Another Tiring But Exciting Day

I am exhausted. I have discovered that listening and speaking in Spanish makes everything one hundred times more tiring. By the time I left my internship at 6:30 today, I don't think I could remember Spanish or English. Right now, I can barely keep my eyes open and we haven't even eaten supper yet--yes, it's 9PM here but we usually don't eat til 10.

The reason my day was so tiring is I went to 2 classes today, camped out on campus and did homework and ate lunch, then headed to my internship. Doesn't sound like a whole lot but consider it was all done in a language other than my native one. My classes weren't too bad, and I learned a lot as usual. I enjoyed my sack lunch of a ham sandwich and kiwi. The internship was what really took it out of me, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

Today when I arrived, the only person in the chemical analysis lab was Silvia (the other name i couldn't remember). I was to work with her this afternoon. She hands me a folder of concrete-asphalt studies and tells me to read them (they were in english). When she got back, she would need me to help her understand the studies. Granted it was in english, it wasn't hard to read; to comprehend, that was another matter. They were studies on the stress, fatigue, and wear on roads using different agglomerates. Now I don't know much about cement and stress and tension aren't really my areas of expertise, but I managed to figure out what the studies were about. Then came the fun part...answering her questions in Spanish. I managed surprisingly well through a mixture of spanish and sign language to explain to her what she wanted to know. We then moved to her computer.

She pulls up a french cement company's website. It can only be viewed in French and English. So we viewed it in English. She explained what she was looking for, which I understood for the most part. She begins to show be their different products and has me explain to her what each product was developed for. If speaking Spanish requires a lot of thought, switching back and forth between English and Spanish takes your brain to the point of explosion. In addition, we kept getting interrupted by Diego (the big boss) and Frank (Erin's mentor). For the most part they just wanted to talk. I enjoyed this because I could practice my spanish and take a break from the headache of explaining something I really didn't understand in English in Spanish.

To this point, I still didn't really understand why I was doing what I was doing. Then Diego came in for about the 4th time. This time, he explained to me the project with spanish, english, and pictures. Finally, I understood. In the process of mixing asphalt-cement there are two components, bilumen and agglomerate (mix). Currently, it is forbidden to use limestone in the agglomerate because after sometime the wear and tear of traffic basically polishes it smooth. Not good for roads. The project is to take materials such as limestone or other natural resources and find another material that can coat that material to change it's properties. So basically use something that wouldn't work normally and add a compound that reacts with it to change it so it will be more durable than what is currently used. On top of durability, we're looking at cost effectiveness and better resistance to heat. In the summer in Spain, it is not uncommon to have temperatures above 110 degrees farhenheit. This causes problems with the roads.

It's very interesting and very different to what I'm used to working with. I'm very excited to continue doing research and learning more. I also learned quite a bit of spanish and am expanding my vocabulary very rapidly with this internship.