Today is my last day. I’ve decided that (overall) I am sad. Don’t get me wrong; I am really excited to see everyone back home. But I just said goodbye to the man who makes my coffee everyday and I almost cried. It sounds stupid, but I’ve seen this guy nearly every single day since I arrived. He’s almost become one of the symbols of Granada.
Also, I may have purchased 20 euros worth of his coffee… So here’s hoping that customs does not steal it. That would really make me cry. I never really adjusted to coffee in America. Eventually, I acclimated to Starbucks coffee, but I never really got into ‘real’ coffee… You know, the coffee that is at least 60% coffee and is not mostly made up of syrup and sugar. Every time that I tried coffee with milk back home, I wanted to spit it out. Here, it is fantastic. At our goodbye dinner, Manolo, the man that worked with us and found us living arrangements, said “Coffee in the US is dirty water” and I am going to have to agree with him. One of the things that I will miss most is the coffee here. And my croissants. I’ve grown very accustomed to good pastries, so I’m in for a nasty shock when I get back to State College.
I finished the last of my souvenir shopping. The only things I needed were some thank-you gifts and I knew exactly what I wanted to get them.
My last meal was at the German restaurant….Yes, yes. I ate there two nights in a row. But it’s sooo good! Literally the best food I have ever had the privilege to consume.
After dinner, Haoyun and I walked up and looked at some shops and ended up near the cathedral. I said goodbye to the cathedral and Haoyun and came back to the apartment to finish packing up and backing up all of my data (in three different places. I’m not obsessive or anything).
In about 8 hours, I will be in the Granada airport. In about 12 hours I will be arriving in Madrid. In 24 hours, I will be home in State College. I am definitely going to miss Granada, but I am excited to see home.
I never did adjust to the fact that I was living in a different country. I was not around long enough to go through the other stages of culture shock, so I am still blissfully in love with everything in Granada. Except people that walk slow, but that’s a problem back home as well.
I still cannot believe that I successfully tested people on an experiment that I helped design and I cannot wait to start delving into the data to see what I can find. While finding participants was more difficult than I had expected, I was glad that I was able to test more people than I had originally intended.
I do not want to get overly sappy, but the PIRE program was definitely a life-changing event for me. As someone who usually struggles with self-confidence, realizing that I can handle myself in a different culture and still manage to conduct research was quite an uplifting experience. Being surrounded by a different language has made me more interested in the different areas of linguistics and I’m sure that Angie and Annie got sick of me asking random grammatical questions (but I deeply appreciated their help and explanations nonetheless). I look forward to better developing my research skills in the upcoming semester and through grad school.
Thanks to everyone that has believed in me, supported me, helped me, and enabled me to travel to Granada and conduct research. I’ll see you all soon back in the States.