I arrived here in Valencia on Saturday and have spent an incredible week learning Spanish whilst living with a crazy Argentinean woman, Marcela, who speaks 7 languages including French, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic!
I am very lucky to have her as my host mum, because she doesn't have any children of her own so she loves having us around (there is a cool Brazilian guy called Fernando staying here as well). On Sunday we went for a walk around Valencia and Marcela showed us the sights and started helping me with my Spanish.
It's an awesome city, not too big, lots of cool shops and tapas bars and there is a huge dry river that runs through the city which has been turned into a giant park with running and bike tracks. We ate dinner extremely late (11pm) as per the Spanish tradition!
Monday was the first official day of class at Don Quijote and I met heaps of nice people from Switzerland, Holland, Hong Kong, Germany and New Caledonia. I'm speaking more French here than English! It was a bit of a language overload but I learnt a lot, and then we had tapas for lunch, followed by el postre (dessert).
We have class 9-2 every day and then in the afternoon we are free to explore the city or hit the beach! There is a fairly new set of buildings called 'La Ciudad de las Artes y de las Ciencias' (The City of Arts and Sciences) which is absolutely incredible, and as the weather wasn't so good on Tuesday I went with my friend Ludmila to explore.
There is an Imax theatre, a science museum, an art gallery and a huge aquarium, but I prefer to look at the buildings from the outside, because the architecture is amazing.
We then found a cool little sculpture walk and managed to have a quick look before the storm set in!
On Wednesday after class we finally had some decent weather and hit the beach! It's huge, with heaps of beach soccer fields and volleyball nets and best of all it's only a 5 minute walk from the school.
On Wednesday night we went to the supermarket (I was in shock when I saw how cheap everything is, compared to Paris and Sydney) and bought all the ingredients to make paella at my friend Saranda's apartment. It was a huge success!
I only have one more day left, which is a shame because I'm learning so much, but it has been great and now I can speak un poco de español!
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