Postcards from Spain 10: ¡Hasta Luego!
To close our series, James McConnell wishes farewell to our wonderful student ambassadors in Spain…
Farewell Dinner 🙁
June 13, 2016
Wow! 4 weeks? Really? It seems like not that long ago I was picking everyone up at Terminal 4 of the airport and with bleary eyes you boarded the bus to Segovia. Segovia. I bet that word has a different meaning for you now that you’ve actually lived here for a month and experienced the Spanish lifestyle.
What did you think it would be like when you got here? Did it meet your expectations? Did you think you were going to be eating food similar to Mexican food? Come on! Be honest! 🙂 Chorizo. Tortilla. Bocadillos. Pan! Do you miss “pan” yet? Don’t worry: you will! I digress. I’m supposed to speak about the farewell dinner.
Around 9 pm we all made our way up to the Plaza Mayor to take some group photos before heading into Restaurante José for dinner. Everyone cleaned up nicely! After 15 -20 photos in front of the cathedral and me trying to knock everyone over, we made our way inside and had took our seats in a private dining room. That is, all of us but Mom. There was no seat for her and when she finally did get a seat, she had no bread. 🙁 Soon remedied, we began eating types of food that I’m sure most of you have never had served like this before.
You know what else was awesome? YOU! We did some pretty amazing stuff over the past month and it was great to share it with all of you.
What type of things did we do? We visited museums, cathedrals, palaces, fortresses, ate ox meat that we cooked at our table, went kayaking in a nature preserve, consumed entirely too much chicken, as well as pasta or “macarrones” as Luis says, visited glass factories, got sprayed by 500 year old fountains at a palace and you probably did a lot more things I don’t want to know about!
And Barcelona! How awesome was that! You did some pretty impressive stuff over the course of a month and you really should be proud of everything you accomplished. You now know how to navigate unknown cities, take random forms of transportation to get places and if you get a little lost, you realize that it’s not that big of a deal. Oh yea: you can do all of that in Spanish too!
I’m very proud to have spent the last month with all of you and it was sad to see you drive away on the bus. Even Segovia was sad: we had our first cloudy day in weeks.
It’s with a heavy heart that I say to all of you, ¡Hasta Luego!
But remember, hasta luego is not goodbye; it’s literally “until then.” So until then, I will leave you with this: ¡Vamos chicos!
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