Oh dios mio
Hello from spain! i´m here in beautiful salamanca and every turn is an up and down. I just had the worst class and now i feel so discouraged and dont even know what to do with myself. i want to talk to someone but everyone on AIM has an away message up. I love being here don´t get me wrong, but i do not think i am good enough academically for this class. all the people in it besides this one other girl who thank god i´m friends with are all either native speakers or have become fluent. She and i, we´re a far cry from that but the thing is that we´re good enough that we wouldn´t really fit in in the lower program. so, i went to the director after the class just now and basically was like, what should i do? and he was like, oh you could move into this other literature class, and i´m like hey, idiot, if i can´t do well in this one how am i supposed to well in the other? it doesn´t take fluency in a language to understand that, does it? and then he was like, oh well, there is a grammar class for teachers on teaching students grammar so we were like whatever we´ll sit in and see. we got like 5 feet from the door and we saw all the TAs who are here on the trip who are again fluent or native speakers and we were like, wtf. so the girl and i, caroline is her name btw, are basically going to go talk to the director again tomorrow and be like, listen, at this point we don´t even care if we move down to the lower program and get credit. it would be practice and repetition and theres nothing wrong with that. i don´t know if i can just drop this literature class and do my history one because though i had a little trouble with it i could at least get most of what she was saying and what was going on. with this literature class, she lectured for probably about a half hour and i got nothing from it except for the three topics she was talking about, baroque, neoclassicism and preromanticism. and y´know what? i´ve never even learned about those in english and i probably would have trouble understanding the concepts and interpreting the literature and applying those concepts to them in english. so how the hell am i supposed to do it in spanish?
sigh. ok, deep breath.
other than that crisis everything is great. i mean its weird because i can pretty much communicate with the family. i can ask for directions and order food and i had a 5 minute conversation outside the universidad with a complete stranger and i seemed to do ok, so it just is so stressing when you have all this good things happening and then you get slapped with something like feeling overwhelmed and stupid in a class.
Right now im in the plaza mayor and its wonderful. at night it lights up and is really something to see. there are two small parks by my house and ive spent a bit of time in each already. tomorrow i think i might go over to this bigger garden that is some sort of garden for the jesuits? or maybe its a garden by a jesuit church? i dunno, but it looked nice and big on the map so im gonna check it out.
friday i leave for portugal with the group and we´re going to Lisbon. I wasn´t sure if i was going to do it or not because it cost about 200 american dollars for 2 nights and i don´t have a lot of money anymore, but i realized that if i didn´t do it, i would definitely regret it and always wonder, what if i had gone?
The family i am staying with is pretty good. the mother has two sons who live with us, juan who is 25 and dani who is 21. then there´s me and my room mate and then last night two other girls came - its a little crowded but what can you do? and ok, the mother is very hard to figure out, because she seems nice but then the other day she told us we hadf to pay 36 euros for her to do our laundry and i´m almost positive that was in the program fee. then, today at lunch, my room mate had an orange that he didn´t finish and she basically yelled at him for wasting it and the poor guy has only done like one class in his whole life, so he didn´t understand so i had to tell him in english and i felt bad. on the bright side though, everything she´s made so far has been really good. and yesterday for lunch we had platanos con chocolate y helado (bananas with chocolate and ice cream) soooo good.
ok i´m feeling better now about the whole situation i guess. i don´t even care, maybe this minor isn`t worth it. i only wanted it to have something to show for the time that ive studied the language but if its going to cause me this much stress than its not worth it.
sigh. ok, deep breath.
other than that crisis everything is great. i mean its weird because i can pretty much communicate with the family. i can ask for directions and order food and i had a 5 minute conversation outside the universidad with a complete stranger and i seemed to do ok, so it just is so stressing when you have all this good things happening and then you get slapped with something like feeling overwhelmed and stupid in a class.
Right now im in the plaza mayor and its wonderful. at night it lights up and is really something to see. there are two small parks by my house and ive spent a bit of time in each already. tomorrow i think i might go over to this bigger garden that is some sort of garden for the jesuits? or maybe its a garden by a jesuit church? i dunno, but it looked nice and big on the map so im gonna check it out.
friday i leave for portugal with the group and we´re going to Lisbon. I wasn´t sure if i was going to do it or not because it cost about 200 american dollars for 2 nights and i don´t have a lot of money anymore, but i realized that if i didn´t do it, i would definitely regret it and always wonder, what if i had gone?
The family i am staying with is pretty good. the mother has two sons who live with us, juan who is 25 and dani who is 21. then there´s me and my room mate and then last night two other girls came - its a little crowded but what can you do? and ok, the mother is very hard to figure out, because she seems nice but then the other day she told us we hadf to pay 36 euros for her to do our laundry and i´m almost positive that was in the program fee. then, today at lunch, my room mate had an orange that he didn´t finish and she basically yelled at him for wasting it and the poor guy has only done like one class in his whole life, so he didn´t understand so i had to tell him in english and i felt bad. on the bright side though, everything she´s made so far has been really good. and yesterday for lunch we had platanos con chocolate y helado (bananas with chocolate and ice cream) soooo good.
ok i´m feeling better now about the whole situation i guess. i don´t even care, maybe this minor isn`t worth it. i only wanted it to have something to show for the time that ive studied the language but if its going to cause me this much stress than its not worth it.