Ben Hutchins

After spending the weekend in Barcelona, our first full day back in Valencia had commenced. After having a yummy breakfast of eggs, toast, fruit, and coffee, Mason and I headed over to the ISA classroom where our second guest lecture began. We had a very interesting topic for the day – pop culture. In this lecture, many topics were discussed. In this lecture, we primarily discussed “The Modiva”, which was a cultural revolution during the 1970s and 1980s in Spain. We learned about how the death of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, resulted in this movement across Spain, in which the old conservative ideals were left in the past and the new ideals of expression, freedom, and imagination swept the nation. We learned about how this revolution touched many facets of the Spanish identity including art, television, and music. We watched several video clips from '80s movies, as well as listened to some Spanish music that demonstrated this cultural revolution. This was very interesting to learn about and it was great getting more insight into modern Spanish culture.

Following the guest lecture, Mason and I headed back to our homestays where we took a siesta and had lunch with our host family, which consisted of paella, soup, and bread. Being well rested and our belly’s full of food, we headed back to the ISA offices to do a service learning activity as an entire group. This service learning activity consisted of the entire group helping out the community by escorting elderly individuals in the city from their nursing home to a very nice park in the city. After assisting the elderly to the park, we showed them around the park and the person who I was assisting really liked the purple and pink flowers that were very pretty. Following this, the entire group did a fun activity with the people we were helping, where we asked them various questions about music, their families, their hobbies, and other questions of the sort. My Spanish is not very good, so I struggled quite a lot at the beginning; however, other members of my group helped me out and I ended up getting to know the people we were communicating with quite well. It was great to gain more insight into their lives and I could tell that they really appreciated us and I really enjoyed the time I spent with them. While I don’t have any pictures of the people we helped due to privacy reasons, shown are some pictures of the very nice garden that we showed them around.

Today was a great experience and it was very nice to put a smile on someone’s face!