So we hadn’t been here a whole week, we USAC students and visiting professor, when the little city of Donostia-San Sebastián exploded in the annual fiesta of its eponymous saint. Somehow this name-day also coincides with the tamborrada, a commemoration, some say, of the time when Napoleon Bonaparte’s forces occupied the city in the early nineteenth century. What [...]

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Rita Pardee is a junior at UNR, double-majoring in English/Language & Linguistics and Spanish. This is not her first study-abroad experience; a few years ago she did a homestay in Argentina, where she remembers feeling so frustrated at having to navigate daily life in her beginning Spanish that sometimes she would sit in her room and pine for [...]

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 In The New Spaniards, his survey of their amazing 50-year transformation from a conservative and mostly rural society to a socialist industrial state, John Hooper calls modern Spain “fissile.” Basques, Catalans, Galacians, and Castillians still only grudgingly accept the national government’s authority, and even on national TV José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero is referred to as [...]

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See http://www.unr.edu/news/detail.aspx?id=2491

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Seventy-two hours – no time to hacer justicia a Madrid! First, and not too early in the jet-lagged morning, a walking tour of the old city, followed by a guided visit to the Prado; next day, a road trip to the medieval Jewish-Christian-Islamic fortress town of Toledo; and third, an afternoon visit of my own, away from the [...]

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Only a few more days before we depart from SFO via Paris CDG to Madrid, where the students and I have a three-day tour before shuttling to the University of the Basque Country in San Sebastián-Donostia (”Donostia” is the Basque word for “lovely green hilly coastal town with great beaches and four-star Michelin food culture where it [...]

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