Okay, so I know what you’re thinking. ”Limes” is probably the lamest title in the world, and I’m sure you’re all assuming that I’m seriously lacking in my creative writing skills if I’m going to be writing about limes. But I promise this is going somewhere.

Here in Shanghai, we were assigned language partners to help us with anything we need – where to buy certain items, language help, etc. We’ve made pretty great friends with a bunch of our language partners’ friends and were invited to a bbq! Now, BBQs are very different in China. First, you have to pay an admission fee to get into the park itself, where there are plenty of other activities inside (like boating, rides, horse riding, so on and so forth). When we arrived at the BBQ area, everyone has their own little BBQ pod that looks like this:

I rode home today on a double-decker train from class at the Musée d’Orsay. Now how many people can say that? Occasionally I’ll stop and take in where I am and be in absolute awe of Paris. The other night I took a stroll with some friends from the Latin Quarter home to the 16^th arrondissement; I must admit I felt a bit like Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris. Anything is possible in the City of Lights!

10/03/14 was a very exciting day for me. Paul Murray came in to talk to my Community and Contemporary Irish Fiction class.

I can hear some of you saying, ‘And who’d that be?’ Well, I’m about to educate you. And then you can do something great for yourself.

It was about 8:15 AM and for once since I’ve come to Berlin, I wasn’t running late. I had enough time for a quick bowl of cereal and then I was on my way to my first ‘official’ day of class (starting at 9 AM). It was a colder morning, but to save time (and attempt to enjoy the cool morning a little more) I decided to ride my bicycle –  it is not really my bicycle, but after talking with Petra (my most gracious host) about biking in Berlin, she offered me her extra bike that was being stowed in the basement.

Well, it’s been a very busy past few weeks here in Granada. So, to save a bit of your time, here’s the über-condensed-spark-notes-in-a-nutshell-boiled-down version of what I’ve been up to! Buckle up:

A semester abroad is a lot of fun, but it’s not all cafés and museums. The real reason we’re here is to learn! Apart from all the learning we do in our homestays and from the friends we make here, a lot of this new knowledge comes from our classes. One of the things I like best about the IES Salamanca program is that it’s a hybrid: we can choose to take a mixture of classes through the program and through the university here, which gives us access to a huge variety of courses.

Yesterday I witnessed my first South African load-share. Basically this is when the government schedules planned power outages in different neighborhoods in order to save electricity. This is because their current electrical grid cannot support all of the activity that goes on. Apparently a couple of years ago this used to go on everyday, but then when people started conserving energy and becoming more environmentally friendly, they reduced how often these planned outages would go into effect.