Three Day Weekends and I Guess Some Classes, Too

Photo of Instituto Franklin where all of my classes are held

My first week of classes ended last Thursday, and I know I promised a blog, but the weekend came and went before I even realized! So you're getting it now.

You may have noticed that I said "last Thursday" not "last Friday" in the first sentence of my post. That is not a typo, but rather a very important detail, and constituted a decent part of my decision in which school to attend. Students of El Instituto de Franklin a la Universidad de Alcala don't have class on Fridays! This means every weekend is a three-day weekend and perfect for traveling around the country, and hopefully a bit around Europe, too! That's only four days of classes each week, although classes last longer here than they would at CSU.

On Mondays and Wednesdays I attend my Cervantes class at 10:30 in morning. (This is my earliest class, too! Awesome!) This is by far the hardest class I'm taking in terms of both work load and content. So far we're only reading about 10-15 pages for each class, but keep in mind that it's all in Spanish so it takes me just about as long as 50 English pages would. The content is a little slow right now, but we're still doing background and haven't even gotten to Cervantes yet.

On Mondays I also have a Spanish film class! This class is three hours long, but meets only once a week. Last week we watched La Lengua de Las Mariposas, which I would highly recommend. It takes place just before the Spanish Civil War, and sympathizes with the Republicans who were in power at the time. It's a sad one, though, and I'll be honest-- I teared a little up at the end. This week was a very different film, La Raza, which I wouldn't recommend as highly, although it is pretty interesting. You can basically sum the film up as a piece of propaganda for the Nationals (who were against the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.) It was even written by Francisco Franco (Spanish dictator) under a pseudonym. The film's in black and white and has a lot of ridiculous scenes with the Republicans breaking into churches to kill crippled children and things like that.

On Tuesdays and Thursdays is my Spanish Culture and Civilization class. There's not much to say about this one so far. I really like my teacher, but for the first week we only discussed some basic geography of Spain, nothing too interesting. Based on the reading we had to do tonight, I think we're moving onto ancient Spain tomorrow!

On Tuesday afternoons (this is another 3 hour/once a week class) I have a theater class. This one should be very interesting and I don't quite know what to think yet. I thought it was going to be a literature class, reading plays and going to see them and such, but it turns out to be more of the practice of theater than I originally imagined. So this means I'm not quite done with theater like I thought; our final exam for the class is to put on a play for our peers. We haven't been told which play yet, but I'm sure the results will be interesting at least!

At lot happened this weekend, too, but this post is already long enough as it is, so I'm going to sum it up as quickly as possible: Friday to buy books and take pictures, Saturday to the "Parque de Atracciones" (amusement park), Sunday to El Rastro (giant downtown flea market) in Madrid! Okay, that's all you get for now! I'll write again soon!