The "Study" Part

Hola,

Since the main reason for coming to Barcelona was to "study," you are all probably wondering how much "studying" I am doing during my abroad semester.  For starters, the program that I am here with, CEA, has their own school in two different buildings about seven blocks from each other.  Each class is really small; most classes have at most around 15-20 students in them.  This is a huge difference from the lecture halls at UMass with anywhere from 200-400 students.  It is nice to have smaller classes for a change.  However, a big difference between the two are how long the classes are.  At UMass, classes are either fifty minutes, three times a week or an hour and fifteen minutes twice a week.  Here, each class is an hour and a half.  They do give us a five minute break in each class for "phone time."  This is going to take some time to get used to!

CEA is a really great program not only for the classes but for everything else they provide.  They do not hold classes on Fridays which makes for long weekends every weekend for traveling or exploring the city.  They also include different free programs you can sign up for while you are here.  The second weekend of February, my roommates and I are going to Valencia, Spain for a weekend with CEA and in March, they are taking us to Madrid.  On Monday, I am going to a Tapas Cooking Class provided by CEA and during the first week of March, I will experience the excitement of my first Barcelona futbol (soccer) game! It is really nice they know we are here to travel but also to explore Barcelona and the rest of Spain and they're here to help us do that.

During the week, I have classes Monday, Wednesday and Thursday and volunteer on Tuesday.
On Monday and Wednesday, I have three classes: Barcelona History: Past and Present, Spanish and Social Media.  On Thursday, I have International Social Learning which is how I got involved with volunteering.

In my Barcelona history class, we are learning about the history of Barcelona and how it turned into the way it is today.  We have many field trips that we go on, keep a blog and have class presentations. Yesterday, we went to the Museum of History for the City of Barcelona which is right near the ancient Cathedral.  We saw ancient city walls, sewage wells and ancient artifacts that had been collected over the years.  I love history and I can't wait to see parts of the city that I would not normally go to if not for this class.

  

The Cathedral

Museum of History for the City of Barcelona

Ancient columns

Ancient Walls

A place where they kept their fish

Ancient walls that used to be a basilica 

I am in the Intermediate Spanish 2 class.  Luckily, my Spanish teacher speaks very slowly so it is (sometimes) easy to understand.  Hopefully I can take this Spanish and use it when I explore the city!

My Social Media Class is really interesting.  My teacher Pipo Serrano, has a lot of experience in all social media platforms.  He has his own blog, runs his own radio station and even designed the communications campaign for the President of FC Barcelona.  We are going to have a speakers talk to us about different social media platforms.  Our assignments every week are a blog on the website called Storify, which is a blogging website that is on the rise.  You can look at my Storify blog here!

My next post will be about my volunteer experience, be sure to check it out!  It is such a great experience that it deserves its own post. 

Can't wait for another weekend in Barcelona! Will post again soon!

Besos!