Between the first and second year, I applied for the Lingo Travel Award that Worldwise Learning Centre offers, it’s a chance to win £500 towards an experience related to the language you’re studying. You can go to a country for two weeks, practise the language spoken and experience the culture. And from this, I went to Munich in Germany for two weeks.
Another highlight of my time here at the University of Central Lancashire whilst studying Modern Languages BA (Hons) was going to Alicante, Spain on a University trip for one week. We did a lot of activities at the University of Alicante with another group of students from the Czech Republic. This included a paella cooking course which was so cool, as we got to cook both fish and meat paella and then eat it afterwards! We also took a day trip up to Benidorm, but on the way, we stopped off at a lot of coastal places. I learnt a lot more Spanish during the week I spent there, as there was a lot of interaction with the locals.
In my second year, I got to go to Buenos Aires, Argentina for a week. We did so many interesting things. We went to watch an evening salsa class, visited a parliament building and visited Eva Peron's house. We also saw the Plaza de Mayo, where women meet every week in hopes to find their children who 'disappeared' during the dictatorship. I also got to hear a different type of Spanish dialect which I found quite hard to understand, but by the end of the week I had gotten used to it.
"I believe European languages are important because they’re not taught in schools and universities as much and we need languages in order to communicate with different countries, for business and when we go on holidays."
— Lara Betteridge, Modern Languages BA (Hons)
