When I first decided to go abroad, I automatically thought I wanted to live in an apartment. I did not really even consider a residencia or a host family. I saw the option of living in an apartment with a “host mom” who would bring us food everyday, so I thought that seemed like the best idea. I also was under the impression that I would have many different roommates, including Spanish ones. However, when I got to Granada with my roommate from home, we found out that it was just us two living in our new apartment.

At first, this seemed nice, we had a lot of space and were already used to living with just each other. We had so much privacy and often times had people over before we went out at night (which you can’t do in a home stay.) After the first couple of weeks, I started to wish I was in a home stay.  I was not practicing my Spanish very much and the neighbors were getting angry because we were being loud. We learned very quickly that in Spain it is NOT normal to have friends over. If you want to hangout with people, you meet them out somewhere. The walls were paper-thin and you could hear a mouse on the other side.  We stopped having friends over and started immersing ourselves more into the Spanish culture more by going out and exploring.

I would suggest to anybody to chose a home stay or a residencia, unless you do not want to practice your Spanish at all!