A Semester in Spain and
Europe
Nate Long, Universidad Publica Nacional de Navarra, Spain
Nate Long, Universidad Publica Nacional de Navarra, Spain
Hola, my name is Nate
Long and I am going into my senior year at Maryville College. However,
the past semester I chose to study abroad in Pamplona, Spain and am now writing
this blog to share some of my experiences. I hope to be able to share
some insight on many things including what day to day life can be like to
traveling and everything in between. Not only that, but I am including
some of the photos from my travels to accompany my words.
First things first, I
want to give some background information on Pamplona and my decision to go
there. The city is located in the north of Spain, about five hours from
Madrid by bus, and is the capital of the autonomous community of Navarra.
The population of Pamplona is just under 200,000 making it a fairly small
city compared to some of the other much larger cities in Spain. As far as my choice
of the school, I was required to go to a Spanish speaking country as part of my
Spanish major and my first choices for study abroad quickly were narrowed down
to Spain because I wanted to be able to travel around Europe. Within the
choices of schools in Spain that had classes I could take for my majors, I
again chose my school based on location as it is very close to the Pyrenees
Mountains, some very nice beaches and about a three-hour train ride from the
two largest cities in Spain, Madrid and Barcelona. This is how I came to end up
at the Universidad Pública de
Navarra.
Eventually after much
planning I arrived in Pamplona on January 16th at around 11:00 A.M. to find
myself in a rainy town surrounded by mountains, many of which were covered in
snow. As I would come to find out this weather was very typical of
Pamplona until about mid-spring and the constant rain and clouds were something
that would come to really bother me. However, when I arrived I had more
immediate problems and my Spanish was quickly put to the test as my main
suitcase had been left in New York. This made for an interesting first
day because I had to spend it in my same dirty clothes and without a towel or
bedsheets until the following day after our orientation. Life in Pamplona quickly
got underway with an intensive Spanish course to help those of us that chose to
take it to quickly learn or refresh our language skills.
To be completely honest the
first weeks in Spain were tough for me as I am a fairly introverted person and
struggled to make many real friends. I came to find myself facetiming
people from back home as much as possible and not always wanting to go out, but
forcing myself to do whenever possible. While there were meetings for
internationals to make friends and those outings were enjoyable I never really
gained any close friends from them. Then as classes neared and I met with my
new advisor at UPNA (my school) I came to see how different the classes were
going to be. Most classes at my school are taken two days a week and
normally for an hour and a half a day. Not only this but figuring out what
classes I was going to take and when turned into a very tough task in itself.
Me and one other girl I had met had to spend many hours researching classes and
talking with our advisor and some teachers until finally coming to a decision
on classes, but ultimately it would not have been possible without the help of
our advisor there. After a few weeks though I got myself into daily
routine of classes and keeping myself occupied so that I stayed busy.
Then on my second weekend
abroad I was finally able to begin one of the things I had been most looking
forward to with study abroad, traveling. Along with a group of some
Americans and two Australians, we visited San Sebastian, one of most beautiful
beaches in Spain. It is quite famous for the two large hills on both sides of
the beach, which comes inland in the shape of a large C and has houses, stores
and restaurants on all sides, and another large hill protruding from the center
of the beach. Having gotten a first taste of travel I could not wait for
more.
At this same time classes
were officially starting up and the period to drop them was ending (you only
had about two weeks to drop classes at UPNA) and I had finally settled on two
Spanish classes made specifically for foreigners focusing on language and
culture, a class focusing on art and history, a class on how to teach
children's literature and finally one class in English over International Law
and Politics. Ironically, of all five classes the hardest of these came
to be the one I had in English. Another important note I should make about my
schedule is that I managed to work it out so I had no classes on Friday which
would make it significantly easier to travel. Classes became a very routine
thing much like back home except that I came to find that for the most part
there was less homework and out of class work in general which surprised me
since I had been told to expect harder classes in Spain. However, one
thing I was told that did end up coming true was the weight of final exams and
projects in Spain which can often account for a much larger percentage of your
grade than in the U.S.
As the semester
continued I made another trip to Madrid, the capital of Spain, to visit Luke
and Sofia which was great since I got to see familiar faces, even if it meant
sleeping on a couch for a few days. While I didn’t know it this would be
the first of many trips or stops in Madrid to count but while there I went to
Madrid with Sofia and got to see many of the sights including Plaza Mayor, Parque del Buen Retiro, Puerta
de Sol, Gran Vía, El Prado and the palace of the
president of Spain along with many other cool sights and good food.
My next trip would come
only two weeks later when I traveled to Tarragona and Barcelona, two famous
cities in the northeast of Spain. While there, Luke and I stayed with
Alex, another Maryville student studying abroad where I again slept on a couch
but it was again worth the experience. The day we arrived by train we
explored around Tarragona by walking on the beach, checking out churches,
streets and Roman ruins that are famous to the city. The next day we
awoke early to catch the one-hour train ride up to Barcelona for the day where
we walked
After this I finished up
what little school work I had due before the upcoming Semana Santa,
which is essentially the Spanish version of spring break. I was due to
get ten days off and was planning on spending it in four different cities
around Europe. Getting confused (as one does with many things in Europe) I
booked my flight one day too early, skipped my last day of classes and took a
night bus from Pamplona to Barcelona where I arrived at 6:30 AM and boarded a
flight to Brussels, Belgium closer to 10:00 AM. There I met up again with
Luke where we took a bus to the hostel we would be staying at. Now for those of
us who have never used hostels they are interesting and this was our first time
using one.
