Blog Day 7

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Looking Inward

As the trip draws closer to an end, we are spending our final week together as a group in Madrid, the capital of Spain with two separate day trips to surrounding cities. On Monday, a lot of us all decided to go to an impulse trip to the Spain versus Sweden game happening in the Real Madrid stadium. Before going there, we decided to eat an early dinner at the hostel and leave to get there on time for the game. Unfortunately, we ended up leaving a little later than we were hoping to and rushed a bit to get to the metro and the stadium. Prior to leaving, I had no idea where we were going or where the metro was or what stops we needed so while we were moving, I was simply just lost. This forced me to be a follower whereas I normally tend to lead and was a very good learning experience for me to be forced to stay back and allow for others to take charge and get us where we needed to go.

The Relational Level

When at the soccer game, I got to experience one of the relational pieces I saw last week at the homestay again in a different setting. As Culture Smart!discusses on page 117 in the chapter about leisure activities, soccer is clearly the reining sport in Spain (along with many other countries in Europe) and is a great way at bringing people together. In going to the game, a smaller group of people from the trip all got to spend more time together and I feel as though going to this cultural experience together really helped build more friendships as this whole trip is finishing out.

The Social Side

The last thing that the Spain game taught me was the importance of sports in the country and how it can bring not only friends closer together, but also an entire nation together. On the following page of the previous mentioned chapter (page 118), it talks about how even though soccer is a primary sport here, other sports like basketball and tennis are starting to appear and work their way up the ranks also. It seems as though as soon as a team forms for a sport, the country is very good at getting behind them and supporting that team to make them as good as possible and represent the country well. In America, it seems as though we have less of a national pride and more of a regional or local pride. Most of the country supports the NFL and favors a team that competes within the states as the primary sport when one would think it should be a United States national team at the Olympics or in soccer. Spain seems to be able to have more national pride than America and it is very prevalent in games like the one we went to on Monday night.

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