The Study of Hand Gestures, Facial Expressions, and Body Language

I've officially been in Oviedo for a week! And a hectic one at that. Life here is unlike anything I've ever experienced, and yet at times I forget I'm in a foreign country. The days seems to last forever, but I already feel like I've been here for a month. In this post I'll take you through some of my daily occurrences and throw in a few not-so-typical occurrences as well.

Monday of this week I took the placement test to see which level of Spanish courses I could take. I had fears of being placed too high and needing to come down a level due to an inaccurate test. Boy was I humbled by the results. I placed into Intermediate 1, the lowest of low levels. Go me! It turns out that's exactly where I need to be. I've had two days so far of grammar, vocabulary, art, phonetics, translation, and history. Turns out that's quite the work load, so I'll be cutting out phonetics and art. Anyway, the classes are fairly small, less than 15 students in each. I have classes with about 5 people from my program and the rest are from other international programs. Some students are from a school in Florida, others are from Japan, China, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Russia, and even Lithuania (Lithuanian heritage shout out!). Those international students are incredible. They all speak their native languages, English, typically something else like French, and on top of it all they're better at Spanish than I am. Hey rest of the world, way to be multilingual.

After class, most of us students usually find our way to a nearby cafe. It's a delicious way to relax after a long day of straining my brain in attempts to understand Spanish. I go to cafes about two times a day to get a cafe con leche or a cocacola. That's pretty standard around here. No one is in a rush and drinking an insanely small cup of coffee can last for two hours. I have yet to have a meal out on my own since my host mom makes me copious amounts of scrumptious food all the time. Somewhere around 2pm every day I bust out my sack lunch from home, just like old school days.

Ok, I decided to switch things up and just start spewing out random things that have happened to me/things that happen regularly:

-Last week we went to Gijon, a beautiful beach city with Roman Ruins just a half hour bus ride from here.

-Right now my host mom is practicing the accordion in the other room.

-Yesterday at a cafe two men with a microphone and a news camera came up to a group of us and interviewed us, in Spanish of course, and we may or may not end up looking like really dumb Americans on a Spanish TV program.

-They don't like dryers here. Laundry is all air dried. Hello underwear drying display in the middle of the room.

-There aren't many regulations or rules posted. It's pretty much a free for all when it comes to your safety.

-My host mom's dog, Samy, gets a little rough while playing and bit my butt the other day.

-My host mom can't pronounce "Kate". It comes out like "kah-tay" or sometimes even Kelly.

-Everyone here stares at each other (or maybe just me) on the streets, but no one exchanges smiles.

-I'm currently attempting to think of more to write because I don't want to read for my history class.

Once I get more settled in my classes I'll write a more detailed entry on them. If anyone wants more info on any of these tid-bits just holler at me. Oh! I almost forgot. The reason for the title of this entry- I am not so good when it comes to understanding my teachers and host mom who rapidly fire Spanish at me. I've become really good at playing off of their facial expressions, elaborate hand gestures (luckily for me they use a lot of them), and other body language. I usually nod, smile, and say si a lot. It's gotten me in trouble a few times, but for now I'm sticking to these interpreting methods. Wish me luck!