Class and Free Time

             Having class here has been so much different than what I have been accustomed to at Maryville over the past several years. I'm going on about 5 weeks since I started my first days of class here and I've still barely had any classwork outside of class. This is exremely different than Maryville where I typically finish a class and go straight to the library in my free time whether it be in the time between classes or after having finished my classes for the day because I always have something do. Here you actually have free time.. and lots of it. All this free time has been really nice. I've been able to do a lot of travelling to cities close by as well as just being able to go out with friends and meet new people.    
              For the first four weeks  I essentially only did two seperate intensive classes of soley learning spanish in order to prepare us for when our actual courses started.  With that being said there has definitely been no shortage of class hours. During the first two weeks we were place in a class depending on our results from our spanish placement test. Of course when i arrived for class the day after taking the placement test my name was the only one that was not listed on the sheets for what class you will be in. So it ended up that i got placed in a random class that turned out to be the level below advanced so it turned out alright. However, back to the point, during the first two weeks i had class with erasmus students from all over from 9:30 to 2:00 everyday. This turned out to be great for meeting people and still some of my best friends here are people i met from these first two weeks. After, the first two weeks i began my particular erasmus program of isep in which I essentially had another two weeks of what we had been doing but with a different teacher and only the students participating in my isep program. This has been the only dissapointing about my program for me; our class only consists of other other americans and students from china. Therefore, there is not much variety and I feel that I'm around to many americans and english during the class hours. Back to the topic again, this past week I actually started the actual courses which make up our program which include: literature, politics, art, music, and grammar. However, I also have another spanish course in the afternoon based on my level two times a week from 6 to 8 with other erasmus students which has been my favorite class. Then to add to that, next week we start a geography class that we have once a week from 6 to 8 as well. Therfore, three days of the week I will be taking 6 and a half hours. This is a lot of time but I actually prefer it because I'll be around spanish more and the workload has been a lot lighter than what I'm used to so I think it's a good balance. So yea.. that's a little bit on how my classes have been here. Maybe next time I'll fill you in on some of my travels.