Two Positives and a Negative

I've been having a difficult time with my host family for two main reasons.  The first is obviously the language barrier, but I feel myself improving everyday so hopefully this won't be an issue much longer.  I'm getting better at conversational Spanish so I try to engage more in...you know...conversations.
The second issue is that I'm not entirely comfortable living with another family.  I know I said this was my home for the next four months, but I feel like a guest.  I'm constantly afraid I'll overstay my welcome if I don't act like the perfect guest.  And being the perfect guest means never complaining.
At orientation last week they told us that we need to communicate with our families when there is something we don't like.  They told us not to be afraid of being rude because being honest here is never considered rude.  I'd never thought of Americans as being overly polite but every time I say "please" or "thank you" at the dinner table I get laughed at, something that certainly doesn't happen back home.  Our director gave us the following formula to negotiate change with our señoras:
Say two positive things that you like and then one thing you'd like to change.

I haven't been able to do this yet but I thought I would practice here.

• Your house is lovely. 
• I love the smell of the soap in the bathroom.
• You told me I would have my own bathroom completely to myself but your son uses it in the middle of the night and doesn't flush the toilet.

• The food you've been cooking is delicious.
• Thank you for putting my breakfast out for me to eat when I'm ready.
• Please don't prepare me a bowl of milk for my cereal when you wake up because when I sit down to eat it's at room temperature and I can't eat it.

• My bed is very comfortable (this is an exaggeration but it should still count)
• My desk and dresser are very spacious (more exaggerations...)
• I'd like a second pillow for my bed.  I can't sleep well with only one pillow so I've been folding up my sweatshirts to put under the pillow for extra height so my neck doesn't hurt when I wake up.

• The internet works very well (this is a bold-faced lie!  I'll explain in another post)
• Thank you for doing my laundry.
• Where are my clothes? I know you washed them this weekend but I haven't gotten them back yet...

Those are pretty much all my complaints, so that's not bad at all.  At least the ones that can be dealt with.  Other things, like having pits in the olives and the rain that didn't stop this weekend are things I just need to get over.

Hasta luego

The Awkwardness of Not Being Awkward

While I might be able to manage my way around Spain with my current Spanish level, forming a relationship with my host family is very difficult.  Everything I want to say must be translated from English to Spanish in my mind.  The stories I tell, the questions I ask, and the discussions I engage in all have to go through a language filter in my brain.  This means one thing: I have to think before I speak.
Aside from the occasional grain of intelligence in my feminist rantings, most of what I say is completely unfiltered.  But since I don't know how to talk about challenging heteronormativity through the radical reformation of confining systems in Spanish, that topic is off the table.  The rest of what I normally say is pure word vomit.  I constantly babble with no particular point or tell stories with no structured beginning, middle, or end.  I'm all over the place in conversations and rarely ever stop to think about the idiocy pouring out of me.

But isn't that a part of who I am?  Someone who can't maintain a normal conversation without spazzing out and turning one conversation into eight?  Having to think before I speak has stripped me of my entire personality.  Without my apparently insightful idiocy, how will this family get to know me?  Hopefully my Spanish will improve throughout the semester and I won't have to think so much before I speak.  Until then, this family thinks I'm quiet, unopinionated, and unoriginal.  Three words I would not use to describe myself.

Home is Where the Internet Is

I met my host family earlier today and moved into their apartment.  Everyone is really nice and the apartment is very comfortable.  I unpacked my things in my new bedroom and bathroom and proceeded to set up my computer.  My new brother helped me access their wifi connection and  I started importing all the pictures I took during the seminar.  As I opened a browser to test the internet, a familiar but generally ignored message popped up.  The computer wanted to know what I wanted to call this new internet connection.  It suggested home, work, or public location.  As I read these options the realization finally dawned on me that I was living in Spain.  During the seminar we moved from hotel to hotel, but I will be living with this family in Madrid for the next four months.  As my mouse moved toward the "home" option, I teared up.  This place, this foreign country, with a family I don't know, a language I haven't mastered, and a bedroom I've never slept in is now my home. 

Two thoughts have taken over my mind in the past few minutes:
1) Will I truly feel at home here?
2) How do I change google.es from Spanish to English?

