Rachel+&+Robbie

=Independent means=

What’s it like to be abroad alone without parents? With just you and yourself and when nobody is speaking your native language? You are totally alone with your own thoughts. Well, I enjoyed it and I became even more independent. It was only a piece of cake for me.

I have some distant relatives in Wales so I went there for two weeks in last summer. I took off in Turku and I had a stopover in Helsinki. My plane was late so I needed to run through the busy airport. From Helsinki I flew to Heathrow. My relatives picked me up from there and then suddenly no Finnish was spoken anymore. It was a total shock for me. It was weird that in my head everything was in Finnish but then when I opened my mouth, suddenly everything was in English.

I had one day sightseeing in London and after that we went to Wales for the rest of my holiday. I was in the south for my first week and then I went to north, to Abergele. I had a great time there and I got to know my relatives better there. I got more cultured and now I feel like I have turned the other page in the book of the world.

//“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” – St. Augustine//

Rachel


 * It just wasn’t for me **

Spanish is an awesome language that will make your life amazing or not. I used to think Spanish would somehow make my life better but it just wasn’t for me. I thought I would get so good at it that I could move to Spain and live the rest of my life there but during the first course of Spanish in the ninth grade I realized my expectations were too high.

“The beginning of a new life” was what I thought in the beginning of the course. But after a few lessons my excitement had disappeared somewhere deep within the heaters in the classroom. At first it was only new words dropping onto my shoulders but soon heavy grammar fell do ewn with the words. Then the loads of exams given made everything even worse.

“This isn’t how I planned this”, I thought. Other classes, football outside of school and refereeing just took too much time and effort. The fact that our rival team “el asparagus” beat us in the critical matches didn’t help. (Spanish football is SUPER important.) At the end I had so little time and excitement towards Spanish that finally I gave up.

Probably just a small spark would have helped me to keep studying the language. Maybe with a little more luck in some factor I would have had that life in Spain. But the final question is did I fail? I don’t know. I really don’t know. What I do know is that every time that I hear someone speaking Spanish I feel sick to my stomach.

-Robbie-