Abingdonian 2017

8 The Abingdonian Santiago Spanish Exchange Every year in October, there’s a fifth form exchange to Santiago de Compostela, to make our Spanish better and to show us first-hand what Spanish culture is like, with a Spanish family. It does not come without any mishaps however, like me managing to get the words partido, (meaning football match) and pegamento, (meaning glue stick) confused, resulting in my asking my exchange’s father whether he watched all of his son’s glue sticks! We sorted it out eventually. We arrived late in the evening after a very uneventful journey. What followed was an evening of getting accustomed to the rapid dialogue in the Spanish families (they slowed down for us luckily) and finding that actually it wasn’t as difficult as we had thought it would be to converse with the families. Any confusion from there on was easily sorted by our exchange partners, who had been studying English since they were three years old and were therefore almost fluent, making the whole experience far easier for us. On the first day we received a talk on El Camino, the famous pilgrimage to Santiago, all in Spanish. After a brief discussion about what we had just heard, we embarked on a short walk along the very last part of the route itself. After a self-guided tour of the old city, we went into the cathedral itself. Obviously it’s amazing; I could show off all my iGCSE English descriptive writing skills telling you about it, but Google Images would probably do a better job. We were then handed over to our exchange partners for the weekend, which was spent enjoying Spanish culture and getting to know our exchange family. The weekend was probably the period in which I felt the most improvement in my speaking, as we were constantly speaking Spanish. On Monday, we had one of our two days in the actual school of Manuel Peleteiro. We had a Latin Dance workshop (sounds awful, but was quite fun,) and a somewhat confusing maths lesson: whilst our Spanish listening skills were definitely improving, learning functions was probably a bit much. On Tuesday we went to La Coruña to visit the Torre de Hercules (a Roman lighthouse – still in use), a museum called the Domus, an aquarium full of interesting sea life, and then an afternoon on the beach. The weather by now had started to pick up; after rain and fog (“hay niebla” being the best phrase I had come up with so far) for the first few days, we now managed to get some good sunshine. Wednesday brought the interesting experience of having an English lesson with 11 year olds probably, if we’re being honest, better at English than we were at Spanish. We had another, “almost understandable now” maths lesson, and then a biology lesson that I think I mainly understood; clearly the week of non-stop Spanish had done some good. On the final day we had a trip to Baiona, and then on to a town in Portugal where we had our last chance to have a full day with the exchange partners, and after a finale dinner, followed by churros con chocolate, in the morning we said goodbye! The Spanish Exchange must be one of the most useful things you can do if you want to do Spanish at iGCSE, or further. It was great fun and a complete tour of a fascinating area of Spain. I personally had an amazing experience and my Spanish listening and definitely speaking improved greatly. John Allen, 5EPB On Saturday 4th March, we arrived home again; the characteristic light rain of Galicia received us. All of us were exhausted and with many new experiences in our minds. I couldn’t