A few observations

1) Small Spanish children, in addition to all being incredibly cute, seem much more eloquent than their same-aged US counterparts. I considered that it might be my own bias from Spanish being harder for me than English, but decided that it was a real phenomenon. My hypothesis so far is that Spanish parents use much less baby-talk than we do (while still being very affectionate).

2) I've heard a fair number of people in the program talk excitedly about how much better their Spanish is going to get this year--all in English. In fact, few of us speak Spanish outside of the classroom. While it's likely that once we get to our actual cities of study, the amount of Spanish spoken will go up, I'm still left wondering: do they think it will happen by osmosis? We're here NOW. Like, this is Spain, this is the place where you wanted to come to practice your Spanish. (But Sonia, you speak English too, what gives?) My excuse is that I'm already confident in my Spanish. While it's not perfect, I can say whatever I want, whenever I want, to anyone I want, and once I'm not surrounded by other Americans, I'll be comfortable falling into a Spanish-speaking routine.

3) In this program, we have a wide range of Spanish-speaking levels, from those who can barely string a few words together to a couple native speakers who are more comfortable with Spanish than English. When I hear some of the people speaking Spanish or see their level of comprehension, I wonder how they'll survive. Spanish university is still real university: professors talk quickly, papers are graded stringently. As they said in the orientation, they're not going to be sympathetic that you're a charismatic Californian who doesn't speak the language very well. Imagining myself at that level and being asked to do university-level work sounds absolutely horrifying, and I can't help but wonder why some people made this choice. Of course, this is compounded by observation 2, as many of the weakest speakers are the shyest about their speech. That said, I wish them the best of luck and hope that I'm merely being cynical. This has to happen every year, and I'm sure almost everyone does decently.

4) I've now had two dreams in Spanish :)

5) To my ear, the most distinct aspects of the Andalusian accent are the pronunciation of "ch" as "sh" and the elimination of the final consonant. So, "Hay muchos pasteles" would be "Hay musho pasteleh." (Or maybe "pahteleh." I can't figure out the internal S right now.) I find the "sh" sneaking its way into my own diction, although I've only had one instance of the Spain-wide lisp.