Korbin Bordonie
H-SC May Term Abroad
Madrid, Spain
Summer 2016

Week one
After I stepped off the bus into the city of my new home earlier this week, I noticed things were a lot different in Spain. Along with the extremely fast language they speak in Spain, something as small as the layout of their grid of the city is different. This first week I found myself pulling out my phone quite a bit after I got lost a few times to check my GPS. The grid of the city is set out however it fell hundreds of years ago. There is no coordination in the streets or any set structure, so the streets go all different ways and directions. The people of Alcala de Henares and of Spain walk an enormous amount. The amount of walking they do in Spain has resulted in a very fit population. And when I say walk, if it’s 5 miles a day to get to work, they are walking. They walk to dinner, they walk to the grocery store, they walk everywhere. With this being said, the streets are not as clean as ours in the United States due to the amount of traffic they endure. One of my first experiences, on the first day, was an old man almost getting hit by a car. The cars here do not have to yield to pedestrians as they do in the United States, if you would like to cross the street you just take a step out into the street. Kind of risky if you ask me, so I look both ways every time I cross, as they do not. Things are very different here and I’m sure I’ll discover some new things to share with the readers in the next few days.

Week two
I just ate my fourth piece of bread for the day. For every meal of the day, Spaniards eat non-processed bread. Bread cleans your pallet in your mouth and has some kind of history with their culture I have not figured out yet. (The language barrier is quite difficult, haha!) Oh, and lunch is at 2:30 where dinner is at 9:30, a little different than at home, huh? The nice family that is sharing their house with me for the month has two boys. One of the brothers is 15 and the other is 17. Both speak very little English and the parents speak none at all. The conversations between the family and I have resulted most of the time in me saying, sí and no, from what I can translate from the rapid fire talking.

I went to a bullfight earlier this week. There were tons of people in the coliseum. It was kind of strange to see a human fight an animal because that would never happen in the United States. This is part of their culture, and has been dated back all the way to 1726. Things like this may be something us as Americans would not agree with, but it is their culture and we must respect that.