Hi! My name is Alyson. I am in my second semester of my junior year at College of Charleston and my major is Communications. I have been given the opportunity to study abroad in Trujillo this semester while living with a Spanish host family and I couldn’t be more excited. I chose this specific program for so many reasons. One of them was the fact that the Trujillo program was somewhat tailored to the communication major and had all the major classes that I needed to take in order to get the right amounts of credit to graduate. Another was because I’m not a huge fan of big cities, as I grew up outside of the city and Trujillo is a tiny 10,000 people town in the middle of nowhere which I was very intrigued by.

A goal I have set for myself while I am abroad is to learn my host countries language better. I have taken three Spanish classes but I am still far from being fluent in Spanish. I would also like to get better at understanding Spanish as sometimes they speak so fast that I cannot make out the words. I have done some research on the dialect they speak in central Spain and it differs greatly of the dialects in the north or in the south of Spain. In central Spain they pronounce their C as a th and they drop the S on the end of almost everything. For example, instead of saying goodbye as “Adios” like they would do in northern and Eastern Spain or even in Mexico, central Spain just says, “Adio”. This will definitely take some time to get use to speaking Spanish this way but I’m so excited to learn more about the language and culture there, I’m sure I will pick it up relatively quickly.