Expanding Language & Bridging Cultures: Olga Segura and Bélinda Fundaro Navigate an Intensive English Course at Atlantic

Expanding language reaches beyond becoming a fluent speaker. During our conversation, course participants Bélinda Fundaro and Olga Segura spoke of the richness of merging cultures and the joy of making personal connections.

Olga who lives and runs a business in the Pyrenees attended her course through an EOI (Escuela Oficial de Idiomas) programme while Bélinda joined using government-funded professional training credits accumulated during her professional career in France.

The two women participated in our Intensive General English course alongside students from many different countries.

Fine art graduate, Olga Segura and her husband left Barcelona to seek out the tranquillity of the Pyrenees. They now run horseback riding centre Animi Equi in the Valley of Benasque and Olga was at Atlantic to sharpen her English skills.

I’m from Barcelona, but I live in the Pyrenees on the border between France and Spain. I set up a business with my husband to do with horses because he loves horses.

We have a house we rent to toursists. It’s an old house that we renovated. This is my work now. I studied fine arts. We lived and worked in Barcelona, but we moved to the countryside because we wanted to live more relaxed and calm. We love it. We love the rural landscape, the mountains, and it’s very, very nice.

Recently retired, Bélinda explained her journey to Atlantic:

For my part, I’m Bélinda. I am recently retired, four months ago to be precise. I choose to learn English for myself and to travel, to watch films. It’s a very personal project, but I I could use my professional training credit. This is a credit that you accumulate all along your career in France, and you can use it whenever you want. I haven’t used it before, so I had a big credit, and I could use it even at the end of my career. I am lucky, I have the time and the credit.

After working for many years, joining a class abroad made for a great experience, as Olga explained:

Wow. Amazing. I feel like a child. I feel very vulnerable. You don’t have friends, and you don’t know anything, and everything is new. Sometimes I think it’s like when you go to Mars or to the moon, because everything is different. You need to be very creative with words, with sentences. You need to make friends, everything is new.

It’s special when you do something at our age, because maybe it’s something that people do when they are young. I did the Erasmus programme when I was 20 in Manchester.

When I saw Bélinda, I thought, she’s like me because everybody else (in the class) is young.

Highlighting her admiration for her classmates, Bélinda said:

It’s nice for me to share time with young people and with people who are from different countries. I’m happy to see how is it for young people to study now. I like to see how young people are motivated to take their own life in their hands and not wait for something (to happen). They choose to learn English, and they are very open-minded.

Making Personal Connections – the Highlight of the Week

With the best will in the world, most of us have some cultural prejudices, something Olga alluded to:

I think it’s very beautiful because you find, as you said before, a lot of people from other countries. It’s beautiful because you can be close to everybody and speak to everybody. Sometimes, we have prejudices about the people.

When you talk to people and get to know them, all the prejudices go, fall down. You feel a person, a human. This is beautiful.

To Bélinda, travelling alone and joining a class solo leaves you with no choice but to connect with others just the way you are:

Everyone is naked, everyone is, in fact, alone. Here, you are directly in touch with who you are yourself.

Both women agreed on the warmth and friendliness of everyone they met:

The people here are very friendly, very warm, very helpful as well, in the supermarket, in the pub, in the street.

Olga was taken by the Irish way of life:

I was surprised when I walk on the streets and see that the shops are closed at 6: 00. For me, this was a shock. But it’s like, people gather around a place. Everybody is welcoming. Yes, this is my feeling. It’s like work is finished and now we have time for pleasure or for ourselves or to be with friends or family in the pub.

It’s nice because the pub is like a place. That’s not the culture in Spain. In Spain, the bar doesn’t have the same meaning. Maybe that’s the best thing here. How the people live and what is important for the life of the people.