De cuerdo y loco, todos tenemos un poco

For my Spanish class we had to write a page based on the tema Barcelona.  We had to come up with our own problema (thesis, basically) and then desarrollar.  I wrote about my crazy host mom.  I haven't edited it but it's not due until Thursday.  Basically I wanted to brag about having finished an assignment 49 hours and fourteen minutes before it's due.  I can't remember the last time that happened.

Anyway, aquí hay:

Vivir con una familia en un país extranjero es una experiencia bien rara.  El estudiante elige hacerlo para conocer mejor la cultura y practicar más el idioma, y sí logra estas cosas, pero ha estado puesto en la situación extraña de buscar su papel en la casa.  No es una parte verdadera de la familia pero no es independiente tampoco.  Tiene su habitación cerca del resto de la familia y tiene que estar en casa para cenar y llamar a la señora de la casa si haya un cambio de planes, pero la verdad es que la señora no sea su madre.

Conocí a mi señora, Angela, al vestíbulo del hotel dos días después de llegar en España.  Antes de este conocimiento nunca había oído nada sobre ella sino algo que me ha dicho Marco, un estudiante español, treinta segundos antes de conocerla por la primera vez - «tu señora es loca, diviértete.»

Esto me puso un poco nerviosa.

Nos conocimos y hicimos la cosa con los besos que nunca había hecho antes – ahora soy experta – y empezamos a hablar.  A pesar del cansancio acuciante que venía del desfase horario me daba cuenta lentamente de que sí, Angela era loca.  Después de los saludos iniciales la primera cosa que me dijo fue que el Catalán sea un idioma muy feo y la idea de una Cataluña separada de España sea «una locura.»  Se mudó de Madrid a Barcelona cuando tuvo seis años y todavía quiere tener nada que ver con la cultura catalana.  Me sorprendí oír esto porque en Estados Unidos normalmente no hablamos de la política antes de conocer a una persona por el miedo de ofenderla.  La primera cosa que he aprendido sobre Angela es que no le importe si sus ideas le ofenda a alguien, y que tenga creencias bien definidas.

Condujo por todas partes de Barcelona y me dijo que había unos barrios para evitar por la noche a causa de «los árabes y malos negros, y no hablo de los negros de la Universidad.  Estos negros son malos. Tienen drogas.»  Me interesó que solamente explicó la diferencia entre buenos negros y malos negros, y implicó que todos los árabes fueron malos.  Siguiendo con este tema me preguntó si fuera musulmana, porque no había querido una estudiante musulmana, y me invitó a venir a visitarle en el invierno antes de que yo pudiera decir diez palabras.  Cuando llegamos a su casa me mostró su casa, incluyendo mi baño, mi habitación, y su cuarto de la ropa.  Es tan grande como su habitación y conté por lo menos quince pares de zapatos.  No he pretendido contar las bolsas.

Hablar con Angela es recibir un flujo constante de la información, y requiere la habilidad de ignorar un poco de lo que dice.  Me ha dicho que nunca cocina con la sal porque es muy malo para la salud, es mejor no poner el filtro solar porque tomar el sol asiste en la absorción de algunas vitaminas, vivir con el estrés causa el cáncer, y vivir sin chocolate no vale la pena.  Estoy de acuerdo con ella solamente con este último consejo, pero he aprendido sonreír y asentir un poco con la cabeza y decir que sí, el estrés causa el cáncer y intentaré trabajar menos.

He vivido en Barcelona con Angela por una semana y no cambiara mi situación si podría.  Para siempre hay una conversación nueva llena de consejos y locura.

Tú vs. Ud.

I've always learned in my Spanish classes in school that you use tú for people your own age and Usted for older people - basically, it's a formal mark of respect. Our guidebook for CIEE told us that we should refer to our host mothers as Usted unless instructed to do otherwise. So, I've been calling Angela Usted and yesterday I left her a note with my cell phone number when I went out for the day saying "para que tenga Ud. mi información."

Her response when I got home was, "no me llamas Usted! Usted es para una persona mayor que no conoces bien!"

Interesantemente he estado usando Ud. porque ella es una persona mayor que no conozco bien.

We did a reading in my Spanish class today about the differences between the two words, and it basically boils down to calling someone ma'am (at least, when you're not in the South). Forty-somethings wearing a little bit too much makeup can get really self-conscious about it.

In other news I made friends with a whole group of kids on the metro today. I think they were around seven and I was eating an ice cream cone and I made faces at them through the window and they thought I was the coolest.

