Conor McEntee in Granada, SPAIN

TRAVELLING ABROAD SO I CAN IMPROVE MY SPANISH SKILLS

Hello my name is Conor McEntee and I am a transition year student from Dublin. At the start of transition year I knew I wanted to go to Spain on an exchange trip as I knew it would be great for my spoken Spanish skills and a great way to learn about other cultures. I knew it would help my Spanish skills as the best way to learn a language is to be immersed in it, and immersed I have been.

My first impressions of Spain were good ones, when we boarded the plane it had been quite cold but when we landed, we were met with lovely weather it was great. The first 2 nights, two of us ended up staying at the local coordinator’s house and I got to know a few of the other Irish students. The first day, we went into the city and walked around to see what the city had to offer. Everyone was very nice and very patient when it came to conversations.

FIRST WEEK IN SPAIN

For the first week, me and one other person took the Spanish course and I have to say it was a very good course and helped me correctly formulate sentences. They also helped because they were shorter than an average school day so we had more time to explore and get a feel for the city. All in all, the first week was quite good.

Living with a host family takes time to get used to, you are in a house of someone you mightn’t have met before, so it can be a weird experience for a while. The family were incredibly nice, they were very kind and helped organise many activities for us. They had a beagle named coco who was great, he helped make everything a bit more fun. Overall the family were great, I really enjoy staying with them.

Overall I quite enjoyed talking to the people in class and seeing how different Spain was to Ireland, but I did find it a bit hard sometimes as they speak very fast and would use words that I didn’t know the meaning of, this made communication a bit hard sometimes but we got through it by me asking what the word meant or could they say it a small bit slower, they were all very helpful and were always very understanding when I didn’t understand.

SKI TRIP TO SIERRA NEVADA 🎿

There were quite a few enjoyable things that we did during the exchange, on the first weekend me, another Irish student and their host family went up into the Sierra Nevada to ski, it was amazing, we spent hours skiing, meeting new people and taking in the beautiful sites. I would highly recommend going skiing at some point during an exchange, even if you don’t know how to, they have fantastic ski instructors that will help you get started.

One thing that I would recommend doing is bringing warm clothes, because at night the temperature drops quite fast and it is very cold.