Culture Lesson

I'm sorry that it has been a while since my last post.  I was being honest when I said that I didn't have anything too exciting coming up.  These days, I spend a lot of time studying.  We're coming up on midterms pretty quickly and every one is feeling the crunch.  A lot of my friends have said the same thing.  For some of us, it feels like we are in a lull or have hit a wall.  Several people are ready to go home, despite the fact that they have enjoyed their time here immensely, while others are panicking that we only have a month and a half left in the semester.  I'm sort of in the middle.  I think about December 16th a lot...probably more than I should.  But I'm not really in a panic about leaving because I'll be back in Salamanca in the Spring.  I have enjoyed my time here so much and I feel so lucky and appreciative to be able to stay for the whole year.  Last night, I met up with three girl friends, Julia, Laura, and Hilke.  We went to a concert honoring the life and work of Federico García Lorca, a Spanish poet from the autonomous community of Andalucia.  It was a small orchestral ensemble comprised of seven or eight musicians.  Interspersed throughout the concert, selections of Lorca's poetry were read.  I have studied his poetry and plays in previous classes so the concert was very interesting to me.  We are also studying Lorca in my Spanish Literature class now.  As I said, my classes are keeping me busy.  I love the literature class.  I enjoy breaking down the poetry verse by verse and attempting to understand what the poet has written.  But reading the poetry or prose for the sheer beauty of the words is enjoyable as well, even if you don't understand what is being said.  I'm also taking Business Spanish.  We focus on vocabulary in that class and have already learned a lot about the economic situation in Spain.  I think it will be extremely useful in a professional setting.  My third class is focused on grammar.  It's not my favorite but it is definitely filling in the holes left by previous Spanish classes that I've taken at home.  By far, my favorite class is Phonetics.  Our professor, Carlos, always tells us that our classroom is not a classroom at all.  Rather, it is a gymnasium for words.  In that class, we practice intonation and pronunciation of Castellano, the form of Spanish spoken in Castilla y Leon.  Castellano is said to be the purest form of the Spanish language, but there are regional differences all throughout Spain.  In Barcelona, the people speak Catalan which is a combination of French and Spanish.  In cities such as Granada and Seville in Andalucia, Spaniards tend to cut off the ends of words, making it difficult to understand.  And in the autonomous community of País Vasco the language is Euskera, which I don't even know how to explain.  Spain is very regional.  You won't hear someone say, "Soy de España."  Instead, people identify with the autonomous community in which they live.  There are seventeen autonomous communities in Spain and each of them is unique.  A Spanish autonomous community is comparable to a state in the United States.  So, imagine that each of our fifty states spoke a different dialect and celebrated different holidays.  Obviously, there are various accents throughout the United States, but the official language is the same.  That is not necessarily the case in Spain.  Anyway, let's move on from the culture lesson.  Today it is very foggy and rainy so I'm not sure what I'll end up doing.  A lot of my friends are gone on trips this weekend so I might just stay in and get some studying done.  Two weeks from today, I will be with a with a bunch of friends on a day-trip to Zamora and Toro to tour local wineries.  I'm so excited!  We get to taste regional wine and have an authentic dinner in an old wine cellar.  The trip is organized for international students and has been very popular with AIFS students in the past.  Less than a week after that, I'll be in Morocco!  Whoa.  I just have to get through midterms first.  I hope everyone is doing well back home and has a spooky Halloween weekend.  Hasta pronto.