Paella, Playa, y Sangría

First off, last night: tapas were delicious and flamenco was incredible. Flamenco isn't a Catalonian thing - it's from Andalucía, which is all the way across the country - but there's still a little bit here, mostly for tourists I think. At least, the place where we went had drunk British guys and lots of flash photography. It was still absolutely incredible and it was really interesting to see first hand the Muslim influence on Spanish culture. The flamenco singing is an obvious reference to Islam. The whole thing is really beautiful and there's a lot of clapping and whirling and hip moving and feet tapping and it's easy to get caught up in it. After the flamenco show we all went out to a bar and I ordered drinks legally for the first time in my life (yay?) and we all had fun and I ended up getting the very last train back to my homestay. The metro closes at 2 on Fridays. I realized that all of my clothes reeked of cigarettes, but Angela washed them and they now smell like scented laundry detergent, which I usually hate but greatly prefer to cigarettes.

Then after a whopping five hours of sleep, I woke up and we went on a Cava tour and tasting! Cava is Spanish champagne that they're not allowed to call champagne because champagne is French. We toured the storage caves and our guide told us that the wooden barrels down there were purely for decoration because people like to get married there and even though the process has been modernized for 30 years they still like to keep the relics around for fun. Then we got on a train to explore the biggest wine cellar in the world and it was kind of like a roller coaster in that we almost died multiple times and it was great fun! The tasting was amazing - we had two, a pinot noir and a dry one whose name I can't remember that is apparently one of their best. I liked the dry one the best. I do think it was silly to give a bunch of hungover college students two full glasses of cava (I know of at least two people who were still drunk from the night before) but I enjoyed it.

The world's biggest wine cellar! It can hold 100 million bottles, which as it turns out is a lot.

After the tour we went to a little town called Sitges, which is around an hour outside of Barcelona. Sitges is the kind of town that you imagine when you hear the word Mediterranean. It's on the sea like Barcelona is, but it's a lot more quaint and the beaches are cleaner. City beaches are never really the best, I've learned. There's a huge church overlooking the town and it's incredibly picturesque. A friend and I wandered around for a bit and explored and then we hung out with some people on the beach and then we ate paella and had sangría and it was absolutely ideal. The weather was perfect and the food was delicious and it was a little expensive, but worth it for the experience of eating right on the beach.




Sitges might actually be the most beautiful place I've ever been.

And then we tried to find the train station and we finally did (after first finding the train, which was not as helpful as we had hoped) and then our train stopped and we all had to get off because something terrible happened (I have no idea what) so then we got on a new train but it was really crowded and we weren't really sure where it was going so we got off and then got on another train and that ended up going where we wanted to go but we got off at a weird place so we wandered around until we found the Passeig de Gracia and then I realized that I know the metro better than I think I do.

Anyway, getting lost with someone is much better than getting lost by yourself. Samantha and I are nomads now.

Angela's daughter loves Bon Jovi and we listened to all the random slow dance 80's songs we could find at dinner today and I listened to Angela tell me all about how tomando el sol is good for your health because you absorb vitamins that way (which is true) and how you can't avoid cancer anyway so you might as well not wear sunscreen (which is not true). Now she is trying to further my cultural education by making me watch Robert Redford and Meryl Streep movies dubbed in Spanish.

As of yet, any efforts to find Firefly in Spanish have been unsuccessful.

It's midnight on a Saturday and I think everyone I know is drunk and watching the World Cup (or celebrating, or bemoaning) but my bed is very comfortable and I walked around a lot today and I can't seem to bring myself to get up to go out. I'm lame but I think I like it that way.

Oh, and the biggest mistake of my life was leaving my camera at home. It's sitting on my bookshelf right now. I couldn't find my USB cord so I forgot entirely about the camera and now I'm kicking myself. Everyone else is taking pictures and a million are going to end up on Facebook and I'm going to steal them for my own, but in the mean time I'm posting pictures here from Google Imágenes España.

I didn't get lost today!

Not getting lost is perhaps the most exciting thing that has ever happened in my life, especially after yesterday. I told a bunch of you about this, but here's what happened: I left my house at 11:30 for my noon class and I got on the FGC (which is a metro line but not actually the metro). I got off at the stop called Gracia because I assumed it was the same stop as the metro stop at the Passeig de Gracia. As it turns out, Gracia is a neighborhood and not just a street so I wandered around with my map for a while and tried to figure out where the hell I was. Two nice men tried to convince me I was in Albania instead of Spain and eventually I called CIEE to inform them that I was confused about everything. (Thank God I decided to get a cell phone.) They told me to get back on the metro and walk to La Casa - that's what they call the CIEE Study Center - from the Placa Catalunya stop.

Meanwhile bells tolled and informed me that it was 12 and I was already late for my class.

