Kelli in Madrid: Third Post

My most sincere apologies for having neglected the blog for a few weeks now. I’ll compensate by making sure I cover all the essential bases of the events since the last entry.

(Disturbing mixed messages on American culture)

Chapter One: The Language Factor.

As everyone promised me, it does all get easier. I’m sitting in that same rooftop cafe from which I wrote the first post, with a breathtaking view of the mountains, suburbs, and desert surrounding Madrid. And now instead of wanting to block out all the Spanish around me and covering it with familiar childhood country songs, I am confidently eavesdropping on the debate next to me about governments controlling the outcomes of the World Cup, though I still find it hard to care enough to actually sit down and watch the games. At least I’m aware enough to know Spain’s already out and the US still in. Don’t quote me on that. But the point is, I generally get what’s being said the majority of the time. Though it still takes an active mental effort to listen for the direct and indirect object pronouns and which way the verb is conjugated and in which tense, and often by the time I’ve successfully achieved that I realize the train of words left without me. It’s often more nerve-wracking to say basic expressions like “someone’s in here!” when someone knocks on the door of the bathroom or “we’re out of toilet paper” because I never know the most natural way to word it. But after a while you catch on to the fact that everybody generally words something in one order. I know I sound ridiculous most of the time, but I guess you just have to own it because while you’re still learning you have no other choice but to not speak at all and be the loner in the corner.

(Like this guy.)

Even after over a month living here though, I still can't help but often feel as if I'm walking up to people and sputtering complete gibberish. As if you're jumping off a diving board blindfolded and feel certain you'll land on cement. But you're surprised and quite pleased to find it's water when the recipient of your nonsense babble actually responds to you like a normal citizen. It's a repeatedly odd and uncomfortable process every single time you try out another expression. Mental cross-training is the most accurate analogy I can muster, because you need to exercise every facet of learning the new language. As my friend Laura the Spanish major says, sure, she could probably pick up any newspaper here and recount you what it's all about but when it comes to striking up conversation - man were we unprepared from the start.

Chapter Two: My Cumpleaños.

I turned twenty in Spain. My host family and I were actually watching “El Juego de Tronos” (Game of Thrones, if you didn’t yet guess it) at the moment of the European inauguration of my birthday, and if I remember correctly I was mobbed by kisses on the cheek and pulled by the lobes of my ears twenty times. Normal is relative, I suppose, since my family always went with the traditional birthday spankings and cakes that are actually just rectangular ice cream. Then after they'd all gone to bed I Skyped from the quiet confines of the bathroom with my own parents, grandparents, and cousin who were still just having dinner.

(Blurry but legit)

That afternoon I ran with our dog. She's slowly becoming an athlete. Then came back super sorprendida (surprised) that my host mom had made a special birthday lunch and cake for the occasion. Fast forward past working and then I kinda sorta went out that night and around 5AM was taking my usual half-hour late-night stroll back to the central bus station, the only form of transportation available past 1:30 despite the fact that Madrid could easily challenge New York in the realm of cities-that-never-sleep. I was sung the feliz cumpleaños theme song at least four times by packs of drunk adults. And that special day was to be followed by a semi-national four-day weekend, due to a Catholic holiday on Thursday and the "puente" (means bridge) that gives us Friday off. Which leads us to...

Chapter Three: BARCELONA!

This was our first trip as the full gang of six Michiganders, and we took full advantage of that four-day weekend by taking the seven-hour commute over to the renowned metropolis of Barcelona. It fascinates me how little civilization there really is to see when taking the winding highways to these destinations so far, because a lot of people have given me the impression that owning vast expanses of land in Europe is a very rare thing. I was rather thrilled to see some John Deere equipment scattered far and in between throughout the countryside. And the windmills! So much wind power being used here, I've been impressed. For both the trip there and back, we hitched rides through a website called BlaBlaCar, something I wouldn't seriously consider using back in the US. But in Europe it's a perfectly reasonable and the most cost-effective form of transportation to carpool with strangers, and both of our drivers were very kind and made sure we were comfortable the whole time. They also picked us up and dropped us off at the most convenient locations for us. I'm impressed by the idea of it and would like to see how effective it could be in the States, though based on what I've heard about how extremely extensive and expensive the process is to obtain a driver's license in European countries as opposed to our handing them out to any teenage punk with a quarter brain, I'd be less reluctant to trust the average European driver with solid reviews than an American.

Anyway, on the subject of the chapter's title, Barcelona was quite the beautiful, happening city. Certainly more modern than Madrid, it had much wider streets and newer buildings. The metro there seemed to be to some degree slower, less intuitive, and farther spread out in terms of location and arrival times. But I wouldn't be the expert because I basically walked the whole weekend, which I'd only recommended crazy people to do. The tourist attraction highlight I suppose would have to be the Sagrada Familia, an absolutely enormous cathedral whose design was taken over by Gaudi -yeah, that guy whose last name we English speakers use but haven't actually heard the reason why - back in the 1880s. You would think you'd just stepped into the Candy Land Ice Cream Castle. The trip would have been worth it just to finally be at a beach, and to now be able to claim to have swum in the Mediterranean Sea. More hours spent walking than sleeping on that trip, that's for sure.

Chapter Four: The Internship.

So I'm starting to actually feel like a functional and social member of my new workplace, once getting over that initial week of fears to casually talk to the people. In retrospect, that fear was uncalled for because most of them are students around my age are also "haciendo práctica", or doing internships. Took me several weeks before I actually got that expression right. I could go on for hours on words I consistently used without anyone having corrected me before I realize later how ridiculous it probably sounded to them.

But the first major task I had involved translating a 30-some-page rules handbook for an international Iberian-American design competition put on by my workplace, from Spanish to English of course. I'm sure everyone envies that, but in all serious I truly enjoyed getting to write in my mother tongue at work and actually still learning Spanish in the meantime. Then I spent a few days compiling a newsletter of event info and learning a bit of Photoshop, and now we are figuring out how to create a website with an inventory of all the past products for this year's participants to refer back to. I appreciate that practically every day at work I'm offered coffee and snacks, and the schedule is super flexible as long as we get our projects done.

Chapter Five: Because What's A Blog Post Without A Food Chapter.

Waiting for dinner. I thought it was challenging back at my dear co-op Luther House when dinner wasn't served until 7:30, but some nights I'll have barely eaten throughout the day and by the time 10:30 rolls around there's a 50% chance it's ready. But I've started to subside these issues by doing more grocery shopping (read: jars and jars of green olives, cucumbers, Pringles, and an even cheaper version of Ramen noodles). Groceries are such a great deal in Spain, even with the conversion rate! Maybe it's because I got used to seeing the rip-off small-portioned prices of the restaurants - although that is from a college student's perspective, and an American's at that since our portion sizes are rumored to be three times larger than necessary. But I'm really glad to have my breakfasts and dinners included by my host family, especially since being cooked for at night exposes me to dishes I otherwise more than likely would never have tried/made for myself.

One night when we weren't all eating together though, my host brother handed me a bowl of long green substances and proceeded to inform me that they were "aguilas" (eels). Since I had never before tried such cuisine, you can only imagine my excitement. And if you can't, refer to the following:

In my defense, it's easy to be gullible when you're constantly surrounded by novelties. But it turned out to be green spaghetti.

Oh, I also ate lion sausage!

Check up soon since this weekend's my first foreign Fourth of July AND my friend Laura and I are planning to go camping with the bulls. Peace out, cub scouts.

Mucho amor,
Kelli