Third Week in Salamanca

On Monday, I went to class and did a presentation of the avgolemeno soup that I made for my señora and watched the presentations of the food other people cooked or helped their señoras cook. After lunch I read on a bench near where I live for a bit and I was approached two separate times by Spanish people looking for things in the city. They had mistaken me for a native of Salamanca and asked for directions to places, both of which I knew how to get to, so I was able to tell them. It was pretty cool. Later, I went to store and picked up a bottle of wine and then browsed other stores to fulfill my mission of finding a cute skirt or dress, but the mission is still incomplete. After dinner, I met some friends in the plaza and we went to a nearby park and drank some wine. It was really nice.


On Tuesday, I went to the park from the night before and read for a bit after lunch because it was such a beautiful day. Also, I actually had homework. I mean, I have had homework in these classes before, but I was assigned stuff from every class and each of the assignments took a chunck of time and all of them required the internet. While I was working on a public computer, I was signed out by the internet café because the guy next to me was leaving and said that he was at my computer and I lost all of the work that I had done, so I had to re-do all of it. It wasn´t cool. But I did get to talk to Becky and Ethan on Skype, so I felt better pretty fast. After dinner I met the same group from Monday in the plaza. We hit a few bars and I broke off from that group because I was going to go home, but some other friends were having a drink in the plaza and the call me over, so I sat with them for a while. At the table next to us, there were three guys from England on a motorbike tour. They were pretty funny.



On Wednesday, Kelly M. and I went to see Harry Potter 6, which was of course dubbed in Spanish, but I think I liked it more because it was in Spanish (I wasn´t annoyed by Hermione´s voice). I was surprised because I understood almost everything (and it probably helped that I bought the HP3 book in Spanish here and have been reading it, so my Harry Potter vocab is up to speed). After that I went to a travel agency and booked train tickets to Zaragoza to visit Paco´s family for my last weekend in Spain (which is already next weekend crazily enough). I talked to my roommate Rachael a bit on Wednesday and also on Monday. She is meeting me in Milan after I finish this program and we are going to travel around Italy together. I also talked to Manny on g-chat for a bit and hopefully next time he will have a camara so we can video chat.


So I think that it is important to note that there are an unbelievable amount of twins in Salamanca. Everyday I see anywhere between 3 to 7 sets of twins (these are twins that are children, and about half or more are identical from what I can tell), and I can´t be sure, but I don´t recognize any repeats from day to day. It is crazy. It has almost gotten to the point where I almost expect the double stroller rather than a single one. I think that it is awesome, as I kind of have a fascination with twins. Also, there is one set of identical twins here together from my program and two of the girls that were my orginal roommates have a twin at home in MI (Kelly M. and Laurn T.). It is kind of crazy.



Thursday I woke up super early to run to a computer lab to make a quick PowerPoint for my culture class. This oral presentation was worth 20% of my grade, and it could be on anything cultural, preferably something that can compare the US and Spain. I chose to compare the farming systems of both countries (which was easier than it sounds because I just took a class on migrants, which covered the US farming system pretty well and I basically just wrote a paper on it, so I just had to look up a few quick facts about Spain). Then I ran to my art history class, which was suppose to meet at 9, an hour earlier, because Jorge (the teacher) missed class on Friday so we were making it up, except he didn´t show up until ten because he said he had trouble with his car. Whatever. He is going to try and make us come early again, but we were all upset that we came to class twice now and he hasn´t shown up. Then I went to my culture class. Only the people who were not going to be in class on Friday had to give their presentations, which was about 5 kids that were traveling for the weekend. Before I continue, I would like to remind you that this presentation is presented in the syllabus as the el Examen Oral (Oral Exam) and is worth 20% of the final grade in the course, so I put a little bit of effort into it (this is my farming system presentation). Now my presentation was only 4 slides with little info on them, since the presentation only had to be 5 minutes, but I knew that I had done too much work as soon as the first kid got up in the front to speak. He said that he was going to talk about his experience in Pamplona, said 4 sentances about that (lasting for a total of 40 seconds) and then my instructor said Good Work and asked for questions from the class. Next, a girl went up and stated the obvious differences that we have already discussed. The third girl talked about the same thing. The fourth girl talked about her trip to Bacelona. All of these people brought up a piece of paper and basically read off of it. Then I came up with my intense PowerPoint Presentation comparing the farming systems in the US and Spain. It was ridiculous. Actually, it is really funny, thinking back on it, and I can say that I pretty much guarenteed myself an A in that course.

Back in my U of M class with Andy, we watched a movie called La Lengua de las Mariposas. It was in Spanish and we watched it without subtitles. Out of the class, I was one of the very few that hadn´t seen it already, but I feel like I understood most of it, and what I didn´t understand didn´t affect my understanding of the movie. It is a really good film and I highly recommend it. The little boy in it is amazing and so incredibly cute, with the cutest voice ever.

I won´t be going to class on Friday because at 1 am Thursday night (or one could argue Friday morning), I will be getting on a bus to a southern region of Spain called Andalucía. I will be visiting two cities: Granada and Sevilla. I am super pumped.