Out of your comfort zone

I know, I missed last weeks post, but when you read why, I think you will actually be proud of me. Plus where I was, there was no service so even if I had time, I would not have been able to post anyway.

As most of you know, I tried out for the university orchestra. What most of you don't know, is that I made it! I am an official member of the Murcia university orchestra. Also, when I auditioned, I was placed into a small chamber group! I was/am ecstatic that I made it!

Two weeks ago, we started our rehearsals. Generally, the first rehearsal is the most nerve racking one because your coming into a group that have know one another for a long time and you also don't know your skill level in comparison to theirs. Some people don't get nervous by these things, but these types of things are things that I worry about even in my home orchestra.

On top of all of those reasons, the fact that everybody except me speaks fluent Spanish (obviously). After all of those nerves passed, I was able to look past all of these silly little things and just focus on the one thing we all have in common...the music. Music knows no language. Even if the lyrics are not in someone's native language, just the flow and rhythm of the music alone can help the person interpret how to feel or what emotion the artist was feeling or trying to portray when the song was written/performed.

Last week, we had our first concert in Abarán. It was such a neat experience. We stayed overnight in an old school/church. The first night we didn't have any water but the next morning it was up and running. I was really nervous because I was worried that people would not try to include me and that I would not try to include myself due to the language barrier. Yet again, I was over reacting. Everyone was very excited to have me there and were more than willing to help me when I didn't understand. They even invited me to stay up late with them to play games and perform some silly pieces on our instruments.

That Saturday, we had two concerts. One in the morning for the community kids and another in the evening for general public. I enjoyed both of the concerts very much. They were very fun and everybody loved the concerts.

From that weekend alone I feel I broke a little of my walls down. I was forced to communicate and participate and once I got over the nerves I met new people, made a few friends and now I have been invited to play in more concerts this up coming week!

What a great week!

Until next time!

I will be catching up on work for a bit!

Thank GOODNESS for the beach

Hola!

This week has been a bit stressful for all of us internationals in my class. For some reason out professors are unsatisfied with our work that we have been doing.

Our history/literature teacher was very upset with our class last week. For literature we had to do an analysis of a poem that we read in class. A side note: when it comes to analyzing poems or anything really, I can not say it is one of my strong points even in English. I digress, but anyway, the week before we had a discussion about what an analysis was and how to do one properly, which was great because ever teacher wants an analysis done differently. So the next week we turned in our papers and the day after turning them in, we recieved them back and our teacher was very disappointed. No one got 100% but no one failed either but he was very dissatisfied with our work. He began yelling at us telling us we don't care about our work and didn't take time to do the assignment, we just wrote whatever we wanted and handed it in. He told us that we were the worst group of internationals and that we are lazy.

Now, how he got all this information from one assignment I don't know but, I can't speak for everyone in my class, but I personally worked very hard on my analysis. Sure, there were things in there that may not have been exactly what he was looking for, but that does not by any means mean that I did not try my best on the assignment. I am bad at analyses in English as it is so I knew this one was not going to be much easier. If I were lazy, I would not have even bothered to do the assignment. 

The next class was not much better. The next week, we had the same teacher and he proceeded to tell us that all of our teachers had a meeting about our class about how we need to change our attitudes and how they think we are only studying abroad to travel and don't actually care about learning Spanish. The next class we had written and oral expression. This is a different professor and she came in and showed us an example of a badly written paper. It said, "Tengo una hermana, el es guapo y simpactico." For those of you who don't speak Spanish that means, "I have a sister, he is handsome and he is nice." Our teacher proceeded to tell us that this is a mistake that a person in level one Spanish would make and we all agreed. Then she continued and said that we had made those kind of mistakes on our assignments for her.

Pause: I know my Spanish is not that great, however, there is no possible way, that I would make this kind of mistake at my level of Spanish. If I did, I would ask to be sent home because I was probably very ill to even think that was correct.

Continuing, she too began telling us how much we don't care about our work and how our attitudes need to change about our work. She said she could not even grade our papers because we would have all failed and proceeded to hand back our papers. Generally when a teacher hands back a paper, even if it is not for a grade, there is some sort of marking on the paper. In this case, there was nothing. I raised my hand and said, " how are we supposed to know what mistakes we made, if there are no marks on the paper? It is impossible to make corrections to something that when we turned in we thought was correct but you are telling us there are tons of mistakes." So she took them back and graded them in class. Again, I don't know about everyone else, but my paper only had two marks on it and they had nothing to do with the problem she was indicating. According to what everyone else was saying, none of them had that problem either. 

