“Poco a poquillo hace el pájaro su nidillo”

I’ve been having a great couple of weeks here in Murcia. Classes are going well, the weather is beautiful, and I feel like I’m finally comfortable with the language. Clearly, I still have a lot of room for improvement, but at least I’m not afraid to try to talk to people anymore. I feel like I'm really starting to make a life here for myself, which is why I thought the title for this blog was appropriate - it means, "Little by little, the bird makes his nest."

 I’ve been spending a lot of time with my friend Julie, who is from Germany. She speaks 4 languages (German, Spanish, Norwegian, and French) fluently and she also knows some English. However, she’s really adamant about only speaking Spanish while she’s here in Spain (which makes sense, right??) Anyway, when we’re together we only speak Spanish, which is helping me tremendously. I also have my two roommates who are from Mexico with whom I’m so, SO grateful to be living. We all get along really well in the flat and we spend a lot of time just chit-chatting in Spanish. For the most part we all understand each other really well. They laugh at me sometimes because I’ll be talking in Spanish and when I say something wrong I always say, “dammit” under my breath when I correct myself.

I’m really excited because my friend Jillian is coming to visit me toward the end of March! She’s studying abroad in Sweden right now and wants to come down to Spain to enjoy the sun and the beach. My friends and I have also been discussing the possibility of going to the Basque city of Bilbao, which is an art/architectural epicenter of northern Spain.

I’m also trying to start planning my 2 week vacation that’s coming up in April. We get all of Semana Santa (Holy Week) and the following week off from school. Almost every city in Spain has festivals to celebrate Holy Week, complete with parades and really historic rituals. We learned a lot about them in my Culture of Spain class last year at Wesleyan and I’m so excited to see it in person! A lot of people are using those two weeks to travel around all of Europe, but I’ve decided that I really want to get to know Spain while I’m living here, so I’m gonna stay in-country during those weeks with all the historic tradition and such.

Well, once again, this has turned into a pretty long blog post without me even realizing it. :) But – I have homework that I should be doing. Luckily the weather is kind of dreary today, so I’m not tempted to just pass my time outside when I should be studying.

Love to all -