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.
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1 comment:
I think this is a very interesting topic to cover. It seems that in comparison to some of the other blogs I’ve read, you have had an extremely intense cultural encounter. It must have been very exciting, but at the same time a little scary. I liked how you described the living situation you were coming from with detail before diving into your main topic. It served to create a better mental image of the whole experience while at the same time creating a better ground for the readers to relate to your situation.
The description of the family was very thorough. I felt like I could fully understand the awkward situation when the mother would clean your room everyday. I can see how you would feel like a constant guest at first. It must have been strange not having much of a relationship with the father. I think it would be interesting if you embellished on that aspect a little. I could be wrong, but I feel as though this lack of connection may have been a significant aspect of your visit. But overall I felt that you did a good job describing the families.
I also really enjoyed the entry where you wrote about you experiences in the school. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to be put into a work environment with a language so different from my own. However, I can certainly relate to how being completely bombarded by another language will help you master it faster. It made me think about my own travels and how quickly I was able to pick up basic elements of languages. I think that a little more detail could be added about the nature of the work you had to do, in terms of difficulty and troubles with the languages. Maybe one or two short anecdotes on the subject would be interesting.
Overall I think that this is a very interesting and honest cultural encounter to read about. I think that you have done a good job so far in describing your journey in detail. It seems that you have a wide range of information to work with. I only have a couple of suggestions. I feel that some more detail could be added into certain parts of the blog. I think that more information about your relationship with the family would be very interesting. I also think that the culture itself could be described and analyzed a bit further as far as their customs are concerned. All in all I think this is a very interesting and well-written blog.
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