Senior Nate Truman spent his junior year in Zaragoza, Spain in the School Year Abroad program. Read the full story when the print edition hits stands on Sept. 24.

8:00 – Wake up, breakfast

Breakfast, which often included a piece of toast or spicy Spanish sausage, wasn’t a favorite part of Truman’s day. “I don’t recommend it to anybody,” he said.

9:00 – School starts

“I went to school on the metro, which was a line that finished in the later part of the year,” he said. Before then, he had unraveled the bus system in the area in order to travel.

Classes that Truman took included AP Spanish, Spanish Cinema, Myths and Legends of Spain, and Spanish and Mediterranean Art. The latter class was his favorite, mostly because the teacher had “kept things interesting,” Truman said. “He was an artist himself so he gave a lot of perspective on… how the influence of art from antiquity affects modern art now.”

Spanish Cinema was a history class in which Truman watched films corresponding to the time periods he was learning. In his Myths and Legends class, Truman read old Spanish texts such as Don Quijote and La Celestina. “It’s basically Shakespeare, but in Spanish,” he said. The class was very vocabulary intensive, and combined with the overall experience of going to school in Spain, allowed Truman to see the Spanish AP at the end of the year as “fairly simple.”

“Most of the classes were classified as honor classes because if you’re taking a class that is equally as hard in terms of the thought that’s going into it in America, but you’re in doing in Spanish, that just amps up the difficulty to a whole new level,” he said.

5:00 – School ends

7:00 – Fencing practice or time with friends

“There was a strip of street where most of the cosmopolitan life would happen,” he said. Sometimes he and friends would go eat, see a movie, or visit a cafe. “In Spain, you can sit at a cafe for three hours and only drink one coffee, and nobody gives you grief about it.”