Let the Spanish begin...

So today was the first proper day of the language course - we had to be at the University Gandia campus by 8am for an ESN meeting (Erasmus), which was 5 minutes from our apartments.

There were so many of us..., we met other students and got told about our weekly schedule, basically parties and fun activities. They gave us a list of all the trips organised over the semester, like a ski trip to Andorra, various trips in Spain and the biggest trip of the semester to Ibiza, where 2000 Erasmus students go...niice.

Before going to class we all had to take a one hour Spanish exam to determine which groups we'd be put into. It was a multiple choice test, but half of it was realllly difficult. So I was put into A2 (the group above absolute beginners).

The teacher speaks only Spanish, and actually she was quite easy to understand - I think because she was talking slowly. So to no surprise...we all had to introduce ourselves in Spanish. She wrote her own introduction on the blackboard and we had to change it based on ourselves...going something like this:!

Hola, mi nombre es ed, y tengo 20 anos. Naci en un pueblo se llama Hampshire, cerca de Londres. Estudio diseno grafico y voy a estudiar 1 semestre en Valencia. (Use Google translate..!)

We also had to talk about how long we'd studied Spanish and if we'd visited Spain before. I thought I'd struggle with the language a lot more than I am. I think I was put in the right group - most people are around the same level.

After class we went to town to get food and try to sort out cheaper rates for our phones. There is a spanish network called Yoigo which a lot of exchange students use, but the shop was closed because of siesta...it seems like siesta is from like 1-9pm! I managed to ask a guy if he knew what time siesta finishes...he understood okay!, the Spanish pronouncation is so much easier than French.

In the evening all of the Erasmus students went for a welcome dinner. We tried a lot of tapas foods and met more people again...some students from Iceland and a Hungarian. Afterwards we went to one of the two main clubs in Gandia, El Varadero - it was really small but the music was quite good.

There are so many germans/austrians here - everytime we try to talk English in a group, a German comes along and changes everyone to speaking German.. quite annoying! It's funny hearing them speak Spanish - harsh accent. The italians still sing in Spanish too!