Mi Viaje Maravilloso en Guadalajara - Part 2

Hello there, and welcome back to reading about my second Winter Term at Oberlin: my Spanish immersion trip to Guadalajara, Mexico. It’s been quite a while since I've written a blog, and now quite a while since the trip. I would hate to leave such a story unfinished, however. So, without further ado, here’s Mi Viaje Maravilloso part two:

The Academics and Weekly Schedule through our Language Immersion Institute

I’d be remiss if I described my Guadalajara trip without noting the transformative passions of the teachers and staff at IMAC, the language institute where we spent our weekdays taking classes. 

The institute was responsible for organizing nearly everything we got to do as part of the program, and the staff were willing to make changes at the drop of a hat to ensure we had a wonderful experience.

During our first group meeting with the institute staff, for instance, one student shared that he had some apprehensions about staying with his host family and the program coordinator offered right away to get him a new set of hosts by tomorrow. The student was rather taken aback by this offer and turned it down, since it did seem drastic. That moment demonstrated to me, however, just how dedicated these partners of ours were to helping us succeed and flourish during our time in the city.

It was the institute staff who organized our excursions on the weekends and who even assisted in organizing our stay at the Mexican beach in Los Ayala at the end of the trip. Most of all, it was the teaching staff of the institute who worked hard to accomplish the core goal on the trip of growing our speaking and writing skills.

Our group of sixteen people was split up into four classes for this purpose, based on our level of previous Spanish experience. In my group, in which we covered the content normally taught in a Spanish 203 course at Oberlin, we started out with just three students (because the four groups were not divided exactly evenly). Later on, due to his level of prior learning, one student from the 202 group below us would join our sessions as well (making for four students, still very few).

The small group size meant that we each got close-up and personalized learning experiences with our kind and skilled language teacher. She worked each day to edit and improve our writing, and helped us in detail to learn the ins and outs of the subjunctive Spanish tense, which was our main learning objective to tackle. I would tell my family, upon returning to see them in the U.S, just how privileged I felt to learn from a native Spanish speaker, such as our instructor, each day in the city that was her home.

Our academic schedule consisted of instructive learning in the morning, broken up by a brief recess during which we students would flood down to Dane's bakery on the corner across the street. Luscious aromas enticed us to that shop, where treats from cream-filled donuts to crisp macaroons and filling deli sandwiches caught our eyes. Everything there made your tastebuds sing (potentially in Spanish) and was available for around three US dollars, or, in some cases, less than even one dollar (with the prices being in pesos). Pictures of a few of these treats are down below. We would eat our snacks from the bakery and return to class with our instructor until one pm. At that point, we’d head next to our conversation class, a collaborative space where we native English speakers would get to try speaking Spanish with local, native Spanish speakers. Our roles would then reverse so that they could practice their English with us! The whole day would wrap up by two (when our conversation classes were finished), and then we would all make our way back to our host families by bus for “la comida.”

What do I mean by “la comida,” you might ask? Its literal translation is “the food,” or “the meal.” It would probably be more helpful for me to explain, however, that la comida is what the Guadalajarans (along with the rest of Mexico) call their biggest meal of the day. I would have mine, cooked with care by my host mom, at about 2:45, which is the time I’d be delivered home by the bus. La comida is a later meal than our “lunch,” which is why we’d commonly have a snack in our mid-morning break time following breakfast, but an earlier meal than our big U.S. dinner. Thus, while in Guadalajara, I would usually have a light supper late at night, only by the time I was no longer full from the larger portion I’d eaten in the afternoon. La comida was delicious cooked by my host mom, and pictures of the things she made me are attached to the end of this blog!

I’d do my homework before it came time for that last meal of the day, and I would especially study before the end of the week when we would have our tests in class. On the note of those exams, however, I didn’t feel they substantially took on the stressful and inhibiting role that exams sometimes can have in academics. This was mostly because they were all based around free-writing questions, through which we put the concepts we’d been learning during the week to work in essay form. With this kind of productive testing, combined with personalized lessons, and experiential reinforcement, my Spanish was able to blossom as never before.

Near the end of the trip, one of the IMAC staff asked if they could interview me about my language learning experience. The interview was in English, but it made me reflect on how my past month of language learning had been one of the biggest periods of growth in my life. I told the staff member my time with the institute had been excellent. Still, looking back on that January now, I feel I’ll always think of my teacher and everyone else at IMAC fondly, and that I’ll remain grateful for the many things they did that allowed me to speak Spanish as I do now.