Day 1 – #Butterflies
Hi, my name’s Gemma Duffy, the Irish group leader for this year’s CSS Valencia language programme! I am a Spanish secondary school teacher in Bush Post Primary in Carlingford, Co. Louth and I am leading a small group of Irish secondary school students over to Valencia, Spain, to improve their Spanish language skills and also to have a great time at the same time.
I’ll be keeping this blog to keep you all informed on what we do each day of the programme and to give you an insight into what 3 weeks in Valencia studying Spanish is like.
Today is Sunday and I got to meet up with all of the group participants – there are 5 of us: myself, my brother Mícheál, Evie from Kildare, and Ailbhe and Emily from Dublin. I met up with everyone in Dublin airport, Evie with her parents at the check-in desk and Ailbhe and Emily at the boarding gate. We then all flew over to Valencia together with Ryanair. It was a late flight – we took off at 18:55 and touched down at Valencia airport at 22:40, late on Sunday evening.
We were met by Liam, Carla and Alba, the CSS Valencia representatives. We were all so happy to finally meet each other! It was late at night but they gave us a very quick orientation meeting on arrival, explaining that tomorrow would be our first day in class and that we would start at 08:30 in the morning. Our Spanish host families would bring us to the language academy for the first morning there. After that, Alba gave us our welcome pack which included maps of the city, notepads, pens and a public transport card to use on the buses, metros and trams of the city. The CSS reps then drove us to our host families’ homes where we settled in for the night.
