The First Monday

Today was a less eventful than the previous two. We started our day off at the URV, where we will be having our classes, and had a presentation about the school. We took a little tour of the campus and then we learned more about the classes we are taking while we’re here.

I’m taking Advanced Medical Spanish, which also has a practical portion. The first week were are going to learn some basic medical terms. The second and third weeks, I’m going to a hospital in Reus (about 10-15 minutes away) and I will be shadowing someone in the physical therapy department. The fourth week, we reconvene as a class and get to look through microscopes and stuff like that.

We ate our lunch at the university (which wasn’t bad) and then we walked back to our house here in Spain. As a group, we went to a beach. Most of us just laid out (so now I have a really bad sunglasses tan), but some people played volleyball and soccer. Luckily for us, we live really close to the beach we went to, so we were able to just walk down there instead of having to meet up and pay 1.40 euros for the bus.

Tonight, we went to a tennis club. We didn’t do any sports, but our mom, Cruzma, took a spinning class; Anna played tennis; and Jordi, the dad, played this one sport that is like a combination of tennis and squash. Melanie and I also walked along Playa Larga, which is one of the beaches here in Tarragona. It wasn’t overly exciting, but we got out of the house and saw what people in Spain do in our free time.

Dinner was kind of interesting. They called it sopa, or soup, but it was more like rice in a broth. Pau put something in my sopa to help cool it down, but I’m not sure what it was and I’m fine not knowing! Then they ate a type of melon that tasted like a citrus-y watermelon. Pau and Anna said it tasted bad, but I thought it tasted good. They had us try eating the melón with ham wrapped around it. It wasn’t bad, but it was definitely weird. They eat a lot of ham here. This kind of ham looked more like bacon. They also ate hamburgers, but without the bun! I had one; it was pretty much just eating the hamburger patty with ketchup … funny enough, they called it “ketchup”, too. Cruzma always makes us eat more, so we had some vanilla pudding. They don’t call it pudding because pudding to them is like pudding in England. Pau had Greek yogurt, but he put lots of sugar in it! How strange!

Some sad news today … I think I killed my curling wand. Apparently my adaptor/converter doesn’t have good reviews online … and we only have one between the two of us here! I want to go to this store called El Corte Inglés, which is like a huge department store, to buy a new curling iron of some sort because I love having curls!

Tomorrow starts our first official day of classes. Hopefully this night I will get more sleep. I didn’t fall asleep last night until after 1 and woke up around 4 this morning, so I’ve been running off of three hours of sleep today. I don’t know how I did it!