Time Travel

Last week, I spent my Sunday evening sat in a field. The sun was setting, giving the sky a beautiful rose-tinted hue, a girl and her horse could be seen walking in the distance, the dust kicked up by its hooves shimmering in the sun’s glow, and someone started strumming on a guitar and singing. All in all a very pleasant evening activity. Until my flatmate decided to reintroduce us to grass-blowing. This very adult activity involves pulling up a piece of thick grass, holding it between your thumbs and blowing to produce a trumpet-like sound. I don’t know what the girl playing the guitar was least impressed with: our somewhat inferior knowledge of music or being drowned out by our grass trumpets. However, momentarily back in 1998, we sat there blowing quite happily on our grass until it started getting chilly and we started the walk home. A fun, simple evening, yet something I would never have thought about doing in Leeds.

As well as little things like this highlighting the contrast between Alcala and Leeds, the differences between the two universities are also vast. For instance, on asking the nice lady in the reprographics room where the printers were – there didn’t seem to be any in the computer rooms – she gave us a funny look and pointed towards the one, sole computer that looked almost discarded in the corner of the room. Apparently, apart from a few helpfully broken machines in another university building, that one computer is the only available place where the entire student body of the Arts Faculty can print out their lecture notes, seminar work and essays. Is it just me or does a printer:student ratio of 1:1050 seem a little absurd? I cannot even begin to imagine the carnage on essay deadline days. As well as this slight technical blip, the University does not seem to communicate with students via email, which is a strange concept after having been bombarded with the things for two years at Leeds. Here, when a lecture is cancelled, the entire class, having walked all the way into uni especially, is presented with a blasé note on the classroom door. Instead of jumping for joy as we would in Leeds and heading straight for the Terrace, here it is somewhat exasperating. The cityscape may replicate the medieval era, but in 2010, the technology doesn’t have to as well!

The classrooms, on the other hand, are nicely set out so that for the most part they are easy to find, other than the odd one or two that are tucked away round corners (clearly designed to confuse the Erasmus students as much as possible). There are also several staircases that seem to lead to different places each time I take them. So, with secret rooms and moving stairs, I find myself in a Spanish version of Hogwarts. Still, it makes a refreshing change from the stress of the Roger Stevens building. Classes have also been fairly interesting, in the sense that I make half a page of spread-out notes and half a page of doodles from a politics class that lasts an hour and a half. Good going – and it’s not just the classes taught in Spanish that present a problem. In the spirit of improving our Spanish as much as possible whilst here, we have all taken a module to do with the history of English-speaking countries, which is taught partially in English. The teacher, not impressed with us taking this module in the first place, expects us, as natives, to possess a working knowledge of English history dating back to the fifth century. Embarrassingly, and somewhat worryingly, we know less than some of the Spanish students in the class. For this module, we have also been told that we are expected to produce an essay, which obviously presents no problem for us as we’ve had essay skills drummed into us for years. However, according to our teacher, the Spanish first-years not only can’t write an essay but also cannot formulate their own opinion to incorporate into an essay. Therefore, this 2,000-word ‘essay’ (may I just add here that the announcement of this word limit drew gasps of horror from the Spaniards) may be written in a group of as many as six people and information can be copied and, in the teacher’s own words, ‘translated’ from the internet, i.e. this is very much a copy and paste job.

Although cobbling together an essay through copy and paste is brilliant and makes a relaxing change to the strict measures in Leeds, where we get penalised for putting a full stop in the wrong place in the footnotes, I am definitely looking forward to my return for my final year, even if just to be launched back into the 21^st century.