Category: 2016 Summer

2016 Summer, May Term

Nick Browning: Post 3

Nick Browning H-SC May Term  Abroad Madrid, Spain Summer 2016 Finally Getting Accustomed Classes this week have been more interesting in the sense that we’re finally being able to see how Spain’s history is affecting life today. Most of the issues that Spanish people are dealing with are due to a combination of medieval history and the struggles that the country faced over the last one hundred years. For nearly forty years, from 1939-1975, Spain was ruled by the dictator Francisco Franco. I’m not going to go into all the details of his reign, but just know that some of […]

2016 Summer

Nick Browning: Post 2

Nick Browning H-SC May Term Abroad Madrid, Spain Summer 2016 Work Hard, Play Hard Our second week in Alcalá was a little less exciting than last week, but that’s because we had to do all of our classwork in the first half of the week, so that we could enjoy a vacation during the second half of the week. Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were each days full of six hours’ worth of class. For us, that meant covering Spanish history from the medieval times until the early 1900’s. This completed our crash course of 2,500 years of Spanish history that […]

2016 Summer

Korbin Bordonie: Post 2

Korbin Bordonie H-SC May Term Abroad Madrid, Spain Summer 2016 Week three Week three was quite an adventure. We visited many very important Spainish landmarks. The first landmark and most fascinating landmark we visited, in my opinion, was the Royal Palace. You may think your own personal house is big, but try a 1.45 million square foot one. We were not allowed to take any pictures of the inside of the house, but let’s just say the chandeliers were as big as cars and everything was gold. To put it into perspective of how much money is in this building, […]

2016 Summer, May Term

Korbin Bordonie: Post 1

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. […]

2016 Summer, May Term

Nick Browning: Post 1

Nick Browning H-SC May Term Abroad Madrid, Spain Summer 2016 My First Week Back I have been lucky enough to be able to return to Alcalá de Henares for the second time during my career at Hampden-Sydney. We are lucky that we are able to return to the historic town and study at one of the oldest universities in Spain: La Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. When I came back, I felt like I never left. The town hasn’t changed at all over the past two years, and with laws in place that maintain the historic feel, I don’t see […]