So today my university had classes (not a usual occurrence on a Friday) but this made up for our Spanish holidays on Monday and Tuesday of the week.
While eating lunch in the cozy cafeteria, the director of my school introduced the group of students I was with to a professor visiting from Purdue. She asked us all sorts of questions from our experiences in the classroom to our favorite aspects of the city. It turned into a very interesting conversation with many different opinions from my fellow classmates, but we all agreed on the fact that we loved the accepting environment of our school and having the privilege to integrate into the Valencian community in so many ways (intercambios, internships, English lessons, city events, etc.)
After a long day of classes, our school put a new twist on our free weekly event. This was called "día de nostalgia" and consisted of all of the students voting all week for a movie that we would finally watch today. It was a close call between Mean Girls, Easy A, and Wedding Crashers, but The Social Network somehow turned out to be the winner. I was hoping for the movie to be in English, as it was the first time I saw it a couple months ago in the US, but had to settle for English subtitles while I listened to the spanish ramble away.
I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I didn't have to read the English subtitles to understand at all, I understood all of the Spanish I heard, even the new colloquial terms I had recently learned (which are much different than those in South and Central America). This was such a great feeling of accomplishment, my Spanish has improved 150%. In fact, while reading through my history book today I was so happy to find that I only had to translate 2-3 words of the 10 pages of text I read through. One comical side effect of using so much spanish, though, is that I can no longer think clearly in English to communicate smoothly. I know this sounds ridiculous, but my brain has started to function in spanglish, with a stronger accent on the 'span' part. Some phrases just come easier to me in Spanish, and it will take me a little longer to formulate them correctly in English (as the sentence structure is usually backwards and longer). Bizarre, yet I'm very happy about this, as it's taken me years to reach this point. Good things don't come easy
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