In my head I was appalled (and probably on my face too) that she would even think it was okay to hand back a paper that she said has so many mistakes but has not marked anything on the paper. If when I turn in the paper, We think is perfect, and it gets returned to us after being told it was terrible but there are no marks, how are we supposed to know what our mistakes are? That is a terrible teaching tactic to me. Furthermore, if we had made mistakes like that on our papers, that is a reflections on her teaching skills because she is the one who is supposed to be teaching us how to write correctly.

These teachers are going to drive me insane. 

If I truly did not care about these classes, I would not wake up every morning at 8:30am to go to a bunch of classes that I am 85% sure won't even transfer over because I have taken them already, I wouldn't be doing assignments in advance, I wouldn't be taking notes/participating in class. Yes, there are 2 out of the 10 of us who truly do not care enough to either show up or when they do show up, they are disruptive or high on weed, or both. I understand that sometimes we make silly mistakes sometimes yes, but Spanish is not our first language. If it were, would I be in these classes in the first place? No. 

None the less, I think it is very unprofessional to tell students that they do not care and tell them they are lazy and that teachers are having meetings about how they are only in Spain to travel and need to change their attitudes. Especially when there are only a few students who actually fit the bill.

If they think that me showing up, participating, doing homework, and asking questions when I don't understand in class is me not caring, I obviously don't know how to care about class. If they truly think I do not care about class, I will show them what not caring looks like: I am not even going to bother showing up to class and I am going to travel like they think I do.

Thank goodness for the beach, because if I was not able to get away this weekend and relax with friends, I would have been stressed out for the weekend.

Hasta luego,

Thanks for reading :) hopefully this next week will be better (it is only two days long!!!!)

Putting trust in others

Hello everyone,

I know this is the second week that I am late making a post, but I had so many awesome adventures last week that I was unable to stop and blog about it.

Last week was probably one of the most stressful/fun experiences that I have had so far. Me and three friends traveled. Before traveling we had to start off with the basics of research. We had to research how to get there, how much it would cost, what we wanted to do once we got there, and how to get back. The easiest way to research how to get there, was to have one person look up different methods of travel and report back to the others costs and efficiency. That was the first trust test. We had to trust that the person researching actually sifted through everything and found the best/price reasonable method of travel, in return since they were paying for everyone's ticket, they had to trust that everyone had the funds to pay them back. That also trickled into how much it cost. 

What we were doing once we got there was a little more difficult. Some people had specific things they wanted to see. In one instance, we had a tour guide at the colosseum and after that we wanted to go to Vatican City to see the Sistine chapel. After the tour at the colosseum, we asked the tour guide the best way to get to the chapel and she proceeded to tell us that we would not make it there in time to see it. Then suddenly she had the idea to take us herself to the museum because she could get us in a little after hours because she is a tour guide. We talked it over then accepted the offer, however, we really took a big leap because she had to take us across the city to get there.

Pause...

Four American girls, in a completely different country, who have no idea where they are going...

It would have been so easy to lead us to some back alley and rob us or worse. We literally had our lives in her hands...we took a big step trusting her to take us to some place we had never been. 

Luckily she was very trustworthy and took us where we wanted to go. It was amazing! She took us all around the city and showed us where the pope worked and a ton of different exhibits withing the city then finally we made it to the Sistine chapel! It was amazing! We weren't aloud to take pictures, we actually weren't even aloud to talk, while we were there! It was absolutely breath taking. After the tour our tour guide gave us directions of how to get back to our hostel. She was very nice. 

Also on our travel, I got to hang out with my awesome CFAB Ally. It was her birthday so that is originally I decided to meet up with her. We did so many things. We walked around the city, shopped a bit in the street shops, ate tons of gelato and went to the palace pitti (it was closed, but we were still technically there). We saw the duomo, the burial place of Michael Angelo, and the David statue (the copy). I was sad to only have gotten to see her for 2 days, but it was better than not seeing her at all. 

