The biggest challenge yet of my year abroad: Swapping tapas for treadmills and rum for rice cakes

During the last few months of the run-up to my year abroad, I had so many worries and anxieties that I can’t even begin to count them. Now that I’ve been here for almost 6 months, I really don’t know what I was fussing about – it’s all been brilliant and hardly any of the hundreds of ‘what ifs’ I had pandered to have actually crossed the theoretical-to-reality boundary. 

The one negative side that I seem to have overlooked, however, is the amount of weight that can be gained while abroad. I had, somewhat naively, thought that living in Spain for 9 months would help me to shed pounds, with a typically healthy Mediterranean diet and the hot weather helping to suppress appetite. How wrong I was.

Firstly, for some reason all of the tapas bars in Spain feel the need to make everything into a sandwich, including tortilla, which is served in-between not just 2 normal-sized slices of bread, but 2 huge, thick slices of baguette. This is all well and good once or twice a week, but for students, who either can’t or won’t cook for themselves (and when one tapas serving and a drink adds up to just €2.50, who can resist), going out for tea constitutes a major part of each week, which can add up to a lot of extra calories. 

Secondly, being on a year abroad is very much like being back in first year, only with a bit more sun and a distinct lack of Fruity Fridays – other than going out for an inordinate amount of tapas (and the odd bit of studying here and there), all we do is drink, drink...and then drink some more. Although Malibu is my personal favourite, a bottle of wine can be bought for €2 (again, with such good prices, it is hard to resist so this has become my usual choice). We quite often go out 3 times a week and every time we usually drink a bottle of wine to ourselves. In the knowledge that alcohol is loaded with empty calories, the maths is not difficult – it all adds up, over time, to my favourite shorts feeling more than a little tight in certain areas.

And thirdly, Nutella. One of my flatmates introduced me to its chocolately-goodness back in October and ever since, I have been an absolute addict, no further explanation required.

It was only when we were informed that a beach holiday to Ibiza was being organised for all the Erasmus students in May that I seriously started thinking about all this – and in a desperate bid to work off all the extra blubber (which to be fair I feel I needed on my return to the UK over Christmas), I joined the local gym.

Ask any one of my friends and they will verify that I am the most unlikely person to join a gym, ever. Or more correctly, to go to the gym – I did actually join last year in Leeds, went for about 2 weeks and then gave up, having decided that exercise wasn’t my ‘thing’. When I informed one of my friends over Skype that I had joined the gym here, his eyebrows shot up and his mouth literally dropped open in astonishment. My brother didn’t even believe me. However, it has now been 3 weeks and I have been almost every day – to be fair, I have a lot to motivate me: Ibiza, a couple of other holidays planned for the summer and a wedding in September.

So far, it’s been going well – over the past 3 weeks I think I’ve done more exercise than I’ve ever done in my life. However, as with anything, there have been a few little blips: for example, having been away from a gym for so long I’d forgotten that you have to start pedalling on a cross-trainer before the display lights up. Baffled by the fact that none of the cross-trainers seemed to be working, I had to be told by an old man who was pedalling furiously on the machine next to me how to work it (the shame). Of course, I couldn’t understand his Spanish, so in the end one of the gym instructors had to come over and teach me how to use this very simple piece of equipment. He told me to start pedalling so that he could show me what all the buttons were for, but as he was leaning over to reach the display panel, he got dangerously close to the handles and consequently I managed to hit him in the face, not just once but twice. He then took his leave. I don’t know whether I went redder from the embarrassment or from the ensuing exercise.

