3 months down

Hi again,

Already three months down! Time flies when you’re having fun!

This month went really fast. As I posted in my last blog, my boyfriend was here and he left at the 6th of April. In this week we went to the beach and we had a wonderful time. Then as soon as he was gone, I had to study really hard for about 1,5 weeks because I had 2 mid-terms coming and also the exam of my Spanish Course.

After this studying, the weather became very nice, so we went to the beach a lot. The rest of April was actually quite boring, we didn’t do that much except for laying on the beach and working on school stuff. The courses that I am taking are really interesting. I am taking a course in introduction to translation studies, where we look at English text to translate them into Spanish and how you should do this and what kind of things you have to keep in mind. I find this course interesting but also a bit difficult, since we have to translate into Spanish. As I am not Spanish, I don’t always know which words are better to use and how the context reads better, which makes it hard to do sometimes. This means I have to study and practice a lot to be able to do this for the final exam. But since I find translating interesting, I try to do the best I can and practice as much as I can. I am also taking a course in gender and culture in the English speaking world. This course is not as difficult as the translation course, but it is still very different from what I have done back home at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences.  I’ve actually never taken such a course, which makes it interesting for me but also sometimes a bit difficult when I don’t know what they’re referring too. This course is especially about the waves of feminism and how feminism is still something we’re dealing with these days, which makes it very interesting. My other courses have to do with the English language, which I love. These courses are not as difficult as my other two, but still interesting and a good course to follow. The level of all my courses is different from the levels of study at the Hanze University. It’s not much lower, but the way of taking exams is different. They always have partial exams you take in the middle of the course. I find this a good thing, because it means that what you have to learn is now divided in two separate exams. This makes studying a bit easier, because it is not as much as doing only one exam at the end of the course. But on the other hand, the partial exams go further in detail than the normal exam we are used to at the end. You can say something about both ways of taking exams.

A thing we found out here is that the police doesn’t do that much. First we found this out when the mobile phone of one of my roommates got stolen out of her purse in the club. At the club, the people that worked there didn’t want to do anything for her. Because she was crying a lot (there was a lot of personal and important stuff on her phone) they actually kicked her out of the club and she was not allowed to get back in. She then wanted to go the police station, but as soon as she got there, they sent her home. The police didn’t want to help her at all, because she had been drinking some alcohol. They told her to come back the next day. When she did they were really slow and not trying to help her at all. Then another time, there was something happening in our street. There were these guys that had some drugs and they moved a scooter to the other side of the street. By doing this, they touched a car and this car got damaged badly. The guy of the car got mad at the guy of the scooter, but he explained that his scooter got moved. They called the police and when they came they heard their story, looked at the scooter and the car and then just left. They didn’t even asked the guys that had the drugs and moved the scooter, while they were even still standing there! The police just did nothing. We now decided not the look at this guys anymore. They are in our street a lot, but now that we found out that the police does nothing about it, we decided to ignore them.

At the 24th of April my parents finally came to visit me! This was really nice, as I haven’t seen them in 3 months. We did some sightseeing around Palma, had very nice dinners and a good time together. After 4 days, me and a lot of other ESN students left to go to Ibiza on the ESN Ibiza Trip. All ESN students from all over Spain came to Ibiza to party for 4 nights. Amazing! We had a party every night and it was really awesome. The clubs were big and the music was very good. We did a day trip to Formentera, which was beautiful! We also had a poolparty during the day, where we could just sit in the sun a bit and enjoy the music. We had a fantastic time together with all the ESN students of Spain!

Unfortunately, now that I got back, I have to focus on school again. My final exams are already starting at the end of this month, which means: time for study!

Talk to you next month

Besos,

Cynthia