My Spainish Adventures: December 2015

Well… I left you guys hanging for another month. How terrible of me. I would say nothing interesting has happened, but that would be a lie. A lot has happened, and it was interesting. Well… everything I do is interesante.

So update on my language skills is that I'm doing pretty good. I can speak. I'm fluent but also not. I only say this because while I can speak in Spanish, my vocabulary is lacking. And when I speak fast or am not thinking I can't conjugate verbs right. No big deal in English but in Spanish there are 6 conjugations for every verb for every tense. There's like 9 tenses I think. I'm not great at math or anything but when I used the quadratic formula to find the answer to how many different verb conjugations there are for each word; I came up with "A1º+".

If you got that great. If not just stare at it for a minute. If you're reading this from Spain well I'm sorry I hope you figure it out too.

As I was saying, talking is hard. Well it's easy in one language but hard in the other at the moment. I say things wrong then realize a second later. I say things wrong and don't correct them. But I'm talking mostly. Hahaha. I probably sound like a small child that doesn't know what everything is called yet, but it's alright. I think I'm supposed to be making a lot of mistakes. I hope so because if not.. Well it's too late now. Plus the mistakes help, because they make me want to get it right the next time. I'm not always successful. But I'm having a good time none the less. (:

So about the second week of November my school took a field trip. Well not all of the school and not a field trip. It's an excursion and only 3 grades went, which was about 150 students. We went somewhere up in the vague vicinity of Burgos. The canyons of the river Ebro. Sounds cool? Well it was cool. But it was also a lot of walking. We hiked 18 kilometers that day. (Probably more due to some unplanned side trips.) The geography interesting for me as in the USA I'm used to seeing either canyons of rock or mountains with lots of vegetation. These were canyon(s) covered in vegetation. It was a good, albeit long day.

Before I go farther I have to let you USA people know… Thanksgiving is only practiced in the USA. Some of you are probably like "duh Miguel" but I mean, a lot of people asked if I was celebrating it. I didn't because of one fact. Your week of break in the USA was my week of exams for the trimester. How freaking amazing eh? While you lot were having fun I was studying for exams and continuing with school.

So I try to travel wherever I haven't been in Spain as much as possible, and that state of mind is what placed me in Segovia, Spain on a Tuesday night before a history exam. Short story shorter: at lunch my host mom asked me if I wanted to accompany her to Segovia for the afternoon (returning the same night). I said "yeah sure, when do we leave" and she says "10 minutes". Thus, 30 minutes later we left the house for Segovia. That's how I got to spend part of the night alone in a foreign country in a foreign city 15 hours before I would have to write a bunch of definitions about historical stuffs. The city is magnificent. Even though I only got to see it in the lights of the city it was beautiful. I'd learned a bit in history (in the USA [thanks Mr. Lucero]) about the Roman aqueducts, but seeing one in person was pretty great. Those Romans sure knew how to stick rocks together. Without mortar or cement either. Nice job Rome.

And then from the 5 - 8 of December I went on a retreat with Fernando (my host brother) and about 30 guys. (A religious-study-sport retreat). And no we didn't have school on Monday or Tuesday because it was the feast day of the Immaculate Conception which is Spain's patron and because practically everyone is at least baptized Roman Catholic, we have Catholic holiday days. We stayed in a "house" (the word that comes to mind is villa or humongous cottage when I picture it [I mean all 30 of us were staying there]) near Gijón, Spain, in the region of Asturias. Basically middle-north Spain on the sea/ocean/water. It's really green and rains quite a bit. But this weekend the weather was really nice. The retreat was really good. I had a good time and FYI Asturias is beautiful.

Short recap: Everything is good here in Spain, I´m having a great time, and I´m just as ready for the Christmas holidays as you are.

Un saludo, Miguel Sabol