Hi, welcome back. A lot has happened since I last wrote something on here. I won’t go into the details, but I have just finished up with my undergraduate degree and am back in Spain studying Spanish once again. I am hoping my Spanish studies will help me get the type of job I am interested in in the future, something involved in international finance or international risk management. I figured I had already learned a fair amount of Spanish during my previous studies in Spain, so I should make the investment and continue studying in hopes of solidifying my abilities into something that would be considered usable in a business setting.
This time I am up in the north of Spain in a town called, Vitoria-Gastiez. It’s up in the Basque country, about an hour inland from the more renowned city of Bilbao, More to come on the city of Vitoria in the future. I have been here for just about a day, most of that time spend unpacking or sleeping. The trip over wasn’t too fun, traveling with a bike box, 60lbs pack, carry on, and backpack isn’t much fun! But I made it. I am living in an apartment, my roommates are two women, Sonja and Paula, both around 30 years old, and work in a bank and as a journalist respectively. The apartment here is definitely an upgrade from the decrepit piece of junk I was living in in Granada. Let me count the ways:
-The bathroom is no longer the size of an elevator
-There is no broken furniture, doors, windows
-The tv gets more than 3 channels
-We have a microwave
-And perhaps the biggest improvement is that the oven.
Some of my faithful readers may recall that in preparation for the Thanksgiving feast in Granada, I spoke of my oven only featuring two heat settings, big flame and small flame. Luckily the oven here isn’t heated by flame at all and appears to have more than two rudimentary settings! Oh and also the apartment is on the top floor, it doesn’ look out onto another person’s terrace where you can see the neighbor dog taking a massive crap as my apartment in Granada did, it’s not on a busy street where people would sit in traffic and lay on their horn for minutes at a time, I could go on.. but I won’t, needless to say so far the place seems like a nice place and I am glad I ended up here.I have to go to the store today and stock up on some food, I love going to grocery stores in foreign countries, there are so many different things that are fun to check out. Sonja told me that the nearest grocery store is on the same block as our apartment; I hope they have a self serve produce section, something I could never figure out about most Spanish grocery stores is not being able to touch the fruit and vegetables and having to tell someone what you wanted.
Pictures will be coming soon also. Gotta go.