After the trip was over was when the real trust happened. When at the airport, the plain was delayed an hour, so we were left to trust the pilot to get us to the next airport to get our bus. Unfortunately, that did not work out because we arrived at the airport and had to look up more bus schedules. Everyone had to trust me, because I was the only one who had a phone that could access internet. Eventually I found a new bus. Once we got on the bus, once again everyone had trusted me to let them know when our stop was was, that was harder because we were all tired and slept so whenever they asked, it was difficult but we figured it out. 

Eventually we made back to Murcia in one piece. We got to the pantheon, the colosseum, the trevy fountain, the Sistine chapel, the palace pitti, the duomo, the burial place of Michael Angelo, go sing, and eat as much gelato, pizza and pasta as we wanted.

Rome and Florence are/were amazing!

Oh, we were in Italy...did I forget to tell you that?

Traveling is such a fun experience. Having to trust complete strangers or even the judgements of people you know can be difficult, but you have to do it and once you do, it will hopefully/most likely turn into one of the most enjoyable experiences of your life.

That's all I got as far as fun stuff goes. I went to class, went to a museum, went out with some friends, and played pool with some really cool Spaniards. Life continues to treat me well and I am greateful!

Until next time

Better late than never!

Ugh! This week has been so long but it was definitely a fun one.

This week we had two birthday celebrations! On Tuesday my new friend Harold Howar turned 21! Of course for all due from the United States, that is a huge deal, but here in Spain, it is just another birthday so you can imagine the look on peoples faces when a bunch of Americans show up to the club turnt up and ready to go. Before we went to the club, we went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant and then did a little bar hopping scavenger hunt. So when we arrived at the club, there were a lot of people, not including me, who were pretty hyped, including the birthday boy. I was supposed to bake him a cake that night, but since they all went out to dinner I had to hold it off until Thursday. I made him a rum cake with a rum glaze on top. 

Side note: I got a Spanish buddy on Thursday night as well! Now I have someone to help me out with my Spanish!

Now the rest of the story: Saturday was another one of my new friends 21st birthdays, Andi Watkins! For her birthday we played a game called true American. For those of you who don't know who that is, it is a game that mixes history facts/American pop culture facts with drinking. Again, I was not participating in the drinking portion. It was such a blast, but, we made have burned a bridge with one of our roommates who was trying to sleep. You can imagine 20 or so drinking college age students playing a game that involves a bit of group participation and jumping on furniture...let's just say it was not the quietest game ever. But any way, that night I made her a no bake peanut butter cheese cake. The picture is below. We didn't even bother slicing it up, we all just dug in with spoons. I must say I did enjoy it quite a bit. After that they all went out to party, I stayed home and cleaned up the mess and slept.

It was quite an enjoyable week! This week the blog post may be late again as  I will be traveling so look for it Saturday, if it is not there, it will be there the next Saturday. It will be a busy weekend ;) but hey, that just means the next weeks post will be full of fun stories!

Hasta luego!

Stranded in la Manga

Another week has come to an end and I have had yet another great adventure.

You know how last week I said I started classes well, apparently that was just a continuation of the language and culture classes. This week was the start of my real classes. I am taking a history class, geography class, music class, art history class, literature class and politics class. They sound more intense than they are...at least so far anyway. All of the classes went very well but yesterday, Friday, is when the true fun stuff happened. Friday morning literally everyone in my class except for me and one other person went to travel, so there were only two of us in class. He subject was art history and mind you, it was the very first time having the class (what an impression to leave on the teacher). When the teacher arrives she gives us the option to leave and reschedule our four hour long class for another day, or have the lecture as planned, so we decided to do the lecture. It was very interesting! I didn't even realize we had been in the class for an hour ans forty five minutes until she told us to go on 20min break and meet her at the tram station. After break, we met at the tram and then walked to the museum of roman architecture. It was very informational and what's more interesting is that because there was only the two of us there, we got a personal guided tour by our professor! She is extremely knowledgable on the subjunctive and I can tell she really loves what she teaches. It is going to be such a fantastic class.