Another humiliating aspect of the gym is the classes on offer. We go to GAP (Spain’s version of BLT – bums, legs and tums) twice a week. I’m fairly certain that I tone my abs more by laughing than by doing crunches in these classes: we never understand the instructions so we have to watch everyone else and copy them – one time the instructor had told us all to lie down about 5 times, but we, completely clueless as to what was going on, were just sitting on our mats wondering why the class was moving so slowly and awaiting for the next instruction. Last week, we started using exercise balls. The point of the exercise was to lie on your back opposite someone else and balance the ball on your feet while doing crunches, but for some reason the ball would not stay still and kept falling and rolling across the floor to the other side of the room – and then we got the giggles which threw any chance of being capable of balancing a giant ball on our feet (if there ever was any) completely out of the window. Now even just seeing the exercise balls make me laugh, especially as the first time we used them, we had to put them against the wall and lean against them while doing squats, and one of my flatmates was wearing a red stripy t-shirt and had picked a red ball, making her look a little bit like a snail (which, if you’ve already spent the whole class trying to suppress laughter, is all just too much). Another amusing exercise we are made to do involves sticking our bums up in the air while bending our knees to thrust ourselves backwards and forwards. This was fine (the class is made up of just females) until we remembered that the men’s weights area is just behind the class room and that the transparent window probably doesn’t do much to conceal how ridiculous 30 women thrusting in unison look.

Lastly, due to the absolute refusal of the people in charge to turn the ceiling fans on during the morning, as well as the fact that the fans on the treadmills themselves helpfully face outwards rather than towards the overheating (or in my case, dying) person, I leave the gym with a face the same colour as the emergency stop button, which attracts a lot of weird looks. Luckily, home is just a 5-minute walk away so this torture isn’t too long-lasting. I still have over 2 months to go until Ibiza and, despite the numerous embarrassing incidents that have been crammed into just 3 weeks, I am determined to keep going. Hasta luego tasty tapas and excess wine consumption, we shall meet again in May...

The Heart of Africa: Mountains, Mopeds and Mint Tea in Marrakech, Morocco

After staying in Marrakech for a few days last weekend, and in the knowledge that a lot of the students here have been, or are planning to go, I have taken the liberty of compiling a list of the things that every visitor to this African city should know:

-Beware of horse and carts. They do not slow down for any pedestrian on any account, even on the narrowest of streets. Not only did I end up half squashed against a wall on various occasions, I also haven’t got enough fingers to count the number of times I almost died an early death from these vicious contraptions. One time, I hadn’t noticed the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves racing towards me and it was only after several Moroccans started kicking up a bit of a fuss that I turned round to be greeted by a horse’s face within millimetres of my head. Needless to say, after that I was a lot more careful, treating everywhere as if it were a road (people do actually keep to the right-hand side of the streets in general).

-Acquire a taste for mint tea. It is one of the country’s delicacies and it is often, although not always, offered free after a meal. It is also served impressively on a patterned silver tray, a beautifully formed silver teapot and an exquisite miniature coloured or patterned glass. Added to this, the waiters pour the tea from a great height into the glass, never missing once. Mint tea was served to us on the roof terrace in our hostel in the mornings after breakfast, which was extremely welcome considering that breakfast wasn’t served past 10am and before this time it was bitingly cold. During the days, however, the sun shone and the temperature was close to perfect. A quick word of warning, though: take sun-cream, even in February, as the sun is stronger than you might think – sunbathing in the park for a couple of hours resulted in an extraordinarily red nose, highlighting even more than my blonde hair the fact that I was a tourist.

-Accustom yourself to early mornings. The first call to prayer of the day is at 6am. It will wake you up and it will feel like someone is leaning over you wailing into your ear with incessant persistence. Although, saying this, on our third day we slept straight through this harrowing howling, which was nice, as our sleep remained unperturbed, yet also worrying that we could sleep through something that loud (the speaker was in close proximity to the roof terrace so that the noise echoed throughout the entire hostel, or riad). This does baffle me slightly: I can’t wake up to a call to prayer, but I can wake up instantaneously to my little alarm on my phone, which chimes gently for a minute or so before falling back into silence.

