Sunday 5/22 to Tuesday 5/24
Sunday
So we left off where I took the siesta… I always feel like I wasted a day when I take a nap in the middle of it, but that’s just what a lot of people do here in Spain during siesta so I guess I should get used to it. The rest of Sunday was pretty uneventful. I woke up, ate dinner, and went on a long walk through the neighborhood around my house. My mamá always asks me if I’m going out, so I feel like it’s the normal thing to do and I shouldn’t say know. She realizes at least that it’s boring for me if I stick around the house. I hadn’t seen much of it because everything happens in the center of the city and I basically only knew the part from my house to the beach (which is a good amount of ground). Anyway, I felt like I should get acquainted with all parts of my neighborhood. There was nothing very spectacular except a lot of fenced off fútbol courts with basketball hoops over them and a scuba diving place with murals of the scuba flags and Nemo and Dori. It was strange because that was the first night I didn’t go out with my friends and I don’t know anyone who lives close to my neighborhood. Hopefully I’ll meet people, but for now it sometimes feels like I’m on an island.
Monday
We were finally going to start work at our companies today. The last piece of the puzzle was appearing. The five of us had different times to meet with Armando so he would escort us from a meeting point to the company and introduce us to the employees/boss. I was all psyched up to go and then Cynthia, one of the directors, called and said that I couldn’t go in to see my company until Wed. because my boss was out of town and couldn’t tell me what to do. I was very disappointed, and I told her that I would still like to visit the company today. So, she met me at my house and we walked to this place called Lucentum Digital (LD for short). It’s only 3ish minutes away from my house so that kinda makes up for the extreme distance of my place from everything else. When I got to LD, the receptionist Rebecca (who is American, but has lived in España for 12 years) showed me around and introduced me to everyone. It’s a relatively small company with 2 floors, 7 offices, 3 studios, and 8 employees (including 2 interns), but it does a large scope of work. LD does video and audio productions in several languages for textbooks, voiceovers for commercials and movies, dubbing for shows and movies in other languages, promotion videos and multimedia websites for companies, and dubbing and interpretation classes for aspiring actors, an prolly some other stuff that I forgot. Basically, they have their hands in a lot of businesses, and in many of the businesses they don’t have any competition. All other audio and visual production companies are in Madrid or Barcelona.
Anyway, after the introduction an actor came in and I got to sit in on the recording they did that afternoon. It was funny because they were recording some listening exercise for a textbook and I remember loathing those when I was in Spanish classes. It was very interesting to see how much work goes into producing those things though. LD has a whole database of actors in Alicante with different accents in order to mix up the exercises. During the recording I chatted with David, the producer, and we ended up exchanging emails so we can meet up later for him to practice his English and me to practice my Spanish. Then, I left work in time for lunch at 2. Eventually I got down to the beach with some of my internship friends after we were all done at our companies. The other four are working with a study abroad enterprise, fertilized chicken egg exporter, information clearinghouse for entrepreneurs, and an ad agency. At first I was disappointed because I got neither of my two first choices (entrepreneur business and ad agency) even though they were the most Spanish intensive and I was told I scored well on the language pretests. But I think my internship with LD will be a great experience because it definitely is the most interesting and dynamic of all the companies.
At the beach I managed to play some volleyball (the one net is always busy) and met some pretty cool dudes. One guy named Olivear was from France and introduced me to his friends he had met when he arrived a day ago at the Spanish language school from Switzerland, Holland, and the UK. They all spoke pretty good English, so getting to know each other was easy. My friends and I met up with Olivear that night to introduce him to the barrio and we got some ice cream. He is only 17 and came to Spain alone, which I think would take a lot of guts. He said he also had an old lady host mom and wants to meet people, so I can empathize.
Tuesday
Today I didn’t have to go in to LD until 1 because that’s when Rebecca said the boss would be back to explain my tasks. With all that extra time I took a nice long run to explore another sector of Alicante. Every once in a very long while (especially when there are places to explore) runs are tolerable. I went past the soccer stadium and visited the Zona Deportiva (a big park with gravel running paths and soccer pitches). There was even another castle that I ran through (basically a lot of stonewalls, open pits, and stairs with graffiti all over). It was only very long because I ended up getting lost on my way back (despite my utter confidence that I had a handle on the city), but just when all hope was lost I ran right into the street where I live.
When I went to work I talked with the boss about my purpose at LD and finally got some direction. At first it seemed like there weren't many things planned for me to do, which seemed like a red flag (who wouldn’t accept free labor and just make up random things for them to do so they could be 10% productive?). Then he told me that I needed to revise the English version of their website to cure it of all flaws and make suggestions to improve the user experience as well as create a brochure in Spanish using InDesign for their new salesman to promote LD around Alicante. He explained all this to me in perfect English to avoid confusion. Truthfully, I was a bit disappointed to see that my job would require the use of so much English, but at least it will be less stressful. He also told me that I could set my own schedule, the dress was casual, and overall seemed like a very chill boss.
After the siesta at 4 I went back to work and reviewed the business plan and websites for a couple hours before heading to the beach. It’s great that it’s light so long because I get to the beach 6:30 nd can stay until 9 no problem when I need to go home for dinner. I met up with Olivear and his two friends at the beach and we got in on a volleyball game. It’s funny that you will see the same people around the v-ball net every day and some are crazy good. Despite being a mish-mash of players (Spanish, French, German and American) we won in 3 games! I also met some people from Germany and Arkansas. The beach is just a great common ground especially for international students to go and meet and see each other day after day.
Tuesday night was capped off with a BP tourney at one of the local bars of about 48 teams. They have this tournament every Tues., and apparently it is a huge draw for a lot of Americans and international students. I met people from Vanderbilt, U. of Tenn., Iowa, England, France, Italy, and Germany. It’s crazy how international Alicante is, and it seems like we all find ways to connect very easily. It really makes it easy when most everyone can speak English. In the last two days I feel like I've met a boat load of people from across the world, and it definitely eases the tension of living in a new country. I still feel guilty for not finding native Spanish speakers to converse with.
I’ve been writing every 2.5ish days, but I think the point of a blog is to have more numerous and shorter posts so I am going to try to write every day during siesta (just FYI for all you on the edge of your seats reading this).
Hasta luego,
Cóle
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