I realize that the above story has nothing to do with the title but lucky for you, I was just getting to that. Today me and my friend Margo decided that we wanted to go to the beach so, at 1:30 we walk to the bus station buy our ticket to la manga and head out at 2:00. It was so beautiful! On one side we had El Mar Menor and on the other we had the Mediterranean Sea! It was 70 degrees but windy so we didn't get in the water to spare us from freezing later on. The water is crystal clear, you can see to the very bottom; the scenery in general is just gorgeous! After we laid on the beach of the Mediterranean for about an hour and a half , her reading and me "sketching" and "writing," we grabbed our stuff and went to the restraunt across the street. We were pleasantly surprised to see that paella was on the menu! We shared the paella de pescado y mariscos. Needless to say, it was delicious! I am glad we got it to share because it was huge! I asked the waiter if he had ever seen anyone eat an entire plate by themselves, and he laughed and proceeded to tell me that they are originally for one person. If you all had seen the amount of paella that was on the serving dish, your jaw would have hit the ground! It was so much food! After we ate the waiter gave us free chupitos, sin alcohol for me, and brought us our bill. Once we paid, we walked on the beach of El Mar Menor for about thirty minutes thinking that we were going to catch the 7:00 bus back to Murcia. Wow were we wrong. After sitting at the stop for about twenty minutes, a boy about our age, asked which bus we were waiting for and he informed us that the bus did not come until 8 which means about 8:30 Spanish time. So we waited at the stop. When we got on, we had to get off in Cartagena because the bus that goes to Murcia is different than the one we were on. When we go inside to get our ticket, we see that the last bust to Murcia was at 8:45 and it was already 9:30 when we got there. We thought would just get another ticket for later, but it turns out the next bus to Murcia isn't until tomorrow at 9:30 am which is the same time as our hike that we are going on. So...we look at tickets to places that would potentially stop in Murcia on the way, and we find a ticket to Madrid but, it was 40euros! So we call the bus ticket company well try to anyway to see if the bus would for sure stop in Murcia before we bought our potentially useless ticket. Margo was on the phone with them when her phone shut off. We then proceeded to call back on my phone but mid call my phone died. What luck right? About an hour goes by of us contemplating our options which were 1. Stay in a hotel for the night and catch the next bus, 2. Buy the ticket to Madrid or albcete in hopes that they stop in Murcia, or 3. Pay for a taxi. We decided to take the taxi because at the end of the day, it was the quickest and cheapest/easiest thing to split cost wise between the two of us. We ended up spending 30euros each on the taxi, 18euros each on food, and 10euros total on bus fare. What should have been a 30euro day trip, ended up being an almost 60euro trip but were the memories worth it...absolutely, because they were priceless! 

All in all it was a pretty adventurous day with a pretty adventure filled day tomorrow as well! 

Thanks for reading I hope you all enjoyed it! There are pictures below! 

P.S. I realize now after relaying the story we didn't really get stranded, but would you have read it if it was less dramatic...didn't think so ;)

Have a great weekend!

 Hasta luego!

The Mediterranean 

Me "sketching/writing"

Margo looking cool on the beach

Paella de pescado y mariscos

El Mar Menor

Finally it's Saturday!

Buenas noches!

Well it is probably more like 3:00 your time but salutations no matter when you read this! 

This week has been so. It was my first full week of classes because; last week we didn't have class on Monday because it was a holiday. My classes are not very stressful by any means, but they are extremely long. They are from 9:30am-2:00pm with a half hour break. I know some people have longer work days than that, but that is a very tiring day for me! Everyday after class I would practice my violin, workout in either the park or my living room then shower (obviously) then try to nap. Usually I end up reading, listening to music, and or just laying in my bed. By Friday I was so exhausted! I even missed out on the international student party! Honestly though, sleep is the most important thing so I am glad that I got a good nights rest.

Besides classes this week, I also had a tour of Murcia! It was a little late considering i have been here for four weeks now, but it was still fun none the less. I went to two museums: the first one was el museo de Santa Clara. It was once a palace of the Moros and now it is a convent. The nuns are only allowed to be out and about when the museum is closed so we did not get to see them on our tour but it was beautiful!mthere are parts of the palace that have been preserved so we got to see some of the architecture. The other museum, el museo de la ciudad otherwise known as the city museum was very informative. I learned that there used to be a wall around the city and where my apartment is now, is where the wall used to be! I am literally living on a part of history! 

