I stepped onto my 15-hour flight to Santiago de Chile feeling reasonably confident with my Spanish. Never mind nine years of studying it at school and university, I had five months of experience of living in Spain under my belt. Although I’d been warned by a few Latin Americans I’d met in Salamanca that Chilean Spanish was notorious for being one of the hardest- if not THE hardest- to grasp out of the entire Spanish-speaking world, I naively thought to myself, how different could it be? Continue reading
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The Levant, otherwise known as the Levante or Sharqi, is a wind that blows westwards through the Strait of Gibraltar. Local myth has it that the wind has an ill nature and has curious effects: some say it slows the mind, others that it induces fatigue, and yet more claim that it invokes a general feeling of indescribable malaise. When it blows, the temperature seems to drop and clouds fill the sky, though it remains humid, and no amount of deodorant can hold back the sweat. People just seem to friction up. And yesterday, after a three day assault, it died away with the news that my home country had severed its ties with the EU. Truly, the Levant is an ill wind. Continue reading
Durham Students Abroad 