Today we actually had a face to face interview with a girl from the other side of the world; well, it was almost a face to face interview because we talked to her through Skype so we could see her and she saw us. Does that count?

Anyway, she’s also from Caracas, Venezuela. Her name is Valentina Ibarra Padilla and she’s 18 years old. Due to Frida’s previous experiences from Venezuela, she can with 100 % guarantee state that no one, absolutely no one, speaks English in Venezuela. Not even the English teachers in the schools knew English. They just translated a sentence word to word from Spanish to English without being aware of the grammatical differences; the most common example was that they always said “how many years do you have? I have 18 years” when they asked someone how old they were. So that was the main reason to why Valentina wanted to go as an exchange student; she wanted to learn English!  

Valentina went to Edinboro, which is a small city in Pennsylvania in the United States of America. It was quite a contrast for her, because she had lived her entire life in Caracas which is a huge city and it has about 12 million inhabitants. But she really thought that Edinboro was beautiful and she loved that fact that it had a lot of nature; something she had never experienced before. The thing she liked most about Edinboro was in the summer, which was without any doubts the best season, because there was a beautiful (but extremely cold) lake where you can spend your time with friends and family. It made her laugh every time someone said “do you want to go to the beach?”, because she really did not consider that rocky cliff a beach (if you have ever been to Venezuela you will understand her point, because the beaches there are amazing!).

She learned a lot during her year in America; she became more independent, she learned how to make things happen on her own, how to take care of herself, she learned about different cultures and how to deal with different kinds of people. For her it was one of the best experiences of her life and she wouldn’t change it for anything. And she would love to go back one day to visit her host family and all the friends she made during the year.

As mentioned before, the main reason to why she wanted to be an exchange student was because she wanted to learn English. So when she had finished high school in Venezuela she went to America to do the senior year again (they have a different school system than what we have in Sweden, because in Sweden you must have at least one year left of high school when you go to study abroad as an exchange student). She has always dreamed of studying at a university abroad, but the language had always been a barrier. But now afterwards when she has learned English, she sees no reason at all to why she should study abroad.

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