A one-year student exchange spent in Spain was an amazing experience for Weyburn student Ben Sidloski, who shared photos and thoughts about his year with the Rotary Club at a recent luncheon meeting.
Ben graduated from the Comp last year, and went to Alicante, Spain for a year, located on the country’s east coast on the Mediterranean Sea.
He showed many photos from his year, including from an extensive tour of Europe taken during the year, as well as many views of the city and activities he did with his host family.
During the year, he got together with other Rotary exchange students for activities, including the orientation for the year held in Madrid.
An interesting aspect of that visit is he discovered there is a circus university in Madrid, and performers could often be seen on the streets. “I thought they were pretty cool,” he said.
The city of Alicante has a population around 330,000, said Ben, commenting, “It doesn’t seem that big.”
The centre of the city was the oldest part, with many interesting examples of architecture, such as cathedrals and castles, and Ben said the city overall is very beautiful.
“It was pretty much everybody’s dream destination. Most of the time the city was filled with tourists from Europe and North Africa,” he said, adding from excursions he made to the surrounding area, “Almost every village you see has a castle on a hill, and cathedrals with spires.”
After he had been with his host family for a little while, he wanted to show his thanks by making them a Canadian breakfast staple, pancakes.
The problem he ran into was he could not find any baking powder or margarine, so he tried making the pancakes without the baking powder.
“After everyone was done, I ate some, and they were easily the most disgusting thing I’ve ever had,” he said, chuckling, and noting his hosts all said they tasted good so as not to disappoint him.
The country around Alicante is comparable to the B.C. interior, close to being a desert as it was hot and dry much of the time.
He was able to visit other centres in the area, such as Valencia, where he saw a museum of arts and sciences.
One photo he took from the southeast tip of Spain was on a high point overlooking the Mediterranean, called El Faro, and said this was known at the “edge of the world” because of the phenomenal view afforded from the height.
A sight that fascinated him as well were orange groves by many of the cathedrals, and noted many of them were planted and cultivated by the Moorish people.
A huge event in Spain was Carnivale in mid-February, “pretty much the biggest thing in Spain. Everybody dresses up like it’s Halloween, and just party,” said Ben.
The class of the high school he attended took a trip to Madrid, and they visited an art museum and took in a theatre production with the literature class.
He also saw a large sign put up on a public building, declaring “Refugees welcome”, and he said, “I thought that was pretty awesome.”
He showed photos of large outdoor arenas which used to hold bull-fighting events, but Ben noted with the younger generation coming up, they are beginning to phase out bull-fighting, although it can still be found in the larger urban centres.
In many places in Spain, not many people knew about Rotary, but they knew of an exchange program called Erasmus, which allows students in Europe to have exchanges to other European countries very cheaply.
Easter provided some interesting sights, said Ben, noting large parades were held where some people wore huge over-sized heads, some depicting what he thought were weird faces. They marched along with lots of musicians and marching bands.
With Rotary, the exchange students had two trips during the year, and at one point his mother Adrienne and an uncle visited him, and they did a wide-ranging tour of Spain together.
Unlike the Rotary students who come to Weyburn and take an extensive Western trip as part of their year here, he said, “We didn’t actually go with Rotary to see much of Spain, but with my mom we went all over southern Spain.”
One of the delights of this tour, he said, was that in many of the villages of 1,000 or less, the food was “fantastic” most of the time.
On the big European trip with fellow Rotary exchange students, they visited such centres as Prague, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Budapest and Berlin, where they saw the remains of the Berlin Wall and the Holocaust memorial.
They also visited Vienna, Venice and Rome as their last destination.
As a pianist, the one frustration for Ben was not being able to find a piano to play until about one month before the end of his year, when he found one in a place called the Theatre Cafe. When he went in, a Swiss man was playing, and they talked and played songs, comparing styles.
“The whole year was really phenomenal, and it was an experience I’ll never forget,” Ben told the Rotarians. “Please continue to do this. It’s a great year for people. There are a lot of things I never would have known about or experienced if I hadn’t done this year.”
Asked how he found learning the language, Ben said by about the end of two months, he began to get better speaking Spanish, but really didn’t feel comfortable speaking it until three months, and six months in, he could both understand it and speak it better.
