Sweden: Discovering my Roots

When people see me, they often ask me where I was born or where my parents are from. They are always surprised to hear that I’m American. People think I’m more Latina that I am. The truth is, I’m actually quite a bit Scandinavian. My great-great-grandmother immigrated to the US when she was just 15 years old. My mom and grandma had contacts with our Swedish family, so I decided to take a trip to meet my family and learn about the past.

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Wine and Dancing

I dread writing this blog now because every day that I’m writing about is a day gone from my time here. I can’t believe I only have two and a half more days here. I feel so stupid for not going through with the two week extension! There is so much I haven’t done and I want to hang out with my familia here more. They are so hilarious.

Anyway, we’ll start with Tuesday. On Tuesday for class, we went to another campus of the URV (the university we are studying through). That campus deals more with the sciences and has some laboratories that we used. Lab work is not my favorite. We learned the names of some basic lab materials (some of which I didn’t even know what they were in English), and then we started to put some sample of things on a Petri dish. Boring. We also tested our blood types; however, I already know mine, so it wasn’t very exciting for me. The test was a little hard, too. We had to put our blood on a slide and mix it in with the necessary liquids. Oh well … I’m still O positive!

For our excursion that day, we went to Bodega Torres, which is a winery about 45 minutes away from Tarragona. It was very nice and fancy there. We watched a video about the history of the winery and then we took a tour on a little tram thing around the winery. It was very pretty and there were some cool parts where the tram took us through the buildings. At the end of the tour, we got to sample some wine. We tried Viña Esmeralda, a sweet white wine. It tasted pretty good for wine! I ended up buying some in the store … hopefully it will make it through customs. If not, at least I only paid 7.50 euros for it. One girl spent 140 euros there …. :O

That night was pretty uneventful. I just sat around and worked on the project that we didn’t know we had until Sunday night. Typical. Melanie went shopping, Anna was playing tennis, and Pau went to the castells, leaving me by myself. 🙁 

Yesterday, we had more lab work to do. I’m not even going to bore you with the details. Just know it was boring and pointless and I’m not cut out for lab work. After that, we ate lunch and had an hour and a half to kill before having our group adventure. I only bought one thing, but it was a good thing. Haha. I still have to buy more things for people though!

Our group adventure yesterday was going back to the place where we had team building and we made a music video. It was funny, but I could have honestly done without it. We did the video to the song Danza Kuduro, but surprise(!) only part of the song is in Spanish … the other half of it is in Portuguese. I liked this song before, but I listened to it too many times yesterday. We got divided into groups and we had to make up choreography to a certain part of the song. We got the ending section and one of the girls suggested I do a round-off backhandspring at the end of it. I ended up doing that almost 10 times because the guy making the video wanted to get different shots of it.

Last night was another pretty uneventful night. Dinner was funny, though, as usual. They talked about Russian mafia people who are rich and come to Spain, they were trying to throw cherries into each others’ mouths, and Anna was being dramatic about her cold. Pobrecita … she’s home from school today.

So today so far I just went to a pointless class where I pretty much relearned everything I’ve learned from health sciences at JMU but in Spanish. Now I’m in the middle of working on this final paper for my class. Hopefully I will be done soon so I can go to the beach or do something somewhat fun before our excursion tonight. Sigh … I’m not ready to go home.

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