Los Primeros Dias en Granada - The First days in Granada

Plaza de Isabel la Catolica

I can’t believe I’ve been in Granada for 5 days now.  It’s such an incredibly beautiful and laid back city. Granada is in the Andalucía region of Spain, 30 minutes from the Sierra Nevada Mountains and an hour and 30 minutes from the Mediterranean coast. While I’m here I will be staying with a Spanish woman named Carmen.  Carmen has been absolutely great so far.  Life with her is going to be so different then what I’m use to.  Carmen never wakes up before I leave for class so she lays breakfast out for me at night so it’s ready for me when I get up.  Breakfast in Spain is really simple. Just bread with Nutella and coffee.  Then I come home for lunch around 2:30.  Lunch is like the main meal here and Carmen is a great cook.  The first day she made paella with chicken.  After lunch is siesta time.  Carmen always says “Siesta es obligatorio.” I haven’t really gotten use to sleeping during the day yet but it’s definitely growing on me. Then dinner is at 9:30 and that’s usually a little smaller than lunch and is usually something like soup or frozen pizza.  Carmen is a really laid back person and as long as we don’t mess with the typical daily schedule, she pretty much lets us do our own thing.  She actually wants us to go out, drink the wine and just have a good time.  The only real downfall to this family stay is that there is no internet in our apartment so we have to go to either the ISA office or an internet café to get online. This is going to make things like Skype nearly impossible because I can online get online in pretty crowded places.

As far as the study program goes, they really wasted no time in starting classes.  The first day we were in Granada we had to take a placement test to see with classes we can take. In order to get credit at UK for the classes I take here, I need to take them in Spanish and in order to do that I needed to get a level 4 or higher on the placement test. I ended up in level five so I’m pretty happy about where I am. The day after the test, classes started. Right know, we are in the intensive month of language class so I’m technically only taking one class that lasts from 9am-1pm.  The class is 4 hours long and I have one teacher for the first 2 hours and another for the last 2 hours.   My class is also really small. There are only 9 other students.  It’s a big change from UK where my smallest class had 30-35 people.  So far I really like my class.  The other students are a lot of fun to talk to and the teachers.  It’s kind of hard to judge the work load for this class right now because we’ve only had 2 days of class. But then again we only have like 20 days left.

Hasta Luego!