40 días y 40 noches

Well, not exactly. So Lent just started and Steph, Kels and I made a decision to give up English. Steph, Kels and I spend a LOT of time together. We are always on the phone, doing cultural things about the city, sitting at a café or going out for the night together. We all spend time with Spaniards too, but for the majority of the time, it's only us. You can imagine how much English we are each speaking when we hang out so much. Plus, our program made it sound like you couldn't even speak English in school, so I assumed that when you weren't in class but you were still in the building everyone would be speaking Spanish. Unfortunately, no one enforces this rule and most of students don't care, so they all speak English anyway. Even though we are in Spain, it's really easy to completely avoid the language if you want to. You can hang out with your American friends, never meet Spaniards, speak English all the time and only hear Spanish when you go to your classes (all the classes are in Spanish). The program makes it sounds like you will be completely immersed in the language, but you really do have to work at it and put yourself out there. Kels and I are both Spanish majors and Steph might as well be because she has taken all of the same classes. We all came here with the goal to perfect our Spanish, so we all started feeling a bit anxious when we noticed that we were spending a lot of time together and we were only speaking English. So a few days ago, everyone in our program got an email from one of the heads our of program telling us that many people who are studying abroad give up English for Lent. This was just the kick we needed to take our begin taking our Spanish more seriously.

Obviously, I am writing in English right now so you can see that we have a few regulations about this time. First of all, when we are communicating with people at home, we can use English. Obviously, my dad doesn't speak Spanish and I can't assume that everyone that reads this blog speaks Spanish, so my blog is in English. Also, if we leave the country to travel, we can speak English. Obviously there is no point of 3 American girls going to Paris and speaking Spanish; that's just confusing. But other than that, every time we hang out, every time we text each other or talk on the phone and every time we talk to another Americans in our program, we're only going to be speaking Spanish. We have been doing it for 3 days now. The first day was very very frustrating, but it has gotten easier and easier. It's to the point where I don't even notice it anymore. Yesterday, I didn't speak a word of English because I didn't go online to email or call anyone. It's also helping us to learn even more vocabulary. Each of us have our Spanish/English dictionaries on us at all times so that we can explain things better. For example, in the last 3 days I learned "anxious", "annoying", "to be in a bad mood", "sketchy", "awkward turtle" and other very common words. I cannot even explain how happy I am about using my Spanish. I have absolutely no anxiety when I talk to a stranger in Spanish. It's also amazing to know that I can say basically everything I want to say. I want to say that I'm fluent, but it's hard to say because there are still times when I meet someone with a thick accent or someone who talks very fast and I can't understand a word they're saying. My señora for example, is really hard for me to understand.

Sense my last blog, things have been pretty uneventful. We stayed in Seville last weekend and we stayed in Seville this weekend. I did win that free day trip to the beach, but I didn't end up going cause the weather was bad. On Friday night, I met a Spanish guy who knew the CU fight song. It was the most random thing. He said that he had friends in Boulder. I took a video of them on my camera singing it. Kels, Steph and I went to the Parque Maria Luisa yesterday. This place is a lot like Central Park but not AS big, but still pretty big. It's probably about a half mile by quarter mile in area. It has two museums, a HUGE plaza, trees, fountains and beautiful ceramics. I took pictures, but I'm going to come back and take more soon because it was pretty cloudy and I can tell that the park will be STUNNING when the weather gets better. My classes are still going very well. I really like the way my school is run. Because they know that we all want to travel and get to know the city, we spend more in the in the class room and less time doing homework and assignments outside the class room. I go to school for about 4 hours a day and the rest of the time, I have no worries! We also don't have school on Fridays. It really is a dream for me, especially after a busy, busy semester with all my activities at CU. It is such a relief to have time to sleep, read, work out and RELAX. I know that I'll come back so refreshed and ready to take on school in the states when I come back. I'm still spending time with both Daniel and Alejandro. I also spend a lot of time with the girl that Steph lives with, Maria Angeles, who is 19. Daniel and Maria both have been taking us out with their friends, which is a lot of fun.

Also, one more thing I wanted to tell you guys. The schedule here is unbelievable. They wake up at 10, eat lunch at 2 or 3, and eat dinner around 9-11. It is not unusual at all to see an elderly woman or a mother with her 3 year old out at 10 or 11pm. Also, they really do have a siesta. I had heard about this before I came here, but I thought it was just something that they did 100 years ago. Every single store and business closes from 2-5pm so that people can go home and eat lunch or take a nap. Thank God I have school during this time or it would be pretty difficult to run errands. It's the same with the night life. People don't even go to bars until 12, bars don't get busy until around 2 and people don't go home until 6 AM. Kels, Steph and I went to a dance club last night at 1 in the morning and NO ONE was there. We left at around 4 and it was packed. As we were leaving, some Spanish guys that we had met there were asking us why we were going home so early. A couple nights ago, Kels, Steph and I were out and decided we wanted it to be an early night so we were going to go home. We looked at our clocks, it was 2 AM. In Spain, all the stores and businesses are closed on Sundays, so many of the young people (and some of the old people) stay out until 6 am on Saturday nights (or is it Sunday mornings?) and then sleep all day Sunday. Surprisingly, this is getting more and more normal to me every single day.

Well that's all I have for now. My birthday is on Friday so we're taking a bus to Lagos, a beach town in southern Portugal. I'm praying that the weather will be nice because I've heard that it's beautiful.

¡Hasta Luego!