Amsterdam turned out to
be a beautiful city filled with canals and rows of houses bordering them.
After Amsterdam we flew
to London for the low price of thirty-five euros and arrived to a cold, rainy
London where we then took a one-hour train ride to King’s Cross Station in
London. That morning ended up being a long one full of walking, getting
rained on and not eating much food. Eventually though we found some burgers,
which completely turned the day around and we got to see some of the sites on
one side of the Thames River like the London Eye, Shakespeare’s Globe, the
Tower Bridge, the Tower of London and St. Paul’s
The next day we got up early
to head back to Madrid, where Luke was studying, and I was planning on staying
the majority of the rest of my Semana Santa. We spent the majority of
that time just chilling in the town and hanging out and made a day trip to Toledo
one night with a girl from the town and after a few days I took a bus back to
Pamplona. Back in Pamplona I went back to classes and my daily routine.
By this time had figured things out and had learned how to much better shop for
food, cook that food and how to pass my time by playing soccer, studying and
watching Netflix. I had weekly meetings for one of my classes where my
group and I had to create weekly presentations for our class.
A few weeks later my parents
came to town on a Thursday and the next day we left for many small towns around
northern Spain including Olite,
Ujue and Jaca. Not only this but I was finally
able to see and do one of the things that I had been wanting to do for most of
the semester, visit the Pyrenees mountains. We spent one night in a hotel in
Jaca and it turned out to be a tiny but also pretty mountain town within miles
of France.
After
my parents left I really only had two more trips planned in addition to
wrapping up my classes and the semester. My first of these two was back
to Madrid because one of the other things I had wanted to do before the
semester was attend a La Liga game and that opportunity finally presented
itself. By staying with Luke again we were able to meet up with Payne,
another Maryville alumni living in Spain, and go visit Segovia, another small
but historic town in Spain. Later that night Luke and I took the bus back to
Madrid and made our way to the Bernabeu to watch Real Madrid versus Celta Vigo.
The game ended up being very one-sided as Madrid won 6-0 but the
experience was still a dream come true and a great time.
A week later, with a high
school friend who studying in Copenhagen, we travelled to Lisbon, Portugal
which turned out to be one of my favorite places in Europe. It isn't like
London or Paris with super famous monuments and museums but the city itself is
beautiful. Lisbon is really close to the beach and built right along a large
river that runs inward from the sea. All of the streets are built on
hills and covered in colorful houses and shops. The streets largely all seem to
end up headed downhill and straight to the coast of the river and have many
bright yellow trolley cars running up and down them all.
After all this I had one week
of class, the next weekend and a week of exams, so a little less than two
weeks, before returning home. I spent most of this time like I had spent
my time in Pamplona watching Netflix, playing soccer and getting ready for
exams. In the end I ended up having an exam for all but one class and most of
them weren’t overly difficult. In reality the hardest one ended up being
the only class I had English but even that exam ended up going well and I was
finally ready to go home. That Sunday, June 3rd, one of my American friends and
I got a taxi to the Pamplona airport and we flew to Madrid. There I said
goodbye to two of my friends I had made that were also headed home and then
flew to Miami and finally Charlotte, officially ending my study abroad
experience.
Throughout the semester
there were many things I had to adapt to such as cooking, shopping, living
alone and much more. Studying abroad was a challenge in many more ways
than I could have imagined but the rewards I gained far outweighed any bad
experiences or struggles I had. Before the time abroad I only barely knew
how to cook for myself and I had to figure out to do all of those things which
also meant going to get the food. Another big thing came with living alone
which was something I had never done before. While I was in a dorm it was
different because I was surrounded by other kids but I didn’t know most of them
so most of my time in the dorm was spent just hanging out in my room.
Furthermore, during my
experience abroad I learned about many things including traveling in Europe,
independence, language skills and the culture of Spain. The traveling
aspect was something that I was quite happy to learn because it is a skill I
hope to be able to employ now that I’m back in the U.S., even though many
things were different there than here. Next, I also learned about how to
live on my own and before the experience I would have already said I was an
independent person, but upon arriving in Europe I began to think otherwise. Not
having many people to speak to on a daily basis was different and hard at first
but as the semester progressed it was something I became much more comfortable
with.
If I could go back,
there would be two main things that I would look to change about the place
where I wanted to spend a semester. First of all, I would look more into
the weather of the place where I was going to make sure it was something I was
going to enjoy for almost five months of my life. Secondly, I would have
gone to a larger town due mainly to the fact that it would have made traveling
significantly easier. I say these two things because while in Pamplona I feel
like these were two of the decisions that I wished I had looked into beforehand
because they were two things that ended up bothering me a good amount while
there.
In the end, study abroad was
a very challenging but also very rewarding experience. While the semester
obviously presented many problems and obstacles it is ultimately an academic
journey I would recommend to anyone regardless of whether they’re studying a foreign
language or not. Obviously the language skills I learned are extremely
important to me, but I learned so much more than just language from things
about how a different culture operates to lots of things about myself.
Ultimately, study abroad is an amazing opportunity and something I would
highly recommend to anyone looking to learn about themselves and others in a
truly unique and unforgettable experience.