3 More Weeks..

August 5, 2010
7:07 PM
My time in Spain is feeling like it’s beginning to wrap up, even though I won’t be in the United States for another three weeks. Tomorrow I head to Barcelona for the weekend, where I will be meeting up with one of the girls from my program who has been traveling for the past two weeks during the time I have been doing archeology. Then only have six more full days in León and three more days of work before heading off on my final mini-adventure, France.

Didn’t really think I’d be going to France during this trip, so I unfortunately left all my beginner French books at home, but after the schedule for the internship was set, I discovered that I had two weeks free before my flight back to the US. I don’t have lodging in León after the 20th, so I was a little concerned (make that a lot concerned) about what I would do with the rest of my time. Everyone else doing programs in Europe is long gone by the end of August, and I couldn’t find any international friends around during that time to visit… but my grandpa came to the rescue with the offer to stay with his friends in Auxerre, France. I’ve never met them, and I don’t know a lick of French, but it should be fun! The only thing I’m worried about now is getting to and from all of my destinations until the US – I’m hoping to buy a Eurail pass tomorrow in Madrid and book all of my trips, but I’ve heard that it can be hard to get on the trains you want during the summer and that making reservations can be expensive. I think the Eurail pass is probably more suited for those who don’t have any set plans and can just jump on the next train to wherever… which I would love to do at some point in my life (next summer???), but can’t do at the moment. Also, there is talk of an airline workers strike during that time, which would probably complicate matters further. But I’m crossing my fingers and reminding myself that my parents will not let me die penniless in Europe with nowhere to stay. haha ☺

As for my “internship”: it has definitely been an experience! The week of working at the archeological site was probably one of the hardest periods of time of my life – next to no sleep, long hours, and roasting in the sun every day – but I’m glad I did it. The best part was definitely meeting all the other students. We had real Spaniards to go out with at night (not that we did that much, the having-to-get-up-at-six-every-morning thing was kind of prohibitive), and I learned lots of new phrases. I now have people to visit if/when I come back to Spain,

-- have to interrupt for a second. Just went into the kitchen for a yogurt and mistook my señora’s sister for my señora. How embarrassing. --

and look much more legit with all my pictures tagged with Spanish names instead of American ones!

This week I started work in the “laboratory,” which is really just a storage room with tables and chairs. Marissa and I are working along with two other University of León students who also worked at the site last week. They get to wear really official looking lab coats, while Marissa and I are stuck with aprons with cartoon cows all over them. All in all, not *quite* what I had imagined for the lab portion of the internship! But the work (mainly washing the pieces of pottery and animal bones that we found, sometimes identifying and categorizing them) is easy and not too boring, and we get to take long coffee breaks every day. Plus, we only have to work three days a week because of all the hours we worked last week, so we have lots of time off to travel and relax. Definitely can’t complain, and I’m so glad that I can sleep more and stay fairly cool during the day again.

In other news, I was excited to discover that watching American movies dubbed in Spanish makes the movies much more exciting and funny than they ever would be in English. I’m pretty sure that “La Segunda Vez” (“Rebound”) is pretty horrible in English, but we all thought it was great. And Toy Story 3 was pretty much the best thing I have ever seen… I’m definitely going to miss our Wednesday nights at the movies when I go back to the States. Going to the mall and watching movies is always an adventure (especially when you only have €20s in your wallet and the smallest bill the bus takes are €5s, but that’s another story, and one that I don’t really feel like reliving right now…), and clothes are much cheaper there than stores in town! Probably a bad thing to discover that, because it makes me really want to spend all my money on new stuff. Especially since a lot of my clothing was semi-ruined by the washing machine of my first señora..

I’m sad to be missing Sweet Pea this weekend at home. And I can’t wait to eat cereal again. But gotta savor these last weeks! Plus, still have more work to do deciding what classes to take this semester. ☺

Later, Brianna