Today I Met a French girl, a Czech, and a German

My two-month vacation came to an end today, sadly, with the start of spring semester. This morning, I got up at 7am to attend an actual university class. Despite my reluctance to start working again, I was rather excited--and a little nervous--about the classes I had chosen. Fortunately, I ended the school day content with 75% of my choices and without a shred of extranjera* anxiety left inside of me.

Grammar and Morphology of Spanish-Despite my huge excitement about this class, I was reluctant to go to it first thing this morning because it had apparently begun last week--without my knowledge--and I didn't want any embarrassing discrepancies. Nevertheless, I told myself I was being ridiculous, sucked it up, and went to class. I am glad I got over my compulsions because the course matter is fascinating and the professor does not appear daunting, and he slightly resembles Robert Deniro. Most importantly, I understand every single word he says, even though I have never studied linguistics in Spanish. I was very pleasantly surprised by my own comprehension abilities today.

Pragmatics and Semantics of Spanish-My morphology-induced high transferred over to this class, which I had right after morphology with the same professor. I have to say, if I had not just had class with this professor, I would have assumed he was not going to show up to teach because he waltzed in ten minutes after class was scheduled to start and announced to us that he had needed a break and had gone to have a coffee. I want a coffee too, sir, but así es la vida.** Punctuality does not really exist in Spain.

Literature and Journalism-I like literature. I want to learn more about journalism. This frontier logic convinced me that this would be an interesting class to take. I was wrong. As soon as the professor started talking, I felt intimidated, inadequate, and at a huge disadvantage for not being a native Spanish speaker. My elation from earlier today slowly evaporated. All the other students, although equally unhappy about all the work assigned (20 page assignment due in a little over a month?!), seemed to be on the same page as the 1980s coiffed professor. Midway through the hour, I had already decided that I would not be returning to this horrific class.

Audiovisual Narrative-After the horror of literature and journalism, screenwriting was refreshing and a relief. The professor is young and seems very friendly and understanding. She introduced me to the entire class, which was not as embarrassing as it sounds because everyone here seems to like Americans. The course basically consists of watching and analyzing movies and working in groups on our own scripts and short films. I did not even have the chance to worry about being the reject and not finding a group because the punk kids sitting in front of me immediately took me under their wing, so to speak. I daresay I'm rather excited about this class.

*foreigner

**such is life