A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

My Apartment in Sevilla It wasn't exactly my apartment per se because I had to share Apartamento 2E at No. 1 Virgen de Robledo with two Spanish roommates.  When I arrived in Spain on September 21, 1988 I had it all to myself for about a week and a half; Juan Carlos, who was 18 and hailed from Jerez de los Caballeros in Extremadura, was the first to arrive; Demetrio, 31, was from  Madrid and he rented a room in that apartment every fall. Apartamento 2E was owned by a middle-aged couple and was one of the many such lodgings used by the College Consortium for International Studies  to house American participants in its Semester in Spain program.  In my group, most of us lived in these residencias or in private homes with host families.  If memory serves, a few students opted to rent their own places without having to deal with Spanish roommates or host families; these, however, were a tiny subgroup in our 42-member CCIS Fall Term class. Even though you...

(C) 2006 Penguin Books In 1976, only a few months after the death of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a young ex-British Army officer named Antony Beevor began working on a book titled  The Spanish Civil War , the very conflict which had ended with Franco's Nationalist faction as the victors after nearly three years of vicious fighting with the vanquished "reds" of the Spanish Republic. Beevor's book was published in 1982, but because it was written before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many important aspects of the Soviets' "internationalist" support of the Spanish Republic were not covered in depth, making  The Spanish Civil War 's first edition worthy of the term "a work in progress" even if the author didn't realize it at the time. By the turn of the 21st Century, however, the Russians began granting access to the vast archives to scholars, researchers and authors from the once-feared West, and Beevor is one of ...

When I was 25 years old and still working toward an AA degree in Journalism/Mass Communications at what's now Miami-Dade College, I was accepted into the College Consortium for International Studies' Semester in Spain program. For 12 weeks in the Fall Term of the 1988-89 academic year, I lived and studied in Seville, Spain's third largest city, along with 41 other students from around the U.S. Not knowing what, exactly, I was getting myself into, I also volunteered to send dispatches from Seville to Catalyst , my home campus' student newspaper as its first foreign correspondent. Having had several years' worth of experience as a reporter and section editor, I thought that it would be a somewhat tricky but still manageable assignment, but in the days before the Internet and e-mail were available to the average person, it ended up being harder and more frustrating than I'd bargained for. Nevertheless, I did manage to, as we reporter types like to say, get...

I first saw Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti Western”  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  when it was broadcast by the ABC television network as a Sunday Night Movie feature back in the day when the home video revolution was still a decade away and the Big Three TV networks devoted some of their prime time schedule to air not-quite-new-but-not-quite-old theatrical movies.   Because I was only 10 or 11 years old at the time and wasn’t educated about movies or the film industry, I was not aware that  The Good, the Bad and the Ugly  was the third chapter of Leone’s “Dollars Trilogy” (which also included A Fistful of Dollars  and  For a Few Dollars More ) or that it was originally an Italian-made flick (shot on locations in Spain and southern Italy) titled  Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo  (literally, “The good, the ugly, the bad").  Of course, because I was so young I didn’t quite understand all the nuances – visual and thematic – of L...

When I was a 25-year-old college sophomore and majoring in Journalism/Mass Communications, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take part in an overseas-study program co-sponsored by Miami-Dade Community College’s Foreign Language Department and the College Consortium for International Studies. At the time, I had just about taken most of the required courses for my Associate in Arts degree except math (my bete noir) and three credits’ worth of the foreign language pre-requisite. I had also, or so I thought, done everything I had set out to do as a reporter/editor at the campus student newspaper, so I was feeling a bit unmoored and restless without a plan for what I figured would be my final year on the staff. Looking back on it now, I’m not sure what, exactly, prompted me to sign up for the Semester in Spain program. Part of it, I’m sure, was a sense that this would be my best chance to go to Europe for a significant amount of time. Maybe it was my journalist’s instinctive...

In Spain, soccer is a wild, no-holds barred contest January 26, 1989 Alex Diaz-Granados Columnist SEVILLE, Spain (CCIS Program) When one is in Spain, one must do as the Spaniards do, or so we've been told by the College Consortium for International Studies Center staff when we ask about how to enjoy our free time here. This applies to everything -- from eating lunch at 2 p.m. and dinner between 9 and 10 p.m. to drinking tall glasses of "cerveza Cruzcampo" (the Spanish Budweiser) with tapas at one of the billions of bars in the city. And for those of us with a desire to be athletic (even if it's once during a 12-week term), it applies to playing sports. Because soccer is the national sport here, it was only natural that we, too, would want to catch a little "futbol fever." Most of the time we watched soccer games on Spanish television, although quite a few of us went to see the Spain-Argentina exhibition game or the Spain-Ireland game,...

Study abroad is more than educational: it’s an experience Alex Diaz-Granados Columnist (Originally published in the December 1, 1988 issue of Catalyst ) SEVILLE, Spain (CCIS Program) Over the past six weeks of my stay here in Seville as a participant in the College Consortium for International Studies’ Semester in Spain program, I have come to understand how challenging studying abroad really is. Several other students from this campus are also taking part in this program. In many respects, studying abroad is no different from studying at our home college or university. We have our schedule set up much like we do in the U.S. with lectures and reading assignments. We have midterms and finals, of course, although in some classes final exams are given at the director’s discretion. Unlike studying in the U.S., we’re learning about a different country’s history, culture, government and economic system, not by reading about these in a textbook, but by living in it. “It’s be...