Como se dice "tampon" en español?

           Okay so this is one of those great foreign country stories that I'll probably tell for years to come.  This is the tale of my first period in Europe.
           For the past 11 days I've been on a traveling seminar.  I packed one suitcase for the seminar and the rest of my stuff stayed in Madrid.  I was very careful in packing only the necessities for the seminar, but a few mistakes were made.  I wasn't expecting to get my period until the seminar was over and I was officially living in Madrid, so I didn't bother packing many of that particular type of necessity.  I brought two tampons and one pad, believing if my period started early I could just buy more.  Probably because of all the walking and stair climbing, my period arrived early.  I did mention the stairs, no?
            Anyways, the group was in Valencia and I had seen a couple of pharmacies not too far from the hotel.  We were enjoying one of our brief moments of free time so I headed out by myself to a pharmacy.  I kept seeing the stores, but all of them were closed.  This was at around 5pm, and many small stores close around 2pm.  But I kept walking because I hoped to find an open store.  After about 40 minutes of wandering around Valencia it became clear that I needed help.
           I did some people watching to choose people who looked safe to talk to.  I saw two middle-aged women walking together and decided they probably wouldn't attempt to rob or kill me.  I approached them and started to ask where I could buy some tampons but then I realized I didn't know how to say "tampon" in Spanish.  Here is our conversation:

Note: The following has been translated from its original format in Spanish.

Me: Excuse me.  Can you help me?
Woman: Yes?
Me: I'm looking for a store that sells....I don't know the word in Spanish...but things that girls need during three or four days each month?
Woman: (laughs) Yes.  You can go to a pharmacy.
Me: All of the pharmacies I've seen are closed.  Do you know of a store that is open?
Woman: El Corte Ingles is open late.
Me: Great! Where is El Corte Ingles?
Woman:  Keep walking on this street and you'll see it on your right.
Me: Thank you so much!
Woman: (laughs again)


I managed to find El Corte Ingles (my new favorite store by the way because they have absolutely everything and it's like a mall all in one store) and I completed my mission and returned to the hotel.  Despite my embarrassment at the awkwardness of the situation, I was beaming with pride.  My Spanish may not be perfect, but this was the first real test of if I knew enough to truly get by.  And I did! I was so excited that I ran to my room to look up the word tampon.  I knew I would remember this word for the rest of my life because of this experience.  I grabbed my Spanish/English dictionary eager to add a new word to my vocabulary.


So to answer the question, ¿como se dice -tampon- en español?


el tampón

Top Reasons Why I Miss Having a Cell phone

I´ve been in Spain for a week now and I don´t have a phone because they aren´t renting the international phones to us until the end of orientation when everyone is back in Madrid.  A few people have blackberrys so they can contact each other for free but the rest of us have no phones or ways to communicate except for the hotel computers because most of us left our laptops to Madrid.  This is inconvenient in 7 ways.

1) Communication.  We´re a group of 21 people and in our free time we like to go out together.  This becomes really difficult without phones because there is no way to efficiently get the plan out to everyone.  We end up leaving some behind who aren´t available at the moment we knock on their doors or we separate into smaller groups to avoid leaving anyone out but we can´t reunite without communication.  In the mornings our conversations are like this:
Person A-What happened to you last night?
Person B-Oh my god we ended up at this club and it was totally crazy! You should have been there!
Person A-I thought we were meeting at that restaurant! I waited for you. What club?  Can we go again tonight?
Person B-Absolutely! Let´s go at 11!
Person A-Okay I´m grabbing dinner around 10 but I´ll meet you there at 11.

The next morning...
Person B - What happened to you? I thought we were meeting at that club at 11.
Person A - Oh my god after dinner we went to this bar and it was the best night ever! I told Person C to text Person D because Person D has Person E´s number and I knew you were with Person E but I guess you didn´t get the message. Sorry! We´ll go again tonight...meet at 11?

2) Visualizing my schedule.  I do this thing where I need my phone calendar or alarm to visualize my day or week.  If I´m planning something a few days ahead I need to move my calendar to that day.  Or if I´m planning something later in the night I need to count the hours with my phone alarm so I can visualize it in my head.  Without my phone I have no idea what day it is, time it is, or when I need to be anywhere.  My watch just doesn´t give me an accurate impression of time windows.

