Sabado 31 Enero 2009—I arose around 10:30 to meet Johan at the train stations so that we could go to the outdoor market. This week, the market was huge, filling about 400 parking spaces if not more with fruit/vegetable, belts, shirts, purses, shoes, and other vendors. Although the stuff is really cheap, it is low quality, so we stuck with just getting fruit. We ended up getting four narajas (oranges) that were seriously bigger than grapefruit for 50 cents. I think that they were the best oranges that I have ever had. After the market, we met up with two other [View Full Entry]

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Lunes 26 Enero, 2009—Today, my professor was sick, so our class was spit into the section above and below us. I of course choose to return the section that was below to be with my old classmates. This experience conferred to me that I have made the right chose to move up a level. However, after receiving the exam from the Friday before; I also realized that although I am working my butt off, it will be harder to get a good grade in this middle level class verse the lower section. Other than that, school was pretty ordinary, 4 hours [View Full Entry]

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Saturday 24 January—Today I got up at 9am, which is early for a Saturday in Alicante to meet a friend near her house to go to an outdoor market. Her house is about a 20 minute walk from mine and then we walked about another 30 minutes to the market, just to find out that the market is about a 10 minute walk from my house. Once we got there, it was less than half the size it was the week before when she went with her host family because it was extremely windy. I learned later in the day that [View Full Entry]

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Thursday January 22—This day started a little different than normal. Usually I take the 24 bus to campus, which is about 5 minute walk from mi casa, but it’s about a 40 minute ride to campus and is packed. So, today I decided to take the 36 bus with John, a CIEE friend, to campus, it is more direct by taking only 15 minutes, but comes only once an hour instead of every 5 minutes. We had taken the 36 home the day before, but finding the bus stop is harder than getting off a bus, but we did finally find [View Full Entry]

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Jan. 21. Sunday-- Seeing that this was my last day of freedom before I started my intensive Spanish course, I took the day easy. I slept late until 11 and then did the one of my favorite hobbies, facebooking. At about 12 I walked down to the beach to run. This unfortunately didn’t go so well for a few reasons. First, it had been about two months since I had ran because when finals rolled around last semester, working out got cut for sleep and I didn’t have the motivation to run over break. Second, I only had walking shoes that [View Full Entry]

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On Friday, CIEE took us on a day trip to the city of Villajoyosa, which is about 40 miles north of Alicante. The drive along the coast alone would have enjoyable enough, but the city was a blast. We started with a tour of a 16 century country estate that had been in the original family until 1992, so much of the building and contents were original. It was a beautiful home that allows us to get a closer look into how the nobles in Spain lived during the last few hundred years. After this, we had a walking tour of [View Full Entry]

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Wednesday, I decided that although I really needed to sleep, that I would go back to the CoCathedral de San Nicholas for the 8:00 mass. I will admit that I was going not for the mass itself, but to hopefully hear the massive organ that the Cathedral. I enjoyed the short walk from the hotel to the church with the locals of to work and only had to ask for directions once (but only to save time, I would have found it eventually lol). Unfortunately, the morning services are in the attached chapel, so although the chapel is very ornate, I [View Full Entry]

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I have arrived in Alicante, Spain and am enjoying the city and the beautiful “winter” weather. However, it was a more complicated process to arrive here that what I had expected. My mom and I left Sunday the 11 at about 11 in the morning to head to the Chicago Airport, which we reached at about 2. This left me about 3 hours to check-in and go through security, it took about 20 mins. This left me with 2.5 hours to find something to do, but at 4:00 we were informed that the plane would be delayed a little over an [View Full Entry]

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Twas the night before I leave for Spain and all though the house not a mouse was stirring (including Gunther who was asleep in his bean bag). In 24 hours I will be in the plane somewhere over the Alantic Ocean, which is kinda weird to think about. However, this date is a long a waited one that has required a lot of work to reach. Recently, I have been asked numerous times if I was nervous, the truth is not really. My semester has been a lot of work to plan in order for me to be able to fit [View Full Entry]

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I thought that I would just put a general outline of what I plan on doing for the next five months: I will be leaving for Spain January 11 and will be returning from London on June 18. For the first 4 months I will be attending school at the University of Alicante, Spain. During this time I will be going on smaller trips through CIEE, my study abroad program. I will also be living with a host family and taking three classes to teach me Spanish and two in English, a history of Spain and a Theology. On May 15, [View Full Entry]

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