call it an early night.

Our friend Jose invited us to go to a bar near his house in Chueca. We got ready, met up and took the metro over there (we had to transfer a few times). When we got there, Jose was nowhere to be found and wouldn’t answer his phone, so the 3 of us girls just decided to wander around and explore this area of town which we hadn’t been in yet. I was surprised at how different it felt from other areas of Madrid. Right when we got out of the metro, we were in a big square with benches on the edges, and groups of people were just hanging around the benches with open bottles of alcohol drinking and socializing. After we wandered around for awhile and got our own bottle, we returned to the same square. Suddenly we saw all these people sprinting in different directions and then we realized why…the police had shown up to bust this open air party. To avoid trouble, we just decided to get on the metro immediately and go home. It was a good thing because transferring took a long time especially since we forgot that the busses had stopped running halfway through our journey and realized we needed to transfer to yet another line, and we didn’t arrive at our final metro stop until almost 2 am, probably on the last metro. Luckily I had already packed for the weekend trip so I just went to bed and slept soundly hasta la mañana.