-If you’ve read my blog about road rage in Spain, take everything I said, multiply the described carnage by at least 50 and apply it to Marrakech. Horses and donkeys share the roads with cars and taxis, and mopeds weave dangerously in and out of the various vehicles, sometimes coming within centimetres of them, which made even me, a passenger in a Moroccan taxi, on my first day, without a seatbelt and amid all the general chaos of this strange place, cringe every time this happened and brace myself for a collision. In Marrakech, it’s not as though zebra crossings aren’t provided or are ignored by vehicles, as they are in Spain – the pedestrians there just prefer not to use them for some reason. Instead of utilising these devices designed for road safety, Moroccans choose to risk life and limb by crossing into the oncoming traffic and weaving in and out of it until they reach the other side, somewhat surprisingly, in one piece. I witnessed only one close shave, when a boy misjudged the speed at which a car was travelling and almost ended up not making it to the pavement – my heart genuinely skipped a beat – luckily the car came to a halt just in time and the boy was fine – better than fine, in fact, he laughed and waved an apology to the driver who waved back – no beeping, no shouting, nada. Very different to Spain indeed, where the cars beep at each other sometimes for no reason whatsoever.

-If anyone offers you a Berber carpet ‘demonstration’, say ‘no’ and run in the other direction. Unsure of what exactly can be demonstrated with carpets, we were dubious of this activity anyway, yet still got sucked in, in order not to appear rude through refusal. The demonstration began well, with a five-minute or so explanation of what the carpets were made from and how long it took to make them, etcetera. From there, it all went downhill. The following hour, although it felt like three, consisted of the man trying to flog us hundreds of expensive carpets that we couldn’t afford, let alone fit in our hand luggage, which was more than slightly awkward. We also ‘happened’ to be in the back room of the house, which added a wonderful sense of being trapped, which I feel really complemented the awkwardness, which was by the end also teamed with a growing agitation and a certain desperation. On the bright side, I did learn something new – never before had I realised that so many negative feelings could be crammed into just one hour.

-If you go on the waterfall excursion, it’s probably best not to attempt to cross the bridges. Trust your instincts: they look rickety, and they are rickety. On the car journey to the waterfalls, we commented on how weak and unsafe the bridges looked – and this was verified by the fact that the next ‘bridge’ that we saw was almost fully submerged in the river, half-dangling and half-lying in a hopeless manner across the rocks.

The great thing about the waterfall trip is that it takes you up into the Atlas mountains, the stunning backdrop to the city. These beautiful snow-capped peaks were one of the first things I noticed on arriving at Marrakech, and set against not only palm trees but also a cloudless blue sky, they created an astounding landscape that resembled something out of Planet Earth.

 

It was an unexpected but welcome surprise; something to contrast the absolute chaos of Marrakech’s roads, and main square, where there are snakes, story-tellers and music galore, as well as marquees full of street food, where you can eat for 5 Dirham, or the equivalent of 50 cents, and souks or the markets, which boast an impressive array of brightly coloured clothing and knick-knacks. As well as being lucky enough to see the Atlas mountains every day for the three days we were there, we also got to climb them. However, we’d been told that we would be taken up to the waterfalls in the mountains by a 4x4, so we were a bit confused when we were told to leave the vehicle, which had stopped in a decidedly flat and un-mountain-like car park. It turned out that we were expected to climb the mountain ourselves – which would have been fine if we hadn’t have been wearing boots and carrying heavy handbags. Watching us girls trying to scale the mountain in little boots with no grip and handbags must have been quite a treat for the locals. For us, not so much. I slipped more times than I can count, grazed my knee through my jeans and on the way down, resorted to slithering rather than descending in a more suitable (or mature) manner. The guide had also told us that the climb would take about 20 minutes. Twenty minutes?! It took at least an hour (although maybe he meant that it takes 20 minutes for normal, sensible people who wear trainers and bring rucksacks to these sort of things). This reminded me of when we went to go and visit my Nan in Paphos back in 2005 and she suggested that my mum and I take a leisurely walk down to the baths of Aphrodite, reassuring us that the heat wouldn’t matter too much as it was only 10 minutes down the road. I’m not kidding when I say that we only reached the baths two hours later, after following the straight path (and the massive hill at the end, just to rub it in). When we arrived dying of thirst in the 40°C heat, the lady on the door was so shocked that we had walked, saying that everyone drove because it was so out of the way, that she gave us free drinks. Thanks, Nan. Bless her, we didn’t mind too much, but really, whose ability to judge distances is that bad?!

