Cory Saavedra
September 16, 2023
Now that I’ve been in Madrid for two weeks I feel like I’m starting to feel at home. I spent the first week mostly just exploring the area around me and getting a feel for what life was like in Madrid for the locals, and for what it would be like for me during the next two months. The main difference that I realized here in Madrid was how different their schedules were. It seems like most people have a big lunch around noon and then don’t eat dinner until around 8 or 9pm. This means that a lot of restaurants and other stores will close around 2pm until about 6pm which seems pretty strange to us. There have been a couple of times that me and the other TAB members here have wanted to go to a certain restaurant only to realize that it was closed.
Me and Chandan are living in an area that I would call authentically Spanish, and there isn’t a lot of English around us as opposed to the more touristy areas. I come from a latino background and so I have grown up with Spanish being spoken around me even though I never learned the language properly myself, it has helped me to better understand what people are saying. I know the basics in Spanish so I try to speak in Spanish whenever I can and because I look Spanish people often start talking in Spanish to me, this quickly turns into me saying sorry my Spanish isn’t good can you speak English. I have been using Duolingo quite a lot before leaving and also during my trip, and so I’m hoping the combination of Duolingo and being immersed in Spanish will help me to speak at a decent level after my two months here.
This week (our second week here) we started at our actual placement school where I am helping out in a grade 2 classroom. The school that we are at is mostly taught in English, although most of the student’s first language is Spanish. It is an international school and so there are a lot of students from all over the world. My classroom has three students that don’t speak either Spanish or English so I have been tasked with helping these students learn English. These students speak Chinese and Hebrew and so they are used to a completely different alphabet than we have which has made it quite difficult.I have mostly been taking these three students separate from the rest of the class and working through learning the different letters and the sounds that they make. I often have to pull out my phone and use Google Translate to explain to the students what we are doing. I feel like they are starting to understand and I think by the end of my two months here that there will be a lot of improvement and I’m excited to watch their progression.