3) Not feeling awkward.  Okay I know I´m not alone in this but when there is a conversation around me that I´m not really included in I play with my phone.  I check old texts and sometimes send new ones.  It´s a way of saying "I choose to not be involved in this conversation because I am busy, but not too busy that I can´t give you some of my attention if you so desire."  Without my phone I just fidget uncomfortably, play with my hair, or pretend to look for something in my purse.  It´s awkward.

4) Simple math.  I´m not talking about converting euros to dollars, because I consider that complicated.  But I need my phone to do basic addition and subtraction.  Like if my meal costs 11 euros and my drink costs 4.

5) Doo-Doo-Doo-Duh. I miss my Kimmunicator ringtone.  I keep playing it over and over in my head.  When I get my new phone I´m going to try and get it again.

6) Worrying about having lost the phone.  Normally I keep my cell phone and my pocket and I´ve always been in a habit of checking to see if it´s there whenever I stand up or move locations.  I´m still doing this and I keep freaking out for a second that I lost it.  But then I remember it´s not with me.

7) Popularity.  I miss that special feeling when I get a call or text.  Like someone is trying to communicate with me and eagerly waiting for me to communicate back.

"La Sopa de Mariscos"

"La Sopa de Mariscos"
An original poem about my dinner the other night.

Don´t look at me that way.
It´s not like I was the one that killed you.
I didn´t remove you from the freedom of the ocean.
And I didn´t stick you in that pot.  You were like me.
You probably tried to swim away from your problems, thinking they wouldn´t catch.
You weren´t fast enough but I will be.
I´ll swim until I know I´m safe and I´ll never look back.
They always say don´t look down.
I´m sorry.
I´m sorry.
I´m sorry you had to die so that I could live to swim another day.
I´m sorry about the sound it made when I pulled off your small shrimp legs and cracked the shell around you.
You won´t stop looking at me.
Do you think this pleases me?
We could have been friends if things were different.
Stop.
I´m going to turn your head around now.
I´m hungry and I want to enjoy my sopa de mariscos

Barcelona

I´ve been in Barcelona since Monday and we leave for Valencia on Friday.  It´s a very cool city.  It´s clean, has tons of stores and beautiful buildings, and the night life is awesome even during the week.  They have a lot of seafood here and it´s been interesting trying new things.  The weirdest thing about the seafood (and I´m sure it´s like this all over Europe) is that it´s cooked and served without removing anything.  It´s a bit uncomfortable when I order some pescado and I have to look it in the eyes before eating it.  I also have to remove the spine and any other bones and tear the legs off of the shrimp.  I´m totally disgusted about seafood by the time I´ve done this so I don´t want to eat it, but I had to work so hard to de-bone/de-skin/torture the fish that I end up eating it anyways.  And it´s always delicious.  But I only eat the parts I´m used to...I´m definitely not ready to eat the heads.
So far we´ve seen the older more gothic areas of the city and a couple amazing buildings from the early 1900s.  We´ve also been to a number of museums including a museum of history, the Salvadore Dali art museum in Figueres, and tomorrow we´re going to the Picasso museum.  Every morning we have a lecture and then we go to 3 or 4 places each day.  Tons of walking, and stairs, and waking up early, and stairs, and eating much later than I´m used to, and stairs, and limited internet usage on the hotel comuputers, and stairs, and staying out really late, and did I mention all the stairs?  I feel like I´m still in Syracuse, except the weather´s perfect here and
there´s no snow. But there´s stairs.

The seminar is a bit of an overload for my body and mind so I´m really just looking forward to moving in with my host family in Madrid.  Only 5 more days!!

Nerd Alert!

I´ve just made my class schedule:

Mare Nostrum

Advanced Language Usage

History of Women in Spain (taught in Spanish)

Abnormal Psychology

Personality

Sexuality in Spain

Hemingway in Spain

The Origins of Christianity

In total the schedule is 23 credits (woops..guess I won´t be achieving that no academic stress goal) but I might take one class pass/fail so that will remove some of the pressure.

