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Published: January 30th 2012
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Santander
Less than 10 minutes walking from my apartment Hey there. Well it´s about time I started writing a blog of my many adventures that started when I was seventeen. I´ve pretty much just been too lazy to write anything online but yeah, so here it goes...
Well I got a scholarship through Banco Santander to study here in Spain for the year, for free (yes! for free!) which is kind of amazing since we´re in a recession in the U.S. I live in Santander, Spain, in the Cantabrian region of northern Spain. I´ve been here for almost six months. In these six months, I have managed to improve my spanish skills, learned to drink cheap red wine with coca-cola (a.k.a-- Kalimoxto), travel to 7 countries, and make a bunch of international friends (mostly from Mexico and Spain).
Spanish skills- well, I´ve studied spanish for a while and been to Nicaragua 7 times, Costa Rica, México and Colombia so I knew spanish pretty well before arriving here but as we all know, in every country they have their own words, phrases, etc. In Spain, there are TONS of idioms, some are actually quite graffic. They tend to "cagar" on everything (your mom, God, 10)..and no, I´m
not going to tell you what that means, you can look that up, but anyways yeah....other things I´ve learned here, they all know I´ve learned spanish in latin america because some of the vocabulary that I use seems strange to them, although they understand it, simple things like calling a cellphone móvil instead of celular or saying ahorita instead of ahora. Its quite funny because some of the things they say seem quite odd to me, like using the word coger to mean to take while in latin america it means to do something naughty...
Okay back to whats good. Since I´ve come to Spain, obviously I´ve been in Spain, I´ve been to Morocco, I´ve been to France, I´ve been to Belgium, Italy, Germany, Poland and Czech Republic...That was a run on sentence! I would have to say the top two places (other than Spain) are Rome (Italy)where I could just keep eating pizza margherita forever. I also learned not to confess at the Vatican because if you tell the truth that you haven´t confessed since you made that commandment, the priest will just hate on you. P.s- we went to the vatican for christmas mass which
I´m pretty sure almost no one can say they´ve done. We got the holy eucharist and all! I also loved Tangier (Morocco) where I learned that if I´m not muslim, I shouldn´t try to go into a Mosque (especially if you´re wearing shorts and a tank top...yeah..it wasn´t funny when they started yelling at me!), also riding a camel! I learned some bad words but I won´t say them, the one word I will tell you is pronounced like this: show krahn which is thank you. Tangier was def. one of the coolest experiences 😉 Prague was pretty sick I´m not gonna lie, it really is the city of fairytales with its big castle and many beautiful Snow White castles!
I´m not gonna lie...Berlin didn´t really impress me except for their cheap food and hostel.. I was pretty excited! The free walking tour was alright but I didn´t really expect much since it was free. The most intriguing experience was probably going to the Sachenhausen Concentration Camp. It was quite eery. It was raining, windy and cold, so it set quite the scene. It was interesting to be where once 6,000 prisoners were, see their living quarters, hear about their stories, etc. That is what made Germany worth the visit. While there I met some pretty cool people, two girls from Argentina and one guy from Zimbabwe. Thats what I like about hostels, you meet really chill people!
Poland was interesting... I didn´t know any Polski (polish) and nobody really knew any angielski (english) so communicating wasn´t as easy as I´d expected. The night part was that I met this older couple who taught me words like smatch-nego which is bon apetit, tac which is yes and nyeh which is no. We passed my dictionary back and forth looking up words to communicate, it was cute. At the end of the night they invited me to dessert, which was even more swell 😉 The other couple I met was my age. Since we´re more modern, we just sat at the computer and used google translate for 2 hours. When we went for a walk together with another guy from senegal, we pretty much just made hand motions to be able to understand eachother. The new words that I learned from them were Oytem-Oytem and Kurwa (which is worse), it´s basically our f-bomb. I also visited the cheapest starbucks I´ve seen in Europe at a whopping 3.5€, most starbucks are 4€-5€, so I was pretty pumped to get my frappacino!! 😊
Last one, I promise, this is getting tiring for me too! Belgium, just went about a week and a half ago with my best friend here from Mexico, Carolina. Well, for starters, I left my camera on my bed and we almost missed the flight. Apparently I´m stupid and told her to meet me at the bus station at 8:00 instead of the airport. We were the last to board but we made it. We went to Brussels, Ghente, and Bruges (apparently there was some famous movie a little while ago?). We went to go to the Chocolate Factory...closed...fail. The cool thing was that our hostel was right next to the Godiva Chocolate factory. They don´t give tours...fail. But yeah, we saw tons of pretty buildings, churches, etc. We did eat chocolate, waffles with strawberries and choc., french fries (one of belgiums specialties) and ate some delicious turkish food (don´t ask where that fits in with Belgium because it doesn´t). We were only in Ghent for a short time because it was raining, cold and we had our backpacks. It was cool there, we went to a church, the center, etc. And in Bruges we had a really fun time! We rented bikes and biked through the city, we went on a walking tour, we went to one or two museums and we almost got sucked into getting our picture taken with a roman guy by accident, stupid trickster! We spent a total of 4 days and 4 nights in Belgium. And I spent a total of....we won´t go there!
Now I´m gonna go and sleep since some of us don´t have time to slack 😉
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