Saturday, May 24, 2014

Getting close to the end

Hola! Alright, I know that my last post was quite boring, and I have been slacking again and haven´t written anything for quite some time, so I will try to make up for it!
Last time I posted, my boyfriend had just left and I had just done all of my major travelling for spring break. Sorry that post was so lame.;)
Alright, so since then classes have ended. But before I skip to that joyous part of my life, let me bring you all to surface with the struggle I had been facing up until the last day of classes. I had two presentations to do before the last week of classes. One of them was in my art class where we had to present an art piece that we had chosen to analyze, and we were supposed to analyze it in front of the class for 10 minutes. With my super awesome last name, I was of course the 2nd one to go in the class, and I totally froze. I went up there with all of my information and just froze. I talked for maybe 3 minutes and then sat down and knew it was awful.
20140511_133021I talked with my professor and explained to him that I just panicked and he was really nice about it and he said that I could redo my presentation on the last day of classes, so I knew I had to make it much better since I had way more time to prepare.
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There is this little café that is near the city center, and it is owned and run by these 2 guys from Canada. It´s called Canada Cupcake Café, and we go there a lot to work on homework. The guys that own it are really cool and the cupcakes are delicious, so it´s a win win. The point of this little story is that I have spent about 20 hours there in the past like 2 weeks writing my papers and doing my homework. The end of the semester struggle is real.
On May 11, 5 of us from CMU met our coordinators in the city center and we drove to a nearby city called Biar, where one of our coordinators lives. There was a festival going on for the Moros y Cristianos, so there were parades and costumes and music and just a ton of people. We spent the afternoon watching the parade and it was really cool to see all of the culture in the streets. It is just like what you see in the movies!
On May 14, we had an oral exam for our history class. We had to read 3 books before taking the exam, and I only read about 2 ½ of them because A. I am a slacker/procrastinator and B. I am not a fan of history. The oral exam was a group exam thankfully, and I think we did pretty well.
May 16-21st were absolutely the worst 5 days of my life. Sure, some good things happened here and there, but overall I don´t think I have ever been so stressed out. I mentioned earlier how I am not a fan of history, and somehow I ended up in 2 history classes here. I had a huge paper to write for one of these classes, along with a 20 minute presentation about my topic, which was the involvement of the United States in the Spanish Civil War. I won´t go into too much detail, but basically I spent more hours on this paper and presentation than I ever wanted to spend doing anything in my life. 
20140511_130715When Monday came around I had to redo my art presentation, and thankfully I did 100 times better than the first time. So my week was off to a good start. Luckily this was also the last week of classes, so that was helping me stay somewhat positive. I had to stay focused and practice and revise my paper all week until Wednesday night when the presentation happened.
Of course, I was the first one to present on Wednesday so I went up there, did my thing, and then it was over. I think I did pretty well, and I was so happy to be done!!! Another insanely hard thing crossed off my list. The next thing I had to do before our trip on Saturday was to dub two 3 minute videos with Amanda for our translation class. It took us FOREVER to finally get it all done. We actually didn´t even finish it until about 8:30 tonight. Talk about a struggle. I don’t think either of us have ever been so mad or frustrated in our lives, but thankfully that is now over.20140511_131410
All that is left for my time here is one paper to write, three finals to take, and one amazing vacation to Dublin and London and then I will be home in about 3 weeks! I have enjoyed this experience so much, and it breaks my heart that it has to come to an end so soon! I am so jealous of all of the students who are going to be coming here in the fall semester, you couldn´t have chosen a better more exciting destination!