·     Buenos días!

          I have realized that I have talked a lot about my travels and personal experiences, and not a lot about my city and schooling. So I wanted to make a post about how the school and city life is!

         Alicante is a really beautiful city. It is considered to be small, but to me it is pretty big! The thing that I love most about it is that everyone walks everywhere, because everything is in walking distance! For example, my host mom has a car, but she drives it maybe once a week. There are like 5 grocery stores less than a mile from where we live, and there are always people out on the streets and it is a very lively and fun city.

          The center of the city has a famous plaza called la plaza de luceros, and this is typically where you meet people if you’re meeting up for coffee or to shop or do anything. All of the other students from CMU live relatively close to this plaza; however I live more off to the side so I have to take the tram or bus to get there. I could walk, and sometimes I do, but it takes a while!

          Before I left, I had the assumption that most people in Europe speak English. I think a lot of people believe this because of what we see in movies or what we’re told. This may be true in larger cities like Madrid and Barcelona, but here I have not run into many English speakers. The locals are really nice though, and they are always willing to help you find places and get where you need to go!

          As for the living situations, people in Alicante don’t really have houses. They live in what they call “pisos” which literally translates to floors. For example, I live in a piso with 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room and a kitchen. It is a decent size, but much smaller than the houses we are used to! It is basically an apartment, but they don’t call it that!

          To get around and to get to classes we have to take the bus or the tram. To be honest, I am already tired of the tram! I take the tram every day to and from class, and it sucks. It is always super crowded and it takes about 20 minutes to get to school, and it is also kind of expensive. It costs about 25 euro for 30 trips, and I have to take it at least 12 times a week. So my euros are being spent on the transportation a lot.

          Classes are getting a little bit easier I suppose. The schooling here is so different, and I’m not sure I’m ever going to fully understand how it is possible for education to be SO different in different countries. I have four classes, and they are all taught with the Spanish students by Spanish professors, in Spanish of course. There are some international students in my classes, but the professors pay no attention to that when they are teaching, and it can be pretty challenging.

          For me, I have to concentrate a lot when I am listening to someone speak Spanish that way I am able to absorb what they are saying and fully understand. So after 2 hours of a class taught by a Spanish professor who speaks ridiculously fast, my brain hurts!

          We don’t have homework here ever. And that scares me. What happens is you attend class all week just like we usually do, and you take notes and there are books you can buy or rent from the library that are recommended by the professors. The classes end in the end of May, and finals are not until mid-June. It is really stressful because there are no quizzes or tests or anything up until the point of the final exam, so you really have no idea if you’re on the right track or not.

           My classes have final papers (15-20 pages!) and a written exam at the end. So I am pretty stressed out about that already! The professors are extremely nice though, and if you take the time to talk to them and let them know that you are foreign and that you might need some further explanation on things, they are more than willing to sit down with you and go over any doubts or questions you may have. So once I get the ball rolling on some of my papers and studying, I’m sure I will be meeting with a few of my professors to go over some of the material!

           Other than the stress of classes, which is of course normal for any university, I am completely satisfied with my choice to study in Alicante, and I would definitely recommend the program to anyone who is studying Spanish!