Foreign Perspectives

I spent last week on an intensive Spanish course in the University of Santiago so this weeks entry is all about that.

Santiago is quite a small town and I managed to walk round pretty much all of it on the Saturday just prior to starting the course. Inside the surroundings of the old town it’s pretty much packed with tourists everywhere but when I ventured out into the new town surrounding it on Wednesday afternoon I found that it was just as nice with a number of nice parks but virtually no tourists. It was much more pleasant because of that as the tourists tend to congregate along a very limited number of routes through the town.

If you want to see a service in the cathedral, go very early on Sunday as the pilgrims and tourists are at their maximum then.

If you want to watch a film whilst you’re there, bear in mind that they will be in Spanish only (ie no subtitles) so you’ll need quite good Spanish to follow them.

The town remains quite lively at night too. The new town quietens down around 10pm but the old town remains lively well after midnight with numerous bars and cafes open until very late (or early!). Around the cathedral area you’ll find numerous lively groups of musicians playing well into the night with one particularly entertaining act under the arches in the building directly opposite the cathedral. If you’re in a rush, be wary of the elderly troubadours with their engaging, if overlly long, patter selling CDs of love songs along the streets leading out of the cathedral square. In the park on the way back to the university we even found quite an elaborate and engaging puppeteer act.

On Tuesday we were off to A Coruna which is on the coast. Quite a different town than Santiago obviously but still with a small old town where you can see a number of churches. It’s still quite a major port and a much larger town than Santiago although you can still manage to walk around the main tourist sights in an afternoon (ie the port area, old town and Hercules Tower).

But, what about the course? Well, it consisted of around three or four hours per day of classes plus a number of workshops on aspects of the Spanish language and Spanish culture. That might not sound like a lot but it’s hard to keep going in a foreign language for as long as that and everyone was quite tired at the end of the days (running from 9am to 10pm Sunday to Thursday). As it was largely a series of conversation classes, the progressive improvement in Spanish ability wasn’t so obvious as it is in normal classes but I’m confident that I speak Spanish a lot better now and was able to try that out this morning with some Spanish guests that we have. Not sure if I’d say I’m fluent at the moment but I’m further on the way than I was a week ago.

Arnold