My First Day at Spanish University

Monday was an exciting day for me, as the sun streamed through my curtains, as the sun beckoned to me to get out of bed with it’s golden seductiveness alluding to the excitement of a new day, I remembered that it was my first day at Spanish University!

After getting up and surviving the five mile bike ride along the coast to get there, I soon realised that I was a tiny speck of sand amongst a desert of students and new things. It felt one of those typical “first day at school” television episodes that so many Western programmes recycle and overuse in their story lines.

My first class of the day was “Greek mythology” so naturally I arrived twenty minutes early in order to find my classroom. What I was soon to realise, was that the room I had written down on my own little timetable, didn’t exist! And so ensued another nineteen minutes of frantically trying to find this non existent “lecture theatre 19″ until I conceded to doing that which most males cannot – asking for help. I was soon efficiently directed to where my class actually was, and managed to arrive (early too) at my first class.

It wasnt very interesting… The students and Profesor were friendly enough, but learning about Greek mythology through pottery in Spanish. After those two hours, where I went from not understanding a single word the lecturer was saying to having a rough idea, I reconciled with my linguistic losses and decided to head to the University café. I sat down, had an espresso (even though I did ask for an Americano, something which doesn’t seem to exist, and wrote for a while, waiting the hour for my next class to begin.

Things soon picked up though, my next class was much more interesting and it was a lot easier to understand. I quite enjoyed it, the unit concerned learning about the history and cultures of various Hispanic countries.

After arriving home I had a little look at my class timetable, and discovered to my horror that there would be several clashes, I would be able to take Greek mythology – oh no!

I therefore decided on a whim to go to a first year business module entitled “an introduction to marketing” and had a surprisingly good time! The lecture was very laid back, whilst the lecturer was very easy to understand. She explained how we will cover relatively simple concepts, which is fine by me as I’m still getting used to even understanding people here, let alone business terms, and at the end of the lesson, we even had a little one to one chat!

Overall I am hoping to study the following subjects in my semester at Almería: Spanish language, Arabic language, the history and culture of various Hispanic countries, an introduction to marketing and an introduction to finance. This is a rather diverse bunch of topics, but I’m hoping that the business topics, something that I don’t cover in my course at Manchester, will be quite useful in providing more of an insight into the world of business.

After having survived my first day at the university, I’m now very excited to carry on my studies there, it will be very interesting to see whether or not Manchester will… approve of my subject choices, but hopefully they’ll see why I picked such a strange mixture.

Here is a nice picture from Google of the University to give you all a rough idea of just how paradisiacal it is.

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