Last week was my fourth and final week of Spanish classes. My class saw more change (a new professor and new students) but not a lot of new material. We spent the week practicing and reviewing the two past tenses we’d learned the previous weeks, which I found a bit frustrating. (The practice was very, […]
Spanish Language School – Week Three
Two new students this week, but otherwise it was business as usual. Week three covered: more past tense! additional practice with pretérito perfecto and the introduction of pretérito indefinido pronouns for direct and indirect objects new vocabulary: crimes, body parts, and animals (hmm… sounds like the setup for an episode of CSI) In comparison to […]
The Rain in Spain
It started raining heavily sometime during the night. I kept waking up during the night as I kept dreaming that the apartment was being flooded. (Note: my apartment has no notable risk of flooding.) The mere threat of rain tends to send granadinos into hiding, so my walks to and from class were very quiet […]
Spanish Language School – Week Two
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 […]
Adventure Even in the Mundane
Today I moved out of the homestay and into a private apartment in the Albaicín neighborhood of Granada. I’m a stone’s throw away from the San Miguel Alto view point, which has spectacular views of the city and mountains. The move from the homestay where 2 meals per day were cooked for me to a […]
One Day in Sevilla
One of the perks of being at an immersive language school is the extracurricular activities. Each weekend the school (in concert with other local language schools) arranges an optional excursion. This weekend we went to Seville. Six hours is nowhere near enough time for Seville, but that was the time I had, and what I […]
Spanish Language School – Week One
Three and a half weeks and only one blog post so far… Off to a slow start, but it should be a little easier to write from here on out! On Monday I started taking Spanish classes at Escuela Delengua in Granada, Spain. I have about 3 hours of instruction per day (broken up into […]
And we’re off!
Journey officially begun with a nine hour flight to London! Not much happened today other than flying, finding the hotel, and dinner and a pint at a local pub. The final sunset colors over the Olympics were amazing. The flight went north over Canada, Greenland, and Iceland before heading down Great Britain north to south. Here’s […]
Pilot Episode: Pittock Mansion (Portland, OR)
I was in Portland this weekend and decided to take a trip to the Pittock Mansion to take in some local history. Henry Pittock, longtime publisher of the Oregonian and an important figure in Portland’s early years, built this mansion in 1909 for his family on a hill overlooking the city. These days it’s part of the Portland […]