Student life

My head hurts. I’d like to say that was because of the intensive Spanish I’ve been doing but, in reality, it’s the aftermath of last night’s paella party.

So a couple of days of full-on Spanish has been both fun and stretching for me. Inevitably in a class from all over the place, everyone knows different things and comes from different perspectives. I am slightly struggling with the fact my classmates are so young – they had to have 9-11 explained to them this morning. And yesterday, when we were wandering the streets looking at protest graffiti one of my classmates was chatting with me and said “I’m really pleased to see older people like you doing cool stuff like this.” It suddenly hit me that I was an ‘older person’. Anyway, with my age insecurities to one side, I can already see how useful this time is, just being immersed makes such an immediate difference.

Last night was the paella party at a downtown restaurant. The paella was pretty crap but the company was good and several of us went to a bar afterward which did absolutely nothing to help my early Spanish lesson this morning. It is interesting for me that my Spanish is at a level where I can manage, but struggle, to have a conversation with a Spaniard, but I can converse about complex subjects with people from Holand, Switzerland, and Italy as long as we all work around tossing in the occasional word from our home language.

After school today I went to visit San Nicolas, known as Valencia’s Sistine Chapel, thanks to its Baroque decoration. I tend to like austere churches but I have to say San Nicolas is lovely.