Overall it was a pretty quiet week around here - mostly just went to class and finished up my summer job applications (finally done!). Monday night I went to this free 'learn how to teach English' workshop, which was sortof a waste of time. It was basically a 3 hour commercial for the program's yearlong course which takes place in Madrid. It was interesting to think about teaching English, though. I definitely have a pretty good grammar background because of 4 years of Latin, but I would have to brush up on the terms for everything because I only know the grammar vocabulary in Spanish! I might try to get a job here teaching English, I think it would be fun, and it would be a great way to work on my Spanish, even though it doesn't seem like it at first.
On Tuesday I didn't go to the school because the kids had a field trip to the Alcazar, so after class ended at 11, I sat outside by the fountain for 3-4 hours and read/wrote in my journal. It was beautiful, warm, and peaceful, and it was nice to have some time to sit and think - and I'm writing the journal in Spanish, so I still got to practice a little bit. On Wednesday, one of the professors who works for our program arranged a get-together for us with a bunch of Spanish students. We all went to this bar and just spoke Spanish and got free drinks - it was great! Really fun to meet them and talk to them. A couple of them were studying translation and interpretation, which means they spoke 3 or 4 languages. I was pretty jealous. But they were really good about speaking with them in Spanish and not switching over to English. We ended up spending a good amount of time with them, going to another bar afterwards to try some tapas and sweet wine made from grapes and oranges, and then to another place to dance. Hopefully we'll end up hanging out with them again, they were so nice! One of them was trying to teach me some of the slang that the young people use - he got up to lesson 8. It's tough for me to learn words in a noisy bar, though - I do much better when I can see them written down. But I did pick up a few things. I never noticed before how much slang we use in English and how difficult it would be to understand us for a foreign student in the US.
Besides that, Hannah and I finally started running yesterday, which is good because Dan signed me up for a sprint triathlon on June 13th, so I need to be in relatively good shape when I get back from Spain (which, by the way, is definitely in time for Brown commencement). A bunch of people from the group went to Morocco this morning, but I decided to go to Ronda with my friends Hilary, Thad, and Megan. It is this beautiful town about 2 hours from Seville, and just outside of it, there is a cave with paintings from 25,000 years ago. Can't wait.
Oh, and Sharon's coming to visit me over her Spring break! So exciting!
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