Classes and life outside of the Comisaría

Classes are basically in full swing now except for "Grado" classes which start the 5th of October. I´ve had to do some rearranging (ok, quite a bit of rearranging) of my classes in order to make everything work, but I guess because we´re Erasmus, they let us do whatever we want. I only have 4 classes as of now because, after listening to my teacher in Philisophic Anthropology ramble and watching the class of native speakers struggle to follow him, I decided that would not be a wise class choice for me. This is my schedule:

Monday: Spanish Geography and Cultural History of the Middle Ages

Tuesday: Spanish Geography, Spanish-to-English (and vice-versa) translation

Wednesday: Cultural History of the Middle Ages and History of Europe in the Middle Ages

Thursday: History of Europe in the Middle Ages

Friday: NO CLASSES

The way my schedule works, and it seems to be the norm in this university, is that one day a week you are in a specific class for 1 hour and the other day it is for 2 hours, so it´s great that it works out perfectly to 3 hours a week of classes- MSU will be thankful. As you can see, it´s not a lot of classes, and the translation class won´t really count for me in MSU- I just think it´ll be helpful for me. I am going to look for a Grado class to take that will count.

Another thing, I got a job teaching english 6 hours a week, and the pay is NICE. I work in a place called Academio Metodo (I think that´s the name), and it is located on the 3rd floor of a building in the Calle Mayor (pictured). I have classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I have adults and teenagers. Most of the groups are upper intermediate- although I do have a group or 2 of elementary level. I´ll just kind of follow the book that they´ve given me, but the main point is to get them to talk. Today is the first day of class, so I´m going to get suggestions from them in order to see where they want to go with the class. My friend from the UK had her first day of teaching yesterday and said that it was a lot of fun- I´m kind of excited.

The police station.

Today should be my last time to go the that hellish place. They told me to bring my health insurance information last monday, and that was all I lacked. After going there and waiting only an hour or so- I went to the table and was told that they didn´t have my letter of acceptance from the University of Alcalá (UAH) and that I have to return today with that.

One thing I´m going to do is tell the coordinators of this exchange at MSU ALL OF THE DOCUMENTS that you have to present upon arrival in Spain- there are a TON. I guess that´s why I´m the guinea pig- next year´s group will have it EASY.

It´s become evident that I could stay here for 10 months and not improve my spanish speaking too much at all because of the number of English speaking people around. So I´ve decided that I have to start studying Spanish on my own because I really do speak a good bit of English, and in the classes I can just sit back and listen- no speaking necessary. Well, I say I listen, but I´ve been in the habit of tuning out the teacher when it gets to messy with all of this huge vocabulary. I´m going to buy the books for the classes that are the most difficult and do some of my own studying so that I have a bit of a better vocabulary for the subject.
My friends and I here have decided that we´re going to stop speaking English, and we´ve been quite successful.

I think that covers all of the important points- I really need to study a little before going to the Comisaría again.