Tarragona: From Dusk Till Dawn
Hi there!
I’m back again with the scoop on Tarragona and what a typical day looks like for me. I am very active and so I enjoy working out. Remember the fancy gym I mentioned about three weeks ago? Well that’s where my day starts. I get up at 7AM, when the gym opens, and go exercise for about an hour or so. Depending on the day, I would either to weighted exercises such as squats, deadlifts, bench/dumbbell presses or body weight exercises such as push-ups, muscle-ups, pull-ups, chin-ups or dips and when I feel like breaking a sweat or two, I get on the natural form treadmill for about 30 minutes. This routine awakens my senses and preps me for the remainder of the day. After my workout is done, I take a shower and grab my breakfast. I usually have oatmeal and fruits (bananas, apricots, apples, pineapples) that I made from the previous night. Even though our hostel has a mini kitchen, we do not have any utensils so I usually add milk to my oatmeal and let it sit overnight and then right before I have it, I slice some fruits into the softened oatmeal. I usually finish showering and eating breakfast by 8:35AM and leave for class.
The bus doesn’t arrive till 8:43AM so whiles we wait for the bus, we catchup with each on what is going on amongst ourselves. The bus ride is about 12 minutes so we arrive at the school by 8:55-9:00AM. Our classes ran from 9:00AM to 11:00Am, when we take a 15-minute coffee/bathroom break. We return to lectures till 12 PM when we go for lunch. The lunch lasts for an hour on average. After lunch, we return for our second course of the day from 1PM to 3:30PM. We usually return to the hostel by 4PM, grab quick snacks and head out again. Our favorite destination is usually the beach. There are so many beautiful beaches in Tarragona so we tend to go to different beaches every other day or so. And one of my cultural shocks is that, regardless of the day or time, the beaches were sizable occupied. From what I have discerned, people in Tarragona live a very stress-free life and there is a human element in everything they do. On one of our tours, we were all about 15 minutes late and I was worried that the tardiness might not reflect well on us so I began to apologize to our tour guide and to my surprise, he said “oh you guys are fine. 15 minutes late is not late at all!” This attitude is prominent in the way people live here so even on “working days”, you will not be a lonely surfer!
After 2-3 hrs of swimming, running, walking and sunbathing, we head back to the hostel and shower and regroup to go eat dinner. As with the beach, we tend to go to different restaurants for our dinners. On one occasion, we left the beach very early in the evening and decided to get off the bus right around the old town square, where most of the restaurants are located. We walked around for close to an hour trying to find an open restaurant serving anything but just liquor and coffee but found none! It was during siesta so most of the restaurants were closed and the ones that were open were not serving any food but drinks/coffee. Lesson here: be aware of the time and culture.
After we are done with dinner, we break up into small groups to work on our homework problems. Each floor of the hostel has a common room that are furnished with desks and chairs so we tend to occupy the common rooms of about 3 floors. The common rooms are big enough to accommodate us all but we thought if we were all in the same room, we would be distracted so we worked in smaller groups instead. After we are done with the homework problems, we then play card games for an hour or so. By the time the card games are done, it is usually around 11PM-12AM and we all retire for the night, to rise again and do it all over again. On days we do not have classes, we tend to go to the beach early in the morning to watch the sun rise. On our last day in Tarragona, after we watched the sun rise, I decided to swim a little bit before heading back to the hostel. When I first entered the water, it was so cold I almost ran back out but I decided I was cold already and went on to swim. The water was very calm and serene, with seagulls gliding ceremoniously above. After a few minutes in the water, I noticed the most beautiful thing I have seen yet on this dialogue. Beautiful yellow and green fishes, lot of them, swimming all around me. It was a surreal experience and I instantly forgot about the cold from which I almost fled. In a nutshell, our days in Tarragona are pretty eventful and so much fun and somehow, I have no idea how, we manage to be very productive amidst all the fun. If you get the opportunity to go on a dialogue, jump at it. I guarantee you will not regret it. I have learned so much about myself and others on this trip that I would not have known anything about, aside the fact that I have what it takes to sit through a Thermodynamics class for five hours a day. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoy sharing with you. I will be back with some more in the next blog. Until then, Au revoir!
