December: Exams and goodbyes

If you are in luck with the courses you picked, you can leave before Christmas. A lot of the courses offer the possibility to take your final exam before Christmas. A lot off my friends took this option for various reasons. I however could't choose this because this option wasn't there for my English courses. So I went home for Christmas and New Years and then I will return for my four last exams. This last month was a lot off work. There are a lot of things to finish and hand in for the courses and some tests to study for. I had a couple tests that required a lot off work. This meant a lot off hours of studying in the library of the university. This was mostly just the last 2 weeks though. Before that there were still a lot of fun things. Parties like Halloween for instance. I even celebrated Sinterklaas with some of my dutch friends. One more topic for me to discuss is sports. Almost everybody I know did some kind of sports. This is also encouraged at the uni. I took some dancing classes, which was fun and it helped me to get to know more people. Some of my other friends went to the gym, played soccer or hockey, but there are so much more sports offered in Alicante and at the uni. As for cultural differences, there are not so many shocking differences. You will get along fine with the Spanish. Some things to consider are food differences. In Spain it is very common to have your biggest (hot) meal at lunch time. In the evenings the meals are less important. This also comes with the fact that dinner is very late in Spain. You'll have to get used to kitchens of restaurants only opening at 8. Which results in very late dinners. And even though we foreigners did stick to our evening meal being the biggest meal, we ended up eating very late as well. I went out for dinner around 11 a couple of times. And between 9 and 10 was kind of regular. At home, we mostly ate between 8 and 9. Also shops are open till very late in Spain. Depending on the store between 9 and 10. But the small shops still do siestas here. So a lot of shops are closed in the afternoon. Sometimes annoying, but also fun to experience a different way of doing things. And shops being open till late was very convenient in my opinion.