INTRODUCTION

Hello, my name is Oscar. I am 20 years old, from the United Kingdom, and this blog will be all about my year abroad in Ecuador.

"Hello!"

So for the Spanish part of my university degree, the third year is spent entirely in a Spanish-speaking country. The majority of my classmates (in fact all of them apart from myself and one other) chose to go to Spain; quite a lot of them study French, so they have to divide their year between two places. Besides, spending a year in Spain seems fantastic anyway. But I decided to go to South America. As nice as Spain is, I have been there quite a few times and felt it would be much more exciting to go somewhere new. A country I had not been to before would be more challenging and an overall more unique experience, one which (hopefully) would contribute towards me growing as a person, and gain more maturity and responsibility – I will be 21 when I return to the UK.

So my choices were Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, and Costa Rica. I chose to go to Ecuador, based mostly on the programme, location, and features which the host university and Guayaquil offered. Guayaquil is the city where I’d be based (the second capital after Quito). This process started around late 2012. Until then, I had never given much thought at all to Ecuador but all of a sudden my life began to increasingly be focused around Ecuador and Guayaquil.