This week in Spain, I really broke through the tourist barrier and finally felt like I knew what I was doing when it comes to food, traveling around the city of Barcelona, and having small conversations with local business owners. Me and my roommates have been going to the same breakfast place almost every day before class, and we have made friends with the owner of the cafe. I now know how to say simple phrases in Spanish in the context of ordering food as well as in the context of making simple conversations with locals. Honestly, the best way to learn Spanish in my opinion is being forced to have a conversation in Spanish every day, which gives me opportunities to learn a few different words or phrases every day, which in the long run improves my ability to communicate. I can honestly say that although school is good at teaching you words and meanings, in order to truly be able to understand a language, you need to be in an environment where you have to listen and speak the language every day.?
We went to some really cool places this week, both as a class and individually. On Monday we went to the Olympic village from the 1992 Olympic games. It was fascinating to see all the different facilities that were built strictly for the ?92 Olympics, as well as the scenery around the location of the Olympic village. I am a huge basketball fan, so it was awesome to see where the 1992 Olympic ?Dream Team? played their games as well as the hotel that team USA among other countries stayed at.
In class this week my group did a presentation on GDP and why we may not be getting an accurate representation of production through this statistic. We talked about how the world has become more and more technologically advanced, and how a lot of business is done strictly on the internet without a physical good or service. The old formula for GDP does not account for a lot of business that is conducted on the internet, especially the collection and distribution of consumer data. Without a proper formula to account for the buying and selling of data, GDP per capita will never be a perfectly accurate representation of the state of the economy.
On the weekend my friends and I traveled to Mallorca, one of the islands off the East coast of Spain. We spent the day on Saturday shopping, sightseeing, and eating our way through the island, and it was all so beautiful. We learned that a lot of the restaurants have German menus because mass amounts of German people go to Mallorca to go on vacation, so as a result there were a lot of German restaurants in the area. We got to see the Cathedral in Palma and took a ton of pictures in front of it. It was amazing to see the giant Cathedral right by the ocean as well as walking around the city in general. Overall, it was a great test of our Spanish-speaking skills as well as a great first experience of culture outside of Barcelona.