By some miracle, my class stayed exactly the same this week: we had all of the same students, same teachers, same classroom. (This is not typical; all of us are in the school for varying time lengths with different start dates so classes typically see at some change each week.) Next week we won’t be quite so lucky; one classmate finished up her course and left Granada and another is jumping up a class group. There may be other changes; I’ll find out Monday morning!
Week two covered:
- presente contínuo (“… is doing …”)
- first of four past tenses (pretérito perfecto)
- expressing obligations/commands
- asking for permission
- making plans
- giving advice
- making excuses (no, really)
- always more vocabulary (chores, food)
Learning more grammatical structures is always a double edged sword. When I only knew present tense, I often couldn’t express myself clearly. Now I have more tools in my toolkit, so it takes me longer to figure out which to use and how to use it.
On the other hand, I still find myself shocked at how much I’ve learned in two weeks! Most of the arrangement of my new apartment was handled in (written) Spanish, which is something I couldn’t have imagined doing competently two weeks ago.
Outside of school, I spent more time socializing with classmates and visited some more sites around town.
Photos were forbidden inside the Monasterio de la Cartuja, which was really too bad. The first few rooms held an interesting (and often gruesome) selection of religious art, a lot of which focused on the maltreatment/martyrdom of various Carthusian monks at the hands of the English (mostly). Also lots of dead/near-dead people that look suspiciously like modern depictions of zombies. The main chapel is overwhelmingly baroque with a large dollop of creepy mixed in with the beautiful and reverential.
I also made it up to the San Miguel Alto viewpoint, which has views of both the city below and the Sierra Nevadas above. I believe it’s the highest viewpoint of the within the city limits. Unlike the more popular (and lower) San Nicolás viewpoint, there’s not much here other than the church that gives the viewpoint its name. (In other words, you have to bring your own beer.)
Last but not least, I encountered some street flamenco in Granada:
Quite a bit different from Seville!