Taylor McGee
Instituto Franklin
Alcalá de Henares, Spain
Summer 2021
June 29, 2021

This will be my final blog post from my trip to Spain. Overall, I’ve had a truly wonderful time, and my final weekend here will be one that I will remember fondly for the rest of my life. This past weekend I had the opportunity to go to Toledo, one of the most historic sites in all of Spain, and Valencia, a beach city on the Mediterranean with a rich history, killer gastronomy, and beaches that are to die for. My program took us through a guided tour of Toledo, where I got to see the city from a number of truly impressive vantagepoints. In the picture included you can see the river Tajo, the river that protected the city from attack for (literally) thousands of years, while also supplying the city with enough water to support some of the largest population densities within Spain. The amount of historical architecture here truly merits a guided tour, as the beauty is not truly appreciated if you don’t understand much of the significance of what you’re seeing.

Toledo and the Tajo River

In Valencia, I got to meet up with a friend from high school, who saved me from having to pay for an AirBnB or hotel, and also took me to an authentic paella restaurant where I got to try Valencia’s regional dish. Fun fact: like Champagne technically only refers to sparkling white wine from the Champagne region of France, paella also only refers to dishes cooked with exactly the right ingredients (rabbit, chicken, snails [both white and black], a special kind of green bean, a special kind of white beans called Favadas, rice, and a secret concentration of spices not shared with outsiders) and other dishes without key ingredients or that include other ingredients are only dishes served with rice; tldr: if you find yourself in Valencia be very careful to let locals call something paella before trying to call it paella yourself, lest you find yourself the butt of a joke you didn’t see coming. The beach and Mediterranean was also a blast, and it was nice to spend a day lounging on the beach (even if I did come back looking a bit like a lobster). Valencia also has series of well-known buildings in their central park, and that’s where I took the picture that I’ve included in this blog post!

Spain is a truly wonderful experience, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has the opportunity to study abroad, regardless of their level of Spanish. The overwhelming majority of people speak at least a little English, and I’ve found myself in spots where that’s really saved me from awkward situations, while my Spanish (especially my ability to understand what people are saying) has improved drastically. I will fly out from the Madrid airport early tomorrow, so this is me signing off! Thanks for reading, and I hope you will do a study abroad, too.