Some Final Thoughts About Spain

So I posted about pretty much everything I did in Spain so I thought I would write a little more about what I thought of the trip.  Overall we met some of the nicest people in Spain.  When we would try to speak Spanish they really liked it and tried to understand what you were saying.  I’m pretty sure most people in America are not that receptive when people come who don’t speak great English.  It was also very fun to get some affirmations about my Spanish and even though I had terrible grammar I was able to communicate with people.

Also the schedule in Spain is so different from America and it was hard to be on the Spanish schedule with the SAS tours that we were on.  For example, in Spain stores don’t open at all until 10:30 or 11:00am and people don’t eat lunch until 2:00-4:00pm and they don’t go out at night until 1:00 or 2:00am and stay out until 6:00am.  It was really hard to get acclimated to the schedule because our scheduled SAS tours still started early and the meal schedule was off because we seemed to eat lunch really early (usually around 12:30pm) and then dinner kind of late (around 8:30pm).

Other than that, I really enjoyed being on a SAS sponsored trip.  I know that if I had just been traveling by myself I would not have learned anything about the places we visited, and I was still able to go out and have fun while on the SAS trip.  They book amazing guides for all the tours, have really nice hotels (our one in Granada was 4 stars), you can never go hungry with all the food they give you, and everything is organized for you.  I cannot imagine how stressful it would have been in my month off from school before coming to the ship to be trying to plan all these things to do in such a variety of countries.

Overall, my time is Spain exceeded all of my expectations and everything about my time there was just amazing.  I feel like even if I had to go home today I would have had an amazing time, which makes it hard to believe that I still have 7 more countries coming up!

Today was the first day back aboard the MV Explorer and it was definitely hard to get back into school mode.  Classes were pretty relaxed today though because we mostly got to talk about what we learned in Spain and how it related to what we are learning in class.  Other than that the weather on the ship is great now that we are in the Mediterranean, and it was warm outside all day today.  Luckily we didn’t have any rocking today because we had a scheduled stop in Gibraltar for refueling.  Last night they told us that the stop would be from 5:00am-11:00am however we were there practically all day from the time I woke up until 4:30pm.  Hopefully that doesn’t put us behind schedule but I don’t imagine it will because the ship can usually go faster at night if needed.  Going through the Straight of Gibraltar was really cool because we were nearly surrounded by land and you could look one way and see Spain and the other way you saw Morocco.  It was neat to think about Europe being on one side and Africa on the other.  You can also see so many more ships around now instead of being completely alone in the Atlantic so it is definitely more interesting to look out my window.  Well I need to get to bed now – tomorrow qill be a long day of studying!