Hey everybody! ¿Qué pasa? Just an hour ago I completed my first day in week seven of my IIP here in Madrid. Thinking that there is less than two weeks left of my time here in Spain makes me feel a mix of emotions. On one hand, I am excited to go home and see my family and friends again, especially since the 4th of July was last week and I did not get to celebrate it except by wearing a dark blue shirt and an American telling me at my Spanish lesson ¡Feliz cuarto de julio! On the other hand, I am sad to leave Spain behind. This program has taught me so much about the world and myself and could be the only time in my life I get to come to this beautiful country. However, there is still time to continue maximizing the time I have left here and to create life-long memories.
This past weekend I took a trip to the South of Spain to a city named Málaga with a couple friends. This beautiful city is right on the coast and offers the best views I have seen all program long. During my visit I got to see amazing sights. The first sight I went to was La Alcazaba. This impressive structure was a Muslim fortress built during the 11th century and included amazing sights overlooking the city and luscious greenery inside. In the center of it was a beautiful fountain surrounded by shrubs and a canopy for shade that represented to me like a miniature Garden of Eden. Afterwards, we went to the remains of a Roman theater right next to La Alcazaba, which offered us a little glimpse of what leisure life was like during the Roman rule over Spain.
After we left the Roman theater, we took a small walk over to the Picasso Museum. For those who did not know, the world-renowned painter Pablo Picasso was from Málaga and in his honor there is a museum displaying his masterpieces. Although I am not a huge art fan, I surprisingly really enjoyed his work because I enjoyed Picasso’s depictions of normal, everyday things in unique and creative ways. When we finished admiring his work, we then headed over to the beach and spent the rest of our afternoon on an inflatable water park on the beach, which was a blast and a fantastic way to cap our first day in the city. Next day, before leaving for our train back to Madrid, we spent the day relaxing and playing a little soccer on the beach. Although this was the perfect way to cap the visit to Málaga, I unfortunately did not apply enough sunscreen and got so sunburnt that when I returned to Madrid, I immediately went to a store to go and buy Aloe.
These past six weeks doing my IIP have allowed me to observe the communication at my internship. One thing I have been extremely fortunate about with my placement was that my two bosses are both Americans. Because of this, the communication has been low context because that is how we communicate here in the U.S. With that said, however, I have had to navigate miscommunication situations with others at my company. One example I think of was when doing a meeting with our marketing director. We had a Google Meet to discuss a project that I was working on and to talk about the next steps with it. During the meeting, there were times I found him difficult to understand because he spoke too fast to me and because of that I missed parts of what he said. Luckily, however, he shared his screen when speaking with me and shared a document with me, so even though I did not understand everything he said, I was able to read it and understand what he needed from me.
Another challenge I have encountered regarding my internship revolves around working in an international business. Expanish is an international and multi-sited organization, with schools in Argentina and Spain. With one of my bosses living in Buenos Aires, which is five hours behind Madrid, and my other boss returning to California for two weeks, which is nine hours behind, there were times where I was on my own for periods of time during the day. The biggest challenge with this was that communication was slow. They myself messaging my bosses before they were online and then them messaging me after I left my internship, sometimes we did not respond until the following day, which could have been devastating if we needed something crucial and therefore a quick response.
