Nightlife

The nightlife in Salamanca was by far the best part of the whole experience. Being a university town, Salamanca was crawling with students all around my age and almost every night there was something going on. For the most part the people I went out with spoke English; but, where ever we went we would have to speak in Spanish to order things or to be friendly with people. Each night quickly became full of social networking with people from all over the world. I found that for the most part the people who were from the U.S. were college juniors studying abroad and they were always shocked when I explained that I was just a freshman. Lucky for me, in European countries it is very popular to take a year off after high school before you go to college, which meant that I had other people my age to hang out with. It was cool to hang out with so many new people from all different backgrounds because everyone brought something new to the table. At any given moment, there was a new joke to tell, a new game to play, or a new trick to try which kept us all on our toes. I soon found that every night out I became more and more outgoing and more and more independent. I came into the whole experience with the idea that I would try to branch out a lot more than I normally would because I really didn’t have much to lose since I would only be there for a few months. I think that going out and meeting new people each night made me become the mentality more like the guys I encountered on my first nights out in Madrid.

Language Barrier

La Universidad de Salamanca was my first college experience ever, and my 5 years of Spanish classes previous to this had not prepared me for what was to come. I had three classes, 4 hours, every week day of nothing but Spanish. The first few days this was really hard because I could understand almost everything, but it was hard for me to respond comfortably in anything but the present tense. However, I soon realized that being force to speak perfect Spanish everyday was the best way to become fluent. These classes were a lot different from anything I had ever been in before. It was a new style of teaching where the teacher acted more like a friend you were having lunch with than someone just lecturing you. Every day we had a new topic or tense to learn, but it never felt too hard or overwhelming because the classes felt so comfortable and the teachers were so friendly and helpful. Another big difference was that all the students in the class all came from different countries, all speaking different languages. This made the class a lot more interesting on many levels. Firstly, it allowed us to learn about other cultures and social norms in places other than just Spain. This also meant that everyone’s common denominator was that we spoke Spanish, which meant we had to speak it all the more because it was the only way we could understand each other. I found that having complete immersion into a language was the best way to learn and fully understand it. When you have no choice but to speak a language it’s hard to not become good at it.

Host Family

The one of the first, and biggest, challenges I was faced with was having to live with a new family who had their own customs and rituals and on top of it all, spoke only Spanish. At the Salamanca train station I was picked up by my host mom who was young, fashionable and spoke a mile a minute. I was by no means ready for the new living situation that I was about to encounter. I would be living in an apartment with a family who all seemed to live separate lives. I grew up in a house, with a lawn and woods, and my family is very close. My host mother did not work, but attended English class twice a week along with cooking and cleaning the entire house every day. She had two teenage daughters that wanted nothing to do with me at first because I didn’t speak Spanish perfectly. That was one of the biggest disappointments because I was hoping before I came that we would be close and bond a lot like I had done when I had a foreign exchange student live with me. The father was a bus driver who worked all afternoon, as well as, early morning and then slept during the hours that I was at home, so we never really talked. Like I said, my host mother cleaned the house every single day, which included cleaning my bathroom and making my bed basically as soon as I got out of this. Because of this, I always felt like a guest at a hotel and was never comfortable the way I am at my own home. All though this was not the situation I had initial hoped for, I quickly learned that not all places are going to be just like your own home, however that lifestyle works for them.

¡Hola Guapa!

Getting off the plane the first day in Spain, I unknowingly stepped into what would be the greatest adventure of my life so far. Over the next few months I would learn about how to adapt to a new environment, how to be accepting of a new style of living, and to be open to many new customs. One of the first things that I realized was that with my blonde hair and green eyes, I was far from fitting in to the Spanish norm of dark hair and dark eyes. Also, along the same lines, I was not going to get away or be able to hide my features from the Spanish men. My first night out in Spain, I learned a lot about what are acceptable manners. Walking down the street my first night out with my new group of other American students, we were instantly shouted at with words like “guapa” and “rubia” followed by other profane comments. This was my first major culture shock. I had never in my life been talked to like this and had people think that it was acceptable behavior. However I would soon learn that this was a lot more innocent than what I took it for. The Spanish guys were a lot more outgoing than any one I had ever met in America. They were very confident and not afraid of being turned down. This was a nice change for me because it was much easier to get to know people because they basically did all the work for you.

Studying abroad as a Freshman

Being accepted as a January freshman to Wheaton College meant that I need to come up with something to occupy myself with for the whole first semester, from September to December. I found a program on the internet called Academic Studies Abroad, and through this program I attended la Universidad de Salamanca in Salamanca, Spain. Before this experience I had never been away from my family or my home for more than three weeks, and here I was a girl who just turned 18 going out to explore the world all on my own.
This experience turned out to be one of the greatest things in my life. I lived with a Spanish family in an apartment and attended four hours of class every day. Also, because I went alone, I had to remember what it was like to make friends and how to figure people out to see if they were the kind of people I needed in my life. I was also able to do a lot of traveling while I was over there, seeing almost all of Spain, and some of Germany, Holland, Switzerland, and Austria.
This experience basically taught me to grow up and how to be independent. I had to make all my decisions, which means I did make some mistakes, but I was able to learn from them. In this blog I hope to encourage others to not only have the experience of living abroad, or in any new place for that matter, but to realize what it really means to be independent.