Back in the early 1970s, my father spent his junior year of college studying abroad in Japan. My sisters and I grew up on stories from that year, such as when he had to get the local children to stop following him everywhere and when he got to travel around Japan with his friends while the local students went on strike. When I left the United States to spend my junior year of college studying abroad in Europe, I vowed to bring back lots of my own stories, since I don’t want my future children complaining that Mom and Grandpa have the same abroad stories. This week changed that because I now have my own strike story.

This story begins on a Saturday, specifically while my host family and I were walking home from lunch. My host sister mentioned that there would be a strike at the University of Málaga, which we both attend, the following Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Surprised by what I was hearing, I asked her to clarify; she told me that there would be a large protest on Thursday, but some professors would still give classes on Tuesday and Wednesday, so my best bet was to e-mail mine to ask if there would be class. Since I have the same professor on Mondays and Tuesdays, I decided to instead ask him at the end of class on Monday. I also started wondering if the Dickinson-only class on Tuesday afternoon would be affected.

When I woke up on Monday morning, I was greeted by a message from my professor canceling class that day, but not mentioning the strike on Tuesday whatsoever. I got on the bus and rode to the campus for my other class, where I noticed lots of signs advertising the protest on Thursday. A few minutes after I entered the classroom, but before the professor arrived, a student walked to the front of the room and told us not to attend classes on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday.

Fast-forward a few hours: after dinner, I checked my e-mail and saw a reply from my professor explaining that the decision to strike or attend classes was one that each student had to make individually. I then logged onto Facebook, where a conversation themed “to strike or not to strike” had already begun. We decided that those who had class at 9 a.m. would go to the campus as usual and then tell the rest of us (such as yours truly, whose class was at 10:30 a.m.) if things looked empty, but that all of us would attend our Dickinson-only class.

As things turned out, classes were held normally on Tuesday; I don’t know about Wednesday because I don’t have University of Málaga classes that day. On Thursday, since the Dickinson-in-Spain program director had informed us that most professors would be teaching, I went to campus for my class, only to run into two other Dickinsonians getting ready to head home because the place was abandoned. I joined them on the bus and realized that having a strike story like my father’s isn’t a bad thing. It just shows that some things, like students being annoyed at universities, never change.