Here´s the funny thing: Students are not allowed to take more than 19 credits unless they are in the Honors Program.  So I´ve been keeping my plans a secret because I didn´t want to brag about being an Honors student.  But finally my excitement at taking so many interesting classes overwhelmed me and I had to share my enthusiasm.  I started showing people my schedule and prepared myself for their envious glares at my good fortune.  I was most disappointed that no one appeared jealous at all.  As it turns out, some people do not like taking classes.  They don´t like reading or writing, or memorizing or researching.  I´m baffled.  

Now before you join my peers in Spain and label me as "loca," let me explain myself.  I have two majors and a minor back at SU, plus my Honors requirements which leaves absolutely no time for electives.  Aside from the required Spanish classes and Psychology classes for my majors and minors I can take whatever I want. And I want to take a QSX class, an ETS class, and a REL class.  And if I had a time turner, I´d be taking even more because some of the classes are taught at the same time. So that should clear up who the real "loco" people are.

Still me?  Really? 

Making Friends In Another Language

Greetings from Girona in Spain!
This is day 2 of the pre-orientation seminar and as it turns out we´re not allowed to speak in English! At least not when our leaders are around.  We´ve been forced to form covert English Speaking parties but they´re always on our track so we need to change where we congregate.  Otherwise our conversations are strictly Spanish 101
Example: How are you? (¿Como estás?)
               Fine (Bien.)
              It´s cold (Hace frio.)
              Yeah. (Sí)
Kind of difficult to make friends this way which is why we must do it in secret.
So far I´m doing alright with my goals.  I haven´t spent much money or stressed out about grades but I haven´t quite picked up the language.  Of course it doesn´t help that we´re in the Barcelona area so they don´t even speak Spanish here. But I´ve learned many new ways to talk about the weather in my attempt to make friends.

Hasta luego,

Spain for the 4 next months

I'll be studying abroad in Madrid for the next four months and I hope to travel around to other cool cities and countries in Europe.  I'm both terrified and excited because I hate facing the unknown but I also think Europe will be tons of fun.
Here are some of my goals for the semester:
1) Learn Spanish - Aside from the importance of learning Spanish while I'm living in Spain, I want to bring this language back home with me.  It will open a whole new population of potential clients for me and I can more easily talk about people without them knowing what I'm saying. And it will look great on my resume. 
2) Be a tourist - I want to see the sites all over Europe.  Rome, Switzerland, and Prague are at the top of my list.  I've already been to London and Paris but it might be fun to revisit them.
3) Don't act like a tourist - Easier said than done.  Hopefully no one will label me as "that obnoxious American girl" and I can more or less adapt to the European culture.  Then when I come back home I can be "that obnoxious girl who thinks she's European."  Much better.
4) Don't spend money on unnecessary items - I promise I won't do this.  But I really do need a purse from every country I go to.  And earrings.  And a t-shirt.  And chocolate.  Oh dear...this one will be difficult.
5) Keep in touch with friends and family - Skype? - check, Webcam? - check, Intention to keep in touch? - check.  So far I'm doing pretty well so I hope to still have friends when I come home.
6) Make new friends and family - I'll be living with a family while I'm there so I hope to have a good relationship with them.  And the program is pretty big so I also hope to find a group of awesome friends.
7) Put fun before work - I will not stress out about classes.  I will not stress out about classes.  I will not stress out about classes.  I will not stress out about classes.  There are more important things to do, drink, and smoke while I'm abroad so no academic stress is allowed.
8) Keep up with this blog - Wouldn't it be funny if this was the last thing I ever wrote on this blog?

Anyways, I leave tomorrow night and might not have internet access until after the pre-orientation seminar (about 10 days) but I'll be back online after that for my thousands if not three loyal readers.

Adios!

Welcome to the Blog

Life happens. Sometimes I want to write about it.  Sometimes I want other people to read about it.  This blog will be used for those times when I have something to say and I want it heard...or read.  Be patient with me as I have a complicated relationship with technology (and not the good kind of complicated relationship where sometimes I get happy phone calls and presents), and also I might not have anything to say worth reading so I apologize in advance for that.