Ashleigh's Blog

I just woke up from a typical Spanish siesta, and as I'm sat on my bed watching the golden colour of the setting sunshine transform the colours of the buildings, I couldn't be more in love with this city. What a week it has been. I arrived in the city last Friday with my parents and I was immediately greeted by the heat. It got worse, as we soon discovered that we got catfished by the website which boasted a "loft apartment" but ended up being more like a cupboard without any aircon or windows. Having not yet found a place for me to actually live, it's safe to say I was immediately concerned that I'd be spending 4 months in a similar stuffy shoebox! For this reason, day 2 was probably the first time I experienced a feeling of panic. We travelled up to my university campus, which is very much in the middle of nowhere, and then walked for hours around different parts of the city (unsuccessfully) trying to find somewhere for me to live.  Eventually

I'm back and I've been saving all my writing genius for the next insane few months of my life because I am MOVING TO SPAIN IN 12 DAYS.  I currently still have nowhere to live, I've never been to Madrid and after a summer with zero Spanish speaking practice (apart from a lovely chat with an Uber driver in Miami) I'm beginning to panic that I won't even remember how to speak Spanish. But with all that aside, I wanted to talk about how I'm feeling, what I'm expecting so far and what I hope I'll learn from the experience - kind of like a time capsule to look back on.  Firstly, it makes sense to tell you where I'm going and what I'm doing. I'll be studying at la Universidad Pontificia de Comillas which is a very prestigious university in Spain, and I'll be based in the Cantoblanco campus for Las Ciencias Humanas y Sociales (Human and Social Sciences) (see some lovely google images below). In terms of what I'm studying, it wor