Today was a day of fun with some wonderful ladies I have become friends with since I have been here! Caroline, Kaia, Andi, Coral, Margo and I all went to the mall for the day and it was such a blast! I hate shopping alone so shopping with five other people with five different opinions was a blast! Way better than any party I have been or will EVER go to! 

As I mentioned, Friday was the international student party which as I also mentioned I missed, but because I got a good nights sleep last night, I can go out and party tonight!

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful Saturday evening!

Hasta luego!

Black girl in the City

Hola amigos!

Once again it is Saturday and there is another blog post from me. ¡Que Guay!

This week I want to talk about a little bit about race. Not anything heavy, just an observation between how races are seen here in Spain and in the U.S.

One day I was talking to a friend who is studyinghere about school, she is from the U.S. For us, this was our first official week of classes so I asked her how her classes were and she proceeded to tell me about her day. She talked about her professors and how cool she thought their classes were, and how she was feeling about the language difference being that her first language is English; she is really enjoying herself. Then I asked her if she had made any new friends in any of her classes, and as expected she said yes (she is very social). She started with, "I was a little nervous to talk to the people around me at first, but I had a question so I looked around to see who I would feel more comfortable asking" then she said, "this is going to sound racist, but there was a group of Mexicans..." Immediately, my attention was pulled to this statement, because to me that is not racist at all. One thing I notice in the states a lot is that when someone is asked to point someone out or describe someone, most people will say just everything about that person, their hair, clothes, shoes, way they walk, where their from etc. but leave out their race from fear of sounding racist when in fact their race would be the quickest way to identify who the person/group of people are. Some people I have spoken to previously whom I asked why they didn't just say their race to save all the trouble of trying to find "that one girl, with the pink shirt, with black shoes, standing next to the pole that is in the middle of the open space next, to the store with the pillows in the window..." you get the point, when they could have just said the "black/African American girl over there," their response is usually, " I don't see color." When I hear this, my first thought is to ask them if they are color blind, that would be a bit too sassy to say out loud. I usually come to the conclusion that they were too nervous or uncomfortable to say what race they were. I feel that it is the awkwardness of most people not willing to use someone's color as something as simple as an identifier, that makes it uncomfortable when people do use someone's race as an identifier and causes some people to think of it as racist. Here in Spain it is a different perspective.

In class, our teacher was talking about different types of stores and people in the city. At one point he said, in Spanish, but I will translate for you all...your welcome ;), "There are a lot of chinos here in the city, a lot of them work in small convenient stores." Immediately people started looking at each other with big eyes in shock that he used the word "chinos" (people from china) to describe them. He saw the discomfort from some people and felt that he had to explain himself. He said, "Here we see people's race, but we don't think any differently of them. It is because we do recognize that we all look different, that we are able to identify ourselves as the same...as people. We don't treat each other differently simply because our skin color is different. Sure we may say "la negrita (little black girl) or "el blanco" (the white guy), but we are not using it to be offensive, it is just the easiest/quickest way to identify someone, especially in a crowd." I was blown away (in a good way) by this explanation, I was also very pleased to see that there are people who think this way. It is interesting to me how in the country that is supposed to be a great melting pot where people of all races and ethnicities have freedom, is so sensitive about race, whereas a country that is seen as having not as much freedom in comparison to the United States is more accepting of race. Yes, I know there is racism everywhere and I am aware that it most likely does occur here in Spain, and it can be said that people in the states are more sensitive about race, because of slavery and the civil rights movement and other such political events, but what many people do not know, is that Spain went through the exact same phase in history. The difference I think, is that the people of Spain was able to evolve past (not just look past, as in learned something from) the times of race and racism and realize that color is not a personality trait or what makes a person who he/she is, it is just a color. Think of it this way, when a person wants to use the red crayon they don't say, "that one color next to the other one that's in the third row of the box with the writing on it." That would be madness! Color is just color and nothing more, it does not define you, you define it...unless maybe you are a crayon. 

My point is, the fact that the color/race of a person is not made into a big production here has made me feel very at home. Not that I don't feel at home in the states, it's just in the states I very much know and feel that I am a black person (no shame, I am proud of my roots) but here in Spain, I feel like a person.