I'm a student again!

As I mentioned before in a previous post, this year I'm gonna be taking a Spanish class at the University of Almería to help me prepare for the DELE, the Spanish proficiency certification exam which is the equivalent of the Cambridge certification for English.











 I started classes on October 10th and have already finished up week 3 of class. So far, I absolutely LOVE IT. Before having started the class I was really feeling like I had plateaued as far as improvement on my Spanish went. I was learning new vocabulary but was still making the same grammar mistakes that I had always made. I knew that in order to continue improving and to perfect my Spanish I would have to go back and study all that complicated grammar that I learned several years ago.

The class started off with reviewing the 4 different past indicative tenses (pretérito perfecto, pretérito indefinido, pretérito imperfecto, and pretérito pluscuamperfecto...those names make it sound way harder than it actually is haha) and I thought, pfff easy schmeasy...piece of cake! Made it through week one of class and then in week 2 it started to get complicated. We started looking at an old exam and I was introduced to the part of the exam I had known was going to be the hardest for me...the questions where you have to figure out the meaning of an expression. Though I actually fared OK on this particular practice exam, I quickly realized that I've got a lot to learn in order to go into that exam confidently. Luckily for me, I've got until May to prepare.

As far as my schedule goes, I've got class every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday from either 4-6 or 5-7 depending on the day. The bad part is, the days that I have class from 4-6, I get home from Rioja at 3ish, eat lunch as fast as humanly possible, and run to the bus stop to catch the bus for the University at 3:30ish--hardly have time to breathe. And catching that bus is another story. It appears that nearly all afternoon classes start at 4, so the buses at 3:30 are packed to the absolute maximum. On more than one occasion I've been crammed in so tightly that I was pressed up against like 3 different people and I couldn't even have raised my arm to scratch my nose if I had wanted to. It's ridiculous. Not sure why they don't more often run extra buses at that hour, but that's Spain for ya.

I'm really enjoying not only the class, but being back on a college campus. The University of Almeria (or UAL) is apparently one of few universities in Spain that has what we as Americans consider to be a real "college campus feel." That is, most universities here have, for example, the college of humanities in one part of the city, the college of natural sciences in another, and the college of arts in another, etc. The UAL has all of the colleges (minus one, relaciones laborales, which happens to be what Juanmi is studying) all in one place, making it basically like any American college. The only thing it's lacking is on campus-housing, but that's basically unheard of here from what I understand. The UAL has about 12,000 students so it's quite a different feel from what I'm used to, but in a good way. Oh, and as you can see in the above photo, it happens to sit right on the shore of the Mediterranean. I suppose I can get used to this :)