Student Blogs

My ICIP and a Weekend in Madrid!

March 18th, 2012 secain13

First of all, I’d like to give a shout out to everyone back at Holy Cross that celebrated St. Patrick’s day yesterday. It’s one of the best days on campus, and even though I would have loved to be there for it, I had a great time celebrating with some Irish friends who study in León and we watched the Ireland-England rugby match which was a lot of fun.

Believe it or not, I’m about halfway through my second semester here in León. It’s extremely hard for me to think about this because I’m having such a great experience here and even though I do miss family and friends from home, I’m definitely not ready to go home yet. I have been busy planning out trips for the rest of this semester and my weekends are quickly filling up (I’m heading to Morocco next weekend!). Even though I’ll be travelling a lot this semester, I also really want to spend a lot of time in León to be with my friends here.  I am also really looking forward to my family coming to visit me in just over a month!

Last weekend, I had the chance to spend a couple of days in Madrid and I loved the city. Until now, I hadn’t gotten to spend much time there, other than when I was going to the airport to catch a flight. I really enjoyed the city and even though I only had 2 days to spend there, I was able to see a lot of things including the Royal Palace, The Cathedral, El Parque del Retiro, La Puerta del Sol, Plaza Mayor, and the Prado Museum. It was really easy navigating the city because everything was pretty close together and we were able to walk all throughout the city. A highlight of the weekend was definitely going to see the Prado museum because it was huge and there were so many different paintings, including a lot by Francisco de Goya, a Spanish artist who I had studied in my Montserrat class during my freshman year at Holy Cross. I had done a project on one of his paintings for that class, and it was pretty cool to see it firsthand.

Recently, I have been keeping busy with some schoolwork and my ICIP project. For those of you that know about the ICIP, Independent Cultural Immersion Project, it is a project that is required by Holy Cross when you study abroad and it is a chance to learn about an aspect of the culture that interests you specifically. It can vary from an internship, volunteering, or pursuing a hobby. It’s very diverse and each person gets something different out of it. For me, I have decided to focus on Spanish food because it is something that really interests me and I love to cook.  I had originally hoped to find some type of cooking class so that I could learn how to make different dishes; however, I wasn’t able to do so. Instead, I have been compiling some of my favorite Spanish recipes and I have decided to write about the characteristics of Spanish cuisine.  I would love to go home knowing how to cook some great Spanish recipes because the food is amazing here!

I’ve gotta get back to doing some more work but I will update the blog soon with some more of my travels!

¡Hasta Pronto!

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