First week of classes

Oh my goodness the past few days have been…exciting, to say the least!

I woke up on Wednesday with plenty of time to spare before I had to leave for class. I was even planning on leaving a few hours early so that I could get to campus, figure out where classes were, and get some more stuff straightened out in the Erasmus office. Well, I go to leave the apartment that we live in on the fifth floor and my key won’t turn in the lock to unlock the door. So I go find my mom and tell her that the key isn’t working, and she follows me back to the door and tries it herself and it doesn’t work for her either. So long story short, she calls her husband, her friend from downstairs, and her mother who went out shopping and none of them can get the door open either, from either side. So finally she calls the locksmith who shows up and finally gets the door open an hour later.

Meanwhile I’ve been sitting inside freaking out because I’m going to be late to class! The door gets open at 2:15 and I run down the stairs to the bus stop and get to school at 2:55, just in time for my 3pm class. So, already a bit harried from the whole being-locked-in-the-house experience, I walk into the classroom and sit down. The teacher walks in a minute later, puts up a slide show on his computer, and starts talking as he goes through the basics of what is going to be covered in the Principles of Programming II class. And to my horror, I can’t understand a word he is saying! Like, literally I understood about 20% of the actual words that were coming out of his mouth, because they were easy words like “si” or “no” or some recognizable conjugation of a basic verb. But I didn’t get almost anything else he said!

So I’m sitting there freaking out because here I am, in Spain, all set to take classes taught in Spanish, and I can’t understand my professor! Luckily he had a powerpoint up, or I would have been completely lost. So anyways, I sit there freaking out for an hour while he talks on and on and I desperately try to make sense of the 20% of the words that I catch. Nothing doing. Thoughts are racing through my head: “Oh my god, what have I done? Why did I think I could do this? I wonder if I can drop this class and still graduate on time? Maybe I can extend my scholarship for an extra year.” When he dismisses the class I go up to talk to him. I basically explain (in very broken and timid Spanish, cuz I’m pretty freaked out at this point) that I’m an Erasmus student from the United States and does he think it’s at all possible that I will be able to handle this course with help from him, a tutor, a book, online notes, etc. Well, he says something back, and again, I still can’t understand him! I manage to muddle through a conversation in which I think he said something along the lines of “Well programming is programming no matter what language you learn it in. If you think your grip on Spanish is good enough it shouldn’t be too hard” and I stammered out some sort of thanks and a noncommittal “Well I’ll keep trying and see what happens” and then I left the room.

A minute later I was on the phone with my parents bawling my eyes out. Again, long story short, I talked to them for a long time and of course, as always, they made me realize I was being a bit ridiculous and worrying too much. My mom reminded me that my Spanish is, in fact, very good, and I probably couldn’t understand the teacher because a) he was very quiet, b) I wasn’t in the front row, c) he had a slight accent, and d) he seemed to only say half of each word, as if he were mumbling to himself. My dad reminded me that I’m very good at programming and probably could pass the class with the book and the notes and teach it to myself, even if I never understood the professor. And they both reminded me that it would take time to get used to how different people speak.

So I felt better after that, and I went to my next class, which was Internationalization Strategies. In that class I understood at least 90% of what the teacher said, and so I felt a lot better. And in all my classes on Thursday and Friday the same thing happened, I had no trouble understanding any of the professors. So I think it was just that this one guy was hard to understand. And luckily there is another section of that class with a different teacher earlier in the day. So next week I will try that and see if it is any better.

But all in all, it’s been a pretty hectic few days. So I’m glad the weekend is here.