So its been a whirlwind of excitement, nervous and overall incredible experiences. I have started my second month living in Tarragona, now that I have an apartment and university has started and I have met a whole bunch of amazing people from all over the world life has started to settle down and become more real. Although we have had a lot of struggles trying to organize internet for the apartment and have been forced to go to cafes to do work but hopefully that will end soon.

The classes aren’t too hard as they are all in English so that’s fine and the whole vibe of Spain is very relaxed. Its taken a little while to get used to the different eating hours as they don’t eat lunch until 3 pm, due to the siesta break, and dinner usually isn’t until 9 pm.

Tarragona is a beautiful city, it is small but easy to navigate and most things are within 10 mins walk. The beach is amazing and as the weather has still been beautiful I have been able to spend a lot of time making the most of it. I was also lucky enough to be able to be here during the 2 weeks of Santa Tecla, which is a festival to celebrate Tarragona. There were a lot of traditional music and dances, as well as parades, concerts, fireworks and the famous human towers.

Also while here I have discovered that the Catalonia area wants their independence from Spain and therefore there has been a lot of political demonstrations and strikes throughout Tarragona, although it is a big deal here, they are not radical demonstrations and most of the time just involve people taping tin pans at 10 pm or walking through the streets with the independence flag.

However, there has been a few days in which they have had strikes which have closed the university and therefore we have had numerous long weekends. so although it has been ‘disappointing’ that uni was cancelled, I have been able to do a few day trips to Barcelona with a bunch of people I have met here and also a weekend trip away to Valencia, which was amazing.

It has been an amazing and big couple of months, I am super keen for the rest to come.

Eliza Daly, Bachelor of Science (Animal Behaviour) student, Semester 2 2017 exchange at Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Spain

• Read Eliza’s blog post here