This week was my first of six weeks of intensive study at The Abadat School of Language and Culture http://www.abadatescuela.com in Úbeda, Andalucía (southern Spain). There are only three other students here right now, and only one other person in all of my classes. I have grammer class in the morning with Toni, a new teacher, and conversation class after that with David, one of the founders of the school. Those go from 9:30 to 1:00, and then twice a week we go on a walk to visit places around Úbeda, and David explains the history and significance of those places. Then I have a Spanish History class from 4pm to 6pm. I really like David, he is a great teacher, and he makes history really interesting and explains it really thoroughly. I´ve noticed my Spanish improving some this week, but it has been hard because I´m learning some grammer rules that I had never learned before. I think of my Spanish as a building that I keep adding on to, and there are some fundamental gramatical concepts that I should have put into the foundation that I didn´t. So now I am going back to the foundation and carefully removing my habitual ways of talking and replacing them with the correct ones, and making room for new ones. It´s a challenge to say the least. Another challenge is that the accent here is very different from the Latin American one that I am used to hearing both in Central America and in the States. The province of Jaén where we are is known among Spaniards as having an especially thick and hard to understand accent. The accent includes the dropping of the ´s´ at the end of words that end in s. Thus instead of saying ´gracias,´ or ´adios,´ or ´mas o menos,´ or ´buenas noches,´ they say gracia, adio,ma o meno, and buena noche. These are just the most common examples, but there are many more words that I have heard before, and that I know, but that I can´t always understand when they come out of the mouth of someone from here. Luckily my teachers don´t do this since they aren´t from here.
I´m living in a third floor city apartment with Clea, my friend Marie, and a girl named Jackie. We all go to, or used to go to Evergreen. I have a nice room with a balcony that looks over the city and out to the surrounding olive tree orchards and mountains. Look at the Úbeda photo gallery to see the view. We have a small kitchen, which is nice because then we can save money by cooking all of our meals with food that we buy at the local market, including great sausages and cheeses (Manchego..mmmm). The only thing that is not ideal about the apartment is that all of us tend to speak together in English, thus limiting the amount of time that we could be practising Spanish. We do talk in Spanish some times, but I would like to do it all of the time, but it is hard because we can´t talk as fast or clearly as we can in English. I thought of changing to a homestay to remedy this and immerse myself more, but the only one that they have is a family of people that smoke inside their house, which is not appealing to me, especially for my health. I don´t think that it would be worth it, and I also like living with friends, and it would be much more expensive to do the homestay...
It snowed more than 6 inches here this week, but most of it has melted off. It only snows here once a year, so people aren´t prepared with proper shoes, and they don´t know how to drive in it. I laughed when I saw many cars with chains on in very little snow because I am used to driving without chains in a lot of snow. I guess it all depends on your experience and perspective. I had a few snowball fights, which was fun, and I liked the way that everything looked so different covered in snow.
I was feeling a little alone last week because I hadn´t met anyone from Úbeda yet do to spending all my time with my roomates and at school. So I was happy to go out to some bars with my roomate Jackie on Friday night. Jackie has been living here since September so she has quite a few friends who she introduced me to. Most of them are between 18-20, and very nice and fun, but some of them are really hard to understand. I am slowly taking in this small city, and letting it take me in as well as I explore, meet people, and learn more about the Spanish language and culture. I´m still not used to kissing women on the cheek when I meet them or say goodbye, and I have instinctively shot out my hand in greeting many times, which only made them feel awkward because they are so used to kissing on the cheek. And when we do kiss on the cheek I feel awkward because I´m not used to doing that with strangers nor friends.
