¡Saludos de España! Greetings from Spain!

A lot has happened in the months since I last wrote in this blog, and the end result has been my arrival in Spain for March to May this year.

Some of the questions I have been asked a lot in the last week in Spain, as well as in previous months, is why Spain? Why did I decide to learn Spanish to begin with? So I thought I´d share the answers here with all of you, as I´m sure some of you are wondering the same thing.

My interest in Spain began when I was 13 years old, in Geography at school. We had to do a project on one of the top 100 cities in the world. I have no idea why I chose Madrid, or whether we were allocated cities, but I am very glad I did. Through that project I found out that, apart from size, Madrid is a bit like Adelaide, with lots of parks and fountains, and that Spain is very similar to Australia in its climate and geography. I grew up on an almond orchard near a wine region, and there were several olive groves around the place, and these are all things Spain cultivates as well. There was a comfortable familiarity about this exotic place.

At that point I had no interest in learning Spanish. I was more interested in learning German, as my family background is mostly German, although that goes back eight or nine generations, as we´ve been in Australia for about 150 years. At the end of Year 9 we were asked what subjects we would like to do in Year 10, so the school could work out which subjects to offer. I mentioned that I would like to do German, but was told that the school couldn´t start a second language in addition to Japanese yet. A year later I had found out that I could do a subject externally from my school but still have it count towards my high school certificate. I don´t remember whether German wasn´t offered again, or whether I was by now more interested in Spanish, but I started to learn Spanish in Year 11 while I continued to learn Japanese.

It turns out that Spanish is a lot simpler to start learning than German! Plus, as far as I am concerned, it is a beautiful sounding language, has a long tradition of literature, and a fascinating history. Spanish is spread across many countries – more, in fact, than English, and is spoken by more people as a first language than English.

So my interest in Spanish as a language began because of my interest in Spain as a country. I have always been more fascinated by Europe than any other continent, for its length of recorded history and its castles. As I learned Spanish and learned more about the history and culture of Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, I longed for the opportunity to go to Spain, but I never really expected that it would happen. Which means I nearly leaped at the opportunity to come to Spain this year, even while I didn´t really expect for it to turn into a reality! My family and quite a few of my friends who know about this obsession with Spain seemed much more certain about it than I did!

So, why Spain now? Well, I was offered the chance to do some more study in literacy here, and this time in Spanish, as an opportunity to meet people and gain a better understanding of some of the language development (literacy and translation) projects, to see whether I might be able to join one of those projects in the future.

And so here I am! And I think that´s enough for one post, so I´ll tell you more about Spain and what I´ve been up to in the last few months in the next posts.

I hope you have had a great week!