So, I got back on the metro and I got off at the Placa Catalunya and then I realized I didn't actually know where the Passeig de Gracia was so I started walking uphill because I knew I had to go in that general direction. By some miracle I found the Passeig de Gracia by wandering around and then I realized I didn't know which street I wanted to turn on to. I tried one that looked promising and failed. After even MORE wandering I got a call from someone in the class that I was missing - he said that there were six people in our class and he wanted to make sure I was okay and by some miracle I was right next to the street I had to turn onto so I eventually found him and I made it to the second half of class. At 1:20. It was horrific and I had several mini-breakdowns, including one before dinner. During our 45 minute break between classes I didn't want to risk getting lost so I hung out at La Casa and I hadn't eaten anything all day and it was awful.

Now I know my way around, though! At least, I know my way around the Passeig de Gracia and the Placa Catalunya, and that's the important part. I can also get from the Muntaner FGC stop to where I live, and I found a farmacia and today I bought sun glasses for 5 euros and life is going spectacularly well.

I just noticed three pairs of gafas de sol on my escritorio. I told Angela that I had left mine at home (they're in my car which is having major surgery somewhere in Framingham) and she apparently is intent on giving me some of her daughter's. She is insane and wonderful. At dinner last night, when I finally got to meet her daughter, she told me that I talk like una carta (a letter - so, excessively formally) and that I should use the word cojones more often. And joder.

Ahora un repaso de mis clases! I'm taking two, Advanced Spanish and Catalunya a través de las artes (Catalonia through the arts). They're 3 credits each and we have 45 hours of class in 4 and a half weeks. I'm the only one I've talked to who's actually planning on putting in any effort, but I want to do well. I'm pretty sure they're going to count towards my GPA.

Advanced Spanish looks like it's going to be absolutely wonderful. I placed into the highest level here and I'm the best at speaking out of everyone in the class, but I think we're all on pretty even ground when it comes to grammatical mastery. We're going to do grammatical exercises which I haven't done in a year and a half, and everything is geared towards using Spanish in the real world and not writing essays, which is exactly what I need because if you recall, hablo como una carta. We're going to be listening to the news and answering comprehension questions and listening to songs and filling in the blanks and - the part that I'm most excited for - reading stories and answering questions. Everyone has to do a presentation on one of the authors. This week is Cortázar! And we're reading Continuidad en los parques, which I read for Fernando last semester and wrote about in my trabajo final. I'm assigned to do the presentation and I'm absurdly excited and no one else understands why. We have a good thing going, CIEE and I - everyone thinks I'm a geek, which is true so I'm willing to go with it.

Catalunya a través de las artes is going to be a fair amount of work. I've never taken art history before and it looks like it's going to be great and exactly what I want, in terms of being able to culture myself, but I need to acquaint myself with an entirely different branch of academia. Tomorrow we're taking a field trip walking around the city and identifying things as Románico o Gótico. I've been taking a lot of notes but the professor speaks really quickly and I'm not sure I've been getting it all down. We have a midterm and a final exam, and we have to write a 9 page research paper about something related to Spanish art. It can be about any kind of art so I'm thinking of writing about Spanish literature during the Siglo de Oro en el Renacimiento because I took that class last fall. There are so many things I want to research - la poesía de Quevedo, el rol de entremeses en el teatro, el desarrollo de la novela picaresca, la idea de la mágica en La Celestina. I'm also looking forward to doing research in a Spanish biblioteca. I like the idea of learning about art history but I don't think a month is enough for me to be entirely comfortable with writing a 9 page paper about art.

Esta noche - tapas y flamenco! Y después mi primer bar español. Veremos lo que sucede.

Crash course in culture shock

The biggest culture shock I've experienced so far probably has more to do with the fact that I'm in a city than anything else. The most exciting thing about my day was that I managed to find my way all the way from the Placa Catalunya to my señora's apartment that's so far north it's not on the map thing my dad gave me. I've actually been able to orient myself alarmingly well, in spite of a few minor panic attacks.

Streets in Barcelona generally run in blocks (except the Avenguda Diagonal) and instead of north-south and east-west they're arriba-abajo and Besos-some other river I can't remember the name of right now. Arriba-abajo comes from the fact that the Mediterranean Sea is abajo and the mountains are arriba, so the streets have a pretty pronounced gradient to them. All of the blocks have diagonal sides instead of corners and they have benches and things, and a lot of people meet there but instead of just saying the corner ('cause there are four, you see) you'd say Passeig de Gracia-Aragó-abajo-Besos.

Even though it's comparably easy to navigate here, I'm not used to cities at all and Barcelona is famous for pickpockets so I'm being super careful/paranoid (the same thing, right?) and my señora walks to work in the morning so I went with her and I had no idea where the metro was when I was coming back home and the map I have is apparently mierda.

