A profile of my fellow estudiantes (aka students)
Trip Start
Jun 17, 2007
1
3
26
Trip End
Aug 01, 2007
Granada,
Spain
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
There were nine new students (including me) who showed up to the school on Monday morning. In the order that I met them, here´s a brief introduction to each of them...
Christina - Danish but lives in Norway, older (late 40s to mid 50s), think she´s an artist of some description.
Charley - English school teacher living in the States, but who has previously lived in Sydney and in Spain. Probably about my age.
Ina & Kristin - both women are from Iceland and in their early 30s, Ina has a 14 year old daughter and Kristin is pregnant with ´their´ first child (obviously they had a man involved at some stage - I gather this was in the form of a donor)
Mary - Texan in her 60s (I think), speaks Spanish fluently but is here to work on her grammar, can be typical ´noisy American´but is really nice. Likes riding motorcycles with her second husband who´s 13 years younger than she is.
Elizabeth - Another Texan in her 60s (maybe), friends and travel buddies with Mary. Is also a teacher with an amazing singing voice. More inclined to be ´noisy American´than Mary, but fundamentally nice.
Philip and Natalie - English, probably in their early 20s, she´s studying French and Spanish at uni, not sure what he does. Keep to themselves a bit, but seem nice enough (so typical English people so far ;-) ) - so no one really knows much about them.
All very nice, but none of whom you´d expect to be keen for a big night out (except for, surprisingly, the two 60 year old Texans!).
My class only has four of us in it - me, Christina, Elizabeth and Kristin. It´s the very beginners´class so we started the other day with ´Hola, como te llamas´ and have moved on from there. Class goes from 9am to 1pm, with a half hour break - which is more than enough for my brain to cope with.
The pedantic among you will have noticed that I haven´t yet mentioned my fellow residents...and there´s a reason for that...I´ve never really seen many of them around. Am sure I´ll manage to find some ´friends´at some stage, but at the moment it´s hard going - not cos people aren´t friendly, I just don´t seem to see many of them around. But so far, from what I can tell, they´re all young!
As for activities today, it´s been an action packed day. After our four hours of lessons, I booked myself on the organised trip to Cordoba on Sunday, and then grabbed some lunch before heading up to meet Mary, Elizabeth, Ina and Kristin at the Alhambra Palace. Was an amazing place - we started our tour just after 3pm and got back to the centre of town about 7.30pm having taken our time. Think I´ll probably head back there again before I leave partly cos it´s so great and partly cos my camera ran out of battery during our trip (yes, I know, I´m always rubbish at keeping my camera fully charged!). When we got back down Elizabeth was hungry so we all sat down for a kebab for dinner, accompanied with sangria. Not typical Spanish fare, but you could say that we were sampling Granada´s Arabic influences.....
Anyway, am now fairly knackered and faced with the prospect of another 4 hours of Spanish lessons tomorrow morning, am going to head to bed...More later...