Anyway. To sum up, Marrakech was brilliant. Chaotic, but brilliant, and I can now definitely see why so many of the Erasmus students here choose to holiday there. If you ever get the chance to go, do it – it is an experience not to be missed.

A Nightmare on Calle Colegios

Okay, so there’s no serial killer roaming the streets of Alcalá like the title suggests, however, today brought the first class of the new semester and already we have been launched into a hellish capacity. It took us about two hours to choose Universal Contemporary History from the module list, which was comprised of equally uninteresting choices, and within about 15 minutes, we’d decided that it was absolutely necessary to drop it. This decision was based on a compulsory task which involves teaching the class for 40 minutes and then proceeding to lead a debate (see blog below to understand why this would pose a problem). Added to this terrifying concept, the preparation for what would have been my presentation was to watch and analyse a Spanish film and then read precisely 672 pages. I thought my politics presentation last semester was a fair amount of work and that involved the reading of one page and the copying of ideas from Sparknotes.

Secondly, on being asked where to find the readings, the teacher shrugged and replied that they may be in the university library, or perhaps in the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library) – in Madrid. Madrid is a 40 minute train journey away. To put this more in perspective, it’s like telling students from Leeds that they need to go to Sheffield to find the books they need. What amazed me is that loads of the Spanish students were nodding and writing to this answer, acting as if it were a completely normal thing to say. Newsflash: this is not normal!

We went up to the teacher at the end of the lesson to ask whether we could sit the final exam (in order to avoid the presentation) and were told that we weren’t allowed to ask questions in the lecture hall – only in his office, despite the fact that no-one was waiting outside to come into the classroom. Instead of simply giving us a reply to our question there and then, which, in the end, turned out to be a one-word answer anyway (the negative kind, in case you were wondering), he made us follow him to his office, him at the helm and us all traipsing behind in a single-file line like little ducklings. Once at our final destination, be it the pond or his office, we had to wait as someone was already in his office needing to talk to him. A Spanish guy came up to us about a minute later and asked us whether we were in the queue. Obviously, we said ‘yes’, and despite his response being ‘okay’, he pushed past us to get into the office as soon as the other person had left! Note to self: ‘Okay’ in this country is synonymic with ‘So?’, ‘Good for you’ or ‘Whatever.’

After this little episode, we learnt that the field trips for our other module, Human Geography, are on Fridays, and that if you miss one, you have to do the final exam rather than the coursework. Putting anything on a Friday is pointless for us in the first place, as Thursday nights are notoriously the best in Alcalá, but I am also going home for a week in March, having a friend out to visit in April and potentially having my mum over later this month, which means that I am already missing three Fridays this term, and if the excursions fall on these days, which, due to the aptly-named Sod’s law they probably will, I am screwed. Added to this, I have enrolled on and paid for a learn Spanish online course, which, in a flat where the internet regularly undergoes bouts of either laziness or tantrums (or signal failure) resulting in a loss of connection that can last hours or almost entire days, logging on will most likely present more of a challenge than the tasks themselves.

Therefore, I have had to change most of my modules which I not only spent hours choosing, but also organised so that I only had Mondays in university, so that I could spend more (or any) time in the gym, with my intercambio, with my friends and on my blog (and in bed, and in the park sunbathing as summer coasts ever-closer). Now, I am in Monday through Thursday – although it does only amount to seven hours a week so I can’t complain too much. Not a great start to the semester – however, I am doing one less module than last term and the two new ones I’ve picked appear to have some substance and seem fairly doable. Plus, I’ve just come back from a chaotic but amazing holiday in Morocco, which I’ll write about in my next blog.