A note on my señora, Angela - she's crazy. She drove me all around Barcelona after she picked me up (when I was falling asleep) to show me all the neighborhoods that I shouldn't go to because there are "árabes y negros, y no son los negros buenos de la universidad. Son negros malos." She also wasted no time in telling me that Catalonians are crazy and the idea of Catalunya as an autonomous nation is "locura" and Spain should be unified. She lives with her dog Maxi - short for Máxima, because she's approximately eight inches long - and an entire room for her clothes. She also has some of her daughter's clothes because her daughter lives in a small apartment without a lot of closet space. Her entire apartment is filled with pictures of her daughter, Melisa, and she talks about her all the time. It's really cute. She's going to teach me how to cook Spanish food and she goes to the cine every week. She's taking me tonight! She's also addicted to chocolate and wants me to ask her questions about everything even though I end up staring at her and being confused most of the time. She walks to work every morning to keep up her figure and she told that did I know that salt is really bad for you? And she has four or five huge bottles of water in her fridge at all time.

The Oberlin in me is going crazy with all this bottled water. I have no idea why it's such a thing here, but they don't do tap water at all. Angela has a Brita filter but she doesn't use it and she just keeps lots of bottled water around. It's killing me a little bit. Also I had a placement test today for my language class and it was proctored and it felt so oppressive.

The other noticeable cultural difference I've found so far is this whole siesta thing. My ever-present desire to take a mid-afternoon nap is culturally embraced. I love it. So, siesta time.

Besitos! and I'm sure I'll stop updating so much when classes start and I know the city better.

I'm moved into my homestay! I have one drawer, which is interesting, so all of my clothes are either hanging from hooks on my door or folded on a little sofa bed thing. My host family is a señora named Angela and her tiny dog. She has an entire room dedicated to her clothing and she wasted absolutely no time in telling me that learning Catalan is a waste of time and it's an ugly language. She's really funny and nice and she made a tortilla tonight with tomatoes and potatoes and onions and it was absolutely delicious and I feel bad about the fact that I've been staring at her when she tries to engage me in conversation. She's pretty cool and I'm sure we'll get along well when I can figure out how to speak Spanish again.

I've always thought that I've had a decent accent but comparing myself to native speakers all the time is making me feel like such a foreigner. Which, you know, I am. I just want to make it so that the little bits of American accent don't creep up into my Spanish. I also feel like I'm trying to be cool or something (phony a la Caulfield, I guess) when I say grathias instead of gracias - the Spanish lisp.

I mostly just can't wait for classes to start and to go to sleep, which is going to happen pretty soon after I post this. It's only 8 here but I'm SO TIRED. Everything is going to seem so much better when I'm not tired anymore.

I can't remember how to speak Spanish right now.

Oh and I have a phone! It was cheap and you can call me! You probably won't but that's okay. The number is 605614583.

HOLA DE BARCELONA

It's 10 PM and I am more tired than I perhaps have ever been. I woke up yesterday a little before 10 AM to finish packing and I haven't slept for what I guess is 32 hours. I'm a zombie, I think, but so is everyone else and we keep apologizing for being boring and falling asleep.

I survived my million hours of hanging out in airports! I did a lot of reading and a LOT of Firefly and a significant amount of trying to get to sleep. Airports are odd creatures.

Barcelona es bello y España es fantástica y caminamos demasiado hoy pero valió la pena porque todo es increíble. Ya sé que me voy a enamorar con esta ciudad. La combinación de idiomas por las calles y los edificios y el tiempo y las playas son perfectos. La navigación será simple muy pronto aunque ahora es un poco complicada, pero todo es complicado a causa de mi cerebro y su funciona actual. Mañana conoceré mi host family.

The only thing is, I didn't really do my research with the program. I definitely didn't expect this much English to be spoken, and I definitely didn't expect people who had never spoken Spanish before to be here. I'm doing a lot of translating for other people and I guess the group dynamic that we have is going to be entirely in English, at least outside of class. I'm okay with that, though. It's not ideal at the moment but once classes start up and I'm speaking more I think I'll be happier.

I somehow ended up here with the wrong kind of electrical adapter, so my computer plug doesn't actually plug into the wall. I need to remedy this. We're in a hotel tonight and I have a temporary roommate so I stole hers, but that's not going to fly in my homestay when I can't steal from anyone. Also my debit card didn't work today at the metro station and I really hope it works at the ATMs here or else crisis. But I'm sure it's going to be fine. Delightful, even.

Also facebook is trying to text a validation code to my cell phone but my cell phone clearly doesn't get texts here and I have no idea what's going on with the internet.

Up tomorrow: bus tour! academic orientation! moving into the homestay! write letters! send letters!

Cute thing of the day: seven (?) year old British kid at the airport said, "I'm just really well acquainted with the swine flu. It's a weird thing about me." :D

And now I will sleep (!!!!) because we're getting a wake up call tomorrow at 8:45. For a meeting that starts at 10:30. I am going to ignore the hell out of that wake up call.