2010 Blogs

Salamanca: Welcome to New York

06/03/2011

I flew from Dayton to New Jersey. With the flight delayed by half an hour and the slow hotel shuttle bus, I arrived later than what I planned. I met quite a few members of the group as I entered the hotel before they left to explore New York City (we were only 8 miles away from Manhattan). I spent a little while chatting with Holly Hexter who has been coordinating our study abroad from Washington, D.C.

Our orientation meeting provided us with icebreaker activities as well as the history and background of the Council for Opportunity in Education. COE works with post-secondary institutions and agencies that host TRIO programs (Student Support Services at IUE) to promote equal education opportunity.

So far, this group has formed a nice, cohesive party. I was very pleased at the diversity of our group and the students range from majoring in engineering to undecided. We had lunch together, aluminum coke bottles, and discussed the code of conduct for this study abroad.

We left for the airport in two groups. I traveled on the first shuttle with Evelyn Rivera-Torres, our group leader from the University of Puerto Rico. The second group traveled with Holly.

At the airport, I was the last person to get my ticket, but I lost the group and headed to security thinking that they were in front of me. They were behind me due to an incorrect name on one of the flight tickets. We were in the no wi-fi zone of the airport for our flight to Portugal, so I could not check my email or call to put a travel alert on my bank card. I spent my free time watching people and thinking about which famous people they resembled.

I had stayed up the previous two nights so that I would sleep on the plane, but I only slept an hour (the first hour of Ramona and Beezus). I made it all the way through The King's Speech. There wasn't any Doctor Who to watch, so I analyzed the Portuguese subtitles for an episode of Bones. We hustled because we only had 15 minutes to catch our connecting flight in Lisbon to Madrid. We had almost half of the plane in our group, so we believe that they delayed the take-off for us so that we could board.

Evelyn-photo: Saindy Claude

We arrived in Madrid to a light rain. There was still a two and a half hour bus ride to Salamanca to anticipate. We were headed to the Carmelitas Residence.

-Dorotha