Unfortunately I have an hour commute to school each day, so for my Tues/Thurs 8:30 classes, I have to leave my apartment at 7:30, meaning I wake up around 7am...which is just far too early for a college student. But then on Mon/Wed when I only have one class, I end up traveling more to get to and from the school than I spend time in school which is also a bummer. At least I have Ana who makes me delicious Spanish meals every night and at least I live in a residential part of Madrid like where most actual Madrillenos live. It's all part of getting the experience. Besides, I get to see all the beautiful people on the subway each day and then I have a 15 min walk to the subway and then from the subway to the school: an hour of walking each day just to go to school is a pretty solid built-in workout to my day.
I will admit that AP World History is basically carrying me through my culture classes. I still remember so much from that class even though I took it as a sophomore in high school. Now that I am in Europe, everything I come across pertains to some major empire or civilization that we studied in high school. I just absolutely adore world history, so maybe that's why I do not find history very difficult to remember: I'm just so interested. Not only are my classes easy because I already know much of the history lessons, but because I've only taken literature Spanish classes in college, I've already read a lot of the famous works.
Spanish Theater of the 20th Century: This class is based around reading scripts from famous Spanish plays. We often act out important scenes to understand what's going on. Basically this is nothing like any engineering class I will ever take. I actually really like theater (okay maybe more like Musicals), and think it'd be really fun to be in a play. We're currently reading "La Casa De Bernarda Alba" by Federico Garcia Lorca. I already read this play back in my junior year of high school with Mr. Martinez. Granted at the time none of us had ANY idea what was going on as we could barely speak Spanish but he explained it to us in English. A lot of his analysis came back to me when I read it again making me feel really intelligent when I could analyze the suppression of women based on the references to heat in the play and among other symbols.
Spanish Business: Although I thought that that was going to be an actual business class such as a finance class of some sort, it turns out that this class is just to gain the vocabulary necessary to use Spanish in a business setting. This is very convenient if I want to be an engineer abroad. Another focus of the class is to understand how different cultures (like Spain, obviously) determine the line of what is and is not appropriate in the business setting. In Spain, for example, it is not uncommon for people to take a two hour lunch break to hang out with co-workers and then remain at work until 7 or 8 at night. In general, Spaniards are just a lot more social at work. They spend more hours at work than the other European countries, but are also known to be the least productive...well, at least they're having fun! And obviously this cannot be applied to all Spanish businesses. This is probably my favorite class because our professor is so funny. She's young and tells it like it is and always had the cutest clothing.
Art and Architecture of Spanish Cities: This is the only class that I am taking in English. I am getting credit for the "Creativity and the Aesthetic Experience" area at Virginia Tech. Some days we don't have class and instead just walk around Madrid and learn about the buildings and art work that we see.
Contemporary Spanish History: I learn more in this class than probably the others combined. Its just an hour and 20 minutes each day of straight lecturing about Spanish history. This class goes a lot more in-depth than the others so I've learned A LOT about monarchs which is something that I never truly could grasp before. We never have homework but you need to be on your game to keep up with her. She flies.
Spanish Cinema: This class is actually really interesting because we watch movies in class every day in chronological order to see how the Spanish cinema progressed. History even impacts cinema as Franco obviously censored everything during his dictatorship in Spain. We have to write a one page report on each movie we watch. I'm really excited for the recent movies at the end of the course!
All in all, I am taking 15 credits, and they will all transfer as meaningful courses that I need for my degrees. I'm incredibly lucky because its very hard to get classes to transfer, and so a lot of students study abroad and receive very little credits for their time. On the other side of it, if I was a business or communications major (like a lot of students are), I could double-dip and take easier communications classes here than in the states, although they are in Spanish. Regardless, this semester will by far be the best semester of my college career for an infinite number of reasons.
I love being a student in SPAIN!!
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