Went to Spain, Realized I Wasted 9 YEARS of My Life

For those who don’t know, I had the privilege of traveling to Spain last week to visit my friends who are studying abroad. All the connections (I had 8 flights in one week) were not that fabulous, but Spain was gorgeous and totally worth it.

The most exciting prospect of this trip for me was that I was finally going to be able to use my Spanish outside of a classroom concentration. Having finished my minor last semester, I’ve been keeping up with practicing my speech and literary skills. I saw the opportunities to use my Spanish, but when it actually came down to it, I felt like my education was an absolute, total WASTE.

My Spanish is pretty good, and hope it would be since I’ve been in Spanish classes for the past 9 years. I’m fluent in the prospect of light conversation, and I know how to communicate my way around. The Spanish people we met in Barcelona and Madrid wanted NONE of this. For example, I ordered in Spanish at a restaurant, and the waiter responded in ENGLISH! And then, one taxi driver said we should all just speak English because it would be easier. IN SPAIN.

In all honestly, I did get to enhance my speaking skills, but it was still pretty shocking. We had a lot of conversations about how multi-lingual the people of Europe are and how in America, we are pretty self-centered in our belief that the world speaks English. I will defend the US, however, because I think the reason we don’t have such a hard push to learn a second language is because our continent-connected travel out of the country are Mexico and Canada, and the need to speak another language isn’t high when traveling to these places. In Europe, there are so many countries in such a relatively small area that learning another language has been essential for intercontinental conversation throughout time.

On to my adventures:

Rather than talk about how beautiful Spain is, I might as well show it (we took a lot of pictures).