Hey, everyone!

We have had two classes so far and I'm already really excited to be a part of it! I do not come from a cultural background that is Spanish-speaking, but my own Pakistani culture does have the modern telenovela incorporated into their televisions as well.

Growing up, my parents didn't really let us watch much television, so my experiences with any sort of telenovela began much later. I took Spanish courses back in middle school for a while, but I switched to taking Latin after seventh grade. My interest in Hispanic culture grew, however, when my friend introduced me to Grand Hotel, a Spanish telenovela that she was watching on Netflix. She would watch it during one of our classes together on mute and we would quietly just read the subtitles together. I quickly grew attached to the story line even though I wasn't listening to what was happening. It was only until much later when I revisited Grand Hotel that I truly watched the show from the beginning and listened.

Some people find it hard to watch foreign television or film due to the fact that they have to split their attention between reading subtitles if they aren't familiar with the language and listening to the audio that might not be their first language. For me, this was not as complicated because I grew up in a Pakistani household. The Bollywood films that I watched growing up were in my second language, Urdu, and while I knew it pretty well, I still struggled sometimes to understand what I was hearing. Ultimately, subtitles saved me when I didn't understand the content and I quickly grew more interested in watching television and film from other cultures.

Spanish dramas, Bollywood films, Turkish shows, and even my favorite show, a Norwegian show called "Skam", were the crux of a lot of things that I was watching. I found that there were a lot of similarities between the things that I was watching. This class has helped me understand those similarities even more because they are all a part of the modern telenovela. They all revolve around a main couple that falls in love nearly too fast and follows a dramatic story line for however long where they face so many different obstacles until they finally get the protagonists end up together happily ever after.

The most interesting thing to me is how universal the topics of telenovelas have become around the world. For instance, Spanish and Turkish dramas have even been subbed and dubbed into Urdu as well as censored for Pakistani audiences and have played in my own house. My cousins, who I thought would have very little idea about one of the shows I was watching, told me that they had watched the same show but in Urdu. And this is because the telenovela has advanced so much and spread all across the globe.

Right now, for the class, I'm watching "Kurt Seyit ve Sura", a Turkish telenovela that is set in Russia during World War One and the Russian Revolution. I'm only a few episodes in, but I'm already enjoying it so much! The concepts that we've talked about regarding telenovelas like the dramatic music during intense scenes, the immediate "fall in love" moment that happens when the main characters' eyes meet, and the several love triangles and squares have made their appearances already in the first few episodes of the telenovela and I can't wait to see how it all unfolds!