Sun shining and yet more problems

It’s true what they say that people are happier when the sun is shining! At the weekend we had some lovely weather, and all of our issues seemed to pale into insignificance whilst I had my window open, my music on and doing my cleaning! Last weekend my parents came and it was so amazing to see them and to spend some time showing them round the town and having a catch up! When they went, it was back to normality and back to the everyday tasks!

Last week I had my first Portuguese class! It is probably one of the harder things that I’ve done – learning a completely new language from a language that I’m not fluent in! Sitting in that class as the only Erasmus student was slightly daunting but my classmates made me feel welcome and were at hand to help me when I had no clue what was going on – especially when our teacher used French abbreviations! I had absolutely no idea what he meant with some of them! So I think it will be a big learning curve – trying to learn a new language, whilst at the same time trying to master the one that I came out here to improve!

We had confirmation last week that we could drop our criminal law class – this all had to be checked and approved by our home university. It was an interesting course - all about the theory of criminal law – but the teacher spoke at about 100mph! Even the French students couldn’t follow her all the time! If they couldn’t, there was absolutely no hope for us Erasmus students in the class!

The saying ‘when one door closes, another one opens’ is quite apt here, but more in the sense of problems! When one problem is resolved, another one appears. This is definitely true in my case at the moment. I learnt yesterday that my Portuguese class, which I found out last week wasn’t going to be noted (no exams or final mark given), won’t be worth any credits. I need these credits….so in an attempt to sort things out, I have been frantically emailing my teacher trying to sort things out – it’s a work in progress!