Being\ncomfortably back at home in Alabama has awarded me some time to reflect upon my\ninitial expectations for the trip. When I landed in Spain, I was pretty sure\nabout my plans to travel, sail, ski, skydive, surf, eat, drink, and make some\nnew friends. Some of these plans changed a little during my time there but some\nweren\u2019t going anywhere. I also set a new long-term goals that I’m very excited\nto have brought back with me to the States, and I’ll touch on that in a bit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
First\noff, I want to say how disappointing it was to make the decision to depart my\nnew home and my gracious host mom. I ate better in her house than I ever have\nin my life, which now that I think about it, might be the reason I gained 15\npounds while I was there. I made friends that I think I will have for the rest\nof my life and we\u2019re planning a road trip together for after the end this Corona\nVirus quarantine. While we were in Spain though, we travelled every single\nweekend and that had to have been my favorite part of being abroad. There were\nso many different historic, cultural, and natural monuments to experience, that\ntraveling in Spain wasn\u2019t boring for a second. The nightlife that didn\u2019t slow\ndown until 8am helped keep it interesting too. I didn\u2019t leave the country a single\ntime but traveled as much if not more than any other exchange students that I\nknew, and I don\u2019t regret it a bit. Hotels are affordable, food is cheap if you\navoid tourist destinations, and the people were generally friendly to foreigners\n(although I\u2019m sure speaking Spanish helped.) The food, friends and travel\nexperiences that I was lucky enough to have in Spain made it very difficult for\nme to leave so prematurely. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One\nof my new friends taught me how to surf in a coastal city North of our University\nin Oviedo, and I went skiing a couple times with some great people in the\nmountains just to the South, but I never got the chance to go sky diving,\nsailing, parting in Ibiza, scuba diving and a long list of other things that I was\nfor some reason hell bent on doing while I was in Spain. I didn\u2019t get to\naccomplish these goals, but while I was there, I slowly came to realize the\nneed for two other important life goals. When I decided to study abroad in Spain,\nI had Spanish language development in mind, but I can\u2019t say that it was a\nserious priority for me at the time. After speaking Spanish nearly exclusively\nfor a few weeks and seeing progress towards fluency, I fell in love with the\nnuances of speaking a foreign language. There are things you notice when\nlearning a foreign language that you never even thought about when speaking\nyour native language, and I remember my favorite thing about Spanish was\nlearning different ways to make the same point. Speaking another language all\nthe time is difficult and can be very confusing, but it\u2019s a continuous mental\nexercise that I found a lot of enjoyment in. Mastering the Spanish language is\none of my new long-term goals and learning it is an activity that I would recommend\nto just about anyone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\nfeel like I accomplished a lot of the things that I set out to accomplish in\nSpain, but I couldn\u2019t help but feel robbed of all the great experiences that I\nknow I would have had during the last half of my stay. I\u2019m much happier\nquarantining at home than in Spain but I\u2019m excited to plan a road trip around\nthe country one day to visit the sights that I missed and revisit the ones that\nI loved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Being comfortably back at home in Alabama has awarded me some time to reflect upon my initial expectations for the trip. When I landed in Spain, I was pretty sure about my plans to travel, sail, ski, skydive, surf, eat, drink, and make some new friends. Some of these plans changed a little during my…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":612,"featured_media":20192,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[369],"class_list":["post-20104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oviedo","tag-rollinsabroad"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20104","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/612"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20104"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20104\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20133,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20104\/revisions\/20133"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}