Day In The Life

High School Exchange Student in Badajoz, Spain

It’s taken a fair amount of time, but I can finally say now that I’ve built a pretty reasonable routine here in Spain everyday. Ironically, this specific day was structured a little differently, but I had to write about it because it was so memorable. Here is a little recap of Thursday, May 5th.

7:45am - I eat breakfast in the morning everyday with the girls. It’s funny because they usually wake up earlier than me although they start almost an hour later. Breakfast usually consists of a fruit bowl or tostada con aceite y tomate (toast with olive oil and tomato). We gobble up breakfast very quickly and I head out the door at 8:00am to get to school by 8:20am (when school starts).

8:20am-11:05am — As soon as I get to school, I start with the first three classes of the day until recreo. We started off this day with computers followed by our mentoring period and then PE. Here are some of my classmates playing basketball during PE.

This day was different than usual at school because it was our school spirit week. This meant that instead of having our normal three classes after recreo, we instead did school-wide activities.

11:35-2:20pm — Instead of our last three classes of the day, we had a school-wide gazpacho making contest and a tortilla de patatas competition. Gazpacho and the tortilla de patatas are two of Spain’s widely popular national dishes; the former is a cold tomato soup popular in the summer and the latter is an egg-potato dish. This was one of the coolest school activities I’ve ever partaken in; as a class, we brought ingredients to make the soup and a few of my classmates brought tortillas from home.

2:45pm - I usually arrive home at around 2:45pm (it takes around 15 minutes to walk back home and my friends and I walk back very slowly, chatting our way through). I come home to a fresh lunch prepared by Laura (how sweet is she!). This day, she prepared a revuelto con espárragos with a spicy tofu scramble for me (and we always eat lunch with bread). The girls have after-school activities that begin at 4 so we rush to eat so we can all go out then.

4:00-7:00pm — The girls have after-school activities Mondays through Thursdays from around 4pm to 7pm. Some days (like this day), I go with Roberto and Laura to wherever they go while the girls are in class (this day, we went to the supermarket). Other days, I attend a class at the gym, do my homework, meet my friends, or have my own extracurricular classes. On this particular day, we went to Carrefour (a supermarket chain popular in Spain) to do the large monthly groceries while the girls were in ballet.

7:00-8:45pm — On Thursdays, I have art class in the evenings. This specific day, I decided to draw a Sevillan bull fighter from a Seville photographs book. This piece is still a work in progress :)

9:15pm - We eat dinner very late in Spain (true to the stereotype), and the sun hasn’t even set at this point. I walk back home from art class to a delicious meal prepared by Laura again. This day, she made me an oriental tofu scramble.

10:00pm - This is when I do my homework and get ready for bed. The house is usually quieter at this point because the girls have gone to bed already. I usually sleep around 11:30pm and wake up the next morning to start the day again around 7:20-7:30am.

Everyday in itself is such a treat in Spain. I cannot comprehend the fact that I have a very short time here ahead of me. I keep telling myself to enjoy it because everyday is a gift.