Spain Part 21 – Tengo sueño

I was exhausted when I got up on Monday.  I definitely had a great weekend, but it was a little light on sleep.  I went into school early to print out my trabajos (essays) and I read the news that I had missed all weekend.  Apparently Zapatero (the president of Spain) had made a lot of campaign promises over the weekend, so I had to research all of those before class because I knew we would talk about it in Mass Media.  Classes went pretty well, I got pretty good grades on everything that I got back, and it was fun reading poetry in Latin American Lit.  We watched a movie that was actually really interesting in economics but I couldn’t focus because I was so tired.  Luckily it was a repeat of information we had already learned so it wasn’t vital. 

 

After class I went home and took a nap until la cena.  We had sopa, made with chicken and vegetables and ensalada.  Afterward, Zapatero was interviewing on channel 4 so we watched it for awhile.  A lot of the issues that were brought up were typical, reduction of terrorism, how to deal with the current state of the economy, homelessness, city violence, police etc. but there were some issues that are unique to Spain that I don’t really know that much about.  Lucia began explaining to me about the Vasco separatists, the people who want Cataluña (the province where Barcelona is) to be its own country.  The reasoning is that it is economically stable enough and the Catalán language would be able to be the national language instead of Spanish.  The terrorist group ETA is made up of these separatists, and they have been particularly active lately, and a lot of them have been put behind bars.  I wish I knew more about the conflict but unfortunately my vocabulary is still somewhat limited so I ended up doing the nod and smile for a little while because Lucia went off on a rant and I understood about 10% of what she said.

 

I had a hard time going to sleep that night, which was surprising because I was so tired and had practically fallen asleep in economics.