Human Towers

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!

We started off our day with some breakfast. The breakfast here is quite different. One thing I really liked is called coca and is a type of bread with sugar on top of it. I also ate some toast, or pan tostado. They don’t make their toast in a toaster, but on a grill-type thing. Our host mother kept urging us to eat more food and to drink coffee, tea, or milk and told us we don’t eat enough! HAHA!

They do have cereal here, but I’m a little nervous to try it. Plus, they have milk (and skim milk) but they don’t refrigerate their milk right away. They store it in a cabinet and then put it in the refrigerator before they use it. How strange … They also eat bocadillas, which are a type of sandwich that’s made with “Spanish bread” (looks like a smaller French bread) and they put tomatoes, cheese, and ham on it. I think it’s a bit strange to eat a sandwich for breakfast.

Today’s event was touring the city. I felt like such a stupid American tourist, taking pictures of the littlest things. We saw a few sites around the city. One of the coolest was the Balcón, which we learned was named when a king of Spain came to visit and called it “the Balcony of the Mediterranean”. The sea is amazing. It’s so blue! We didn’t really go through the Old City today, which was fine because we got a tour of it yesterday, but there was a giant market there today! I didn’t want to buy anything yet, but there was a guy who was selling kittens! They were so cute. The guy was trying to get us to take one, but we had to explain that we’re not from here. I hope he thought we were natives!

We took a train ride around the city. It looked like those little trains that they have some malls for little kids, except bigger, obviously. It took us around the city and we had a earphones so we could listen to more about the attractions we passed. The train was so fun! We went through parts of the Old City … I couldn’t believe the train fit through those tiny roads!

About 11 AM, we went to a gelato place where we got two scoops of ice cream on a cone (sort of for free because we didn’t have to pay!). I got a scoop of chocolate and one of a vanilla ice cream with Oreos in it. For lunch, we ate at an Italian place. I had some lasagna and it was pretty good. From what I’ve seen, Italian food is pretty popular here.

After our day with the excursion was over, the five other girls (that live near me) and I went back to our houses and got changed to go to the beach. It was warm in the sun, but a little breezy, and the water was too cold to go into. We just lied down on the beach for a few hours. It was so nice. We saw a few topless ladies! That was quite strange. One girl was sitting there without a top and was just talking to her friend … Weird!

When we came back to our house (which luckily Pau was here because we couldn’t figure out how to open the door), we just kind of relaxed for a little bit. Pau went to find Anna (the little sister) and then when they came back, we watch How I Met Your Mother. The show was in English, but it had Spanish subtitles. They understand English, but Pau said he needs subtitles to keep up because it’s still a little hard.

Pau watches a few American shows. He likes HIMYM, Modern Family, and Game of Thrones. Right now, they are watching Modern Family on TV but this is all in Spanish with Spanish subtitles, too. It’s really funny to watch because the voices don’t match the people at all. Sometimes they have grown men doing the voices for little kids.

We had dinner today at 9:30. It really wasn’t that bad having dinner so late. We had grilled chicken, omelets (they eat omelets for dinner!), some bread, and some sort of vegetable thing which I didn’t like too much. They actually think it’s weird to drink water all the time, which of course, I don’t mind. They drink a lot of lemonade (more of a sparkling lemonade), Coke, beer, and wine.

So far, we’re having a great time. It’s weird that the US is six hours behind us, so as I’m writing this right now, it’s not even 6 PM in Virginia. One of the girls remarked that “all the children here are perfect”. They kind of are … I’m yet to see an ugly kid and they are all skinny. The kids here play outside all the time, unlike in the US. It’s nice to see. 🙂 Also, I have seen a lot of Mini Coopers, which makes me very happy!

Tomorrow we begin the stuff at our school. There aren’t any classes tomorrow, but it’s a presentation of the program. We had to look nice for it, so I’ll have to choose a pretty dress! Later tomorrow, we get to go to the beach and do some sports there. I don’t know if we’ll do it tomorrow, but I think we’ll get to go windsurfing and paddle boarding! Awesome! ¡Hasta luego!

I can’t believe I’m still going right now. I hardly slept on the plane ride to Barcelona on top of not getting much sleep the night before. We landed at about 10 AM and now it’s almost 10 PM. Somehow I’m still awake. But already, I’m having so much fun.

It was kind of weird at first. We were all waiting forever in the airport waiting on a flight that got delayed five hours. We didn’t even get to Tarragona until about 3. The people who are staying in the dorm got dropped off first, then those of us staying with the host families went to meet up with them. Let me tell you , I can already say I’m so happy I picked the host family option.

My family is great. Both parents are doctors, which is awesome because both my roommate and I are both taking the medical Spanish courses here. There are three children, Xavi, Pau, and Ana. Xavi is my age, but he’s studying at a university in Barcelona right now, Pau is 18 and super nice, and Ana is 15 and loves to play tennis. Their house is amazing. It has four stories to it and they have a patio that opens out into a common area-type thing that even has a pool in it. Plus, we are very close to the beach and the Mediterranean Sea!

I tried a new food today! I don’t remember the exact name, but it was essentially pasta with meat in the middle and drenched in cheese. I hope I don’t gain too much weight here … they are always pressuring more food on you!

Tonight we walked around the old city of Tarragona. It’s really cool because around the perimeter is a wall that was put up by the Romans when it used to be its capitol. There was also a grand cathedral … it was so beautiful. There was so much detail in all the sculptures and painted glass windows. The buildings are so old but so gorgeous at the same time.

Everything is so much smaller here: stairways, cars, streets. It’s incredible how narrow the streets are, but somehow the cars still manage to drive through them. The people here are also parallel parking champs. Just last week at UVA, it took two honor students about five minutes to try to badly parallel park. These cars have just inches of room between the next car, but somehow they manage.

At the end of our walk through the old city, we went to two tapas places. Yay! My first tapas experience. Apparently it’s natural for people to go from one tapas place to another. Each place serves a special tapas of the day and you also get a drink. The first place we went to had a piece of ham wrapped around cheese and placed on a cracker type thing; I enjoyed a nice Fanta Lemonade with it. The second place we went to had a seafood dish that had shrimp and some sort of fish. I tried it! It wasn’t bad, but a little weird in the texture. I had some white wine with it, but it was pretty strong so I didn’t drink much of it.

So, to close up, here are some observations so far.

The Good: the families here are super nice, their house is gorgeous, my roommate is awesome, and they tell us that we talk really well in Spanish (or castellano)

The Bad: nothing so far! except I don’t really know my way around the city; or if you do want a bad, my semi-break down when I thought I lost my passport. Oops.

The Strange: the cars here are all really small (I saw one SUV) and they look really strange and kind of cheapy (needless to say they are all European cars), everyone parallel parks, they mix up their languages between Spanish and Catalan all the time!