Valencia

After two and a half short months in Spain my Christmas vacation started this past Friday. After a rowdy faculty Christmas dinner and few hours of sleep Brandon and I headed up to Murcia where we joined Anna, another auxiliar, and left for Valencia. After some initial confusion while checking into the hostel and trying to establish that Brandon wasn't a wanted criminal we headed out into the historic heart of the city for pizza and a night tour.









The next day we did a marathon tour of the same area, the central market, the restaurant/bar neighborhoods, all the little stands selling local products and handicrafts, all the big plazas, and all the crucial monuments. We enjoyed breakfast at Starbucks (I missed American coffee) and a lunch of paella, cerveza, and pollo. At night we did a DIY bar crawl with some Australians we met in our hostel and some Spanish kids we met on the street. The bars are more expensive than in Aguilas but definitely more fun. There was a Brazilian band playing and I got to sing along to some songs in Portuguese (not to brag about my polyglotism or anything). On the way home I learned the word "battler," Australian slang for someone between a loser and a trooper.









The next day I somehow was the only one with a hangover after a mere four or five drinks. My body rejects alcohol I guess. As a real battler I carried on to the Ciutat de les Arts i les Ciencies. The name is in Valenciano, the local language. This place was amazing. If you are ever in Valencia, go just to see the architecture. Inside there is a theater, a science museum, and an aquarium. We only went into the aquarium because the place is so expensive. Admission there was over 18 euros with a student discount.









In brief Valencia is fantastic because of the following reasons: horchata, paella, seafood, beaches, architecture, nightlife, shopping, linguistic diversitry, and a dried riverbed that has been converted into a park. Go there.

Click on the title of the blog to see my facebook photo album.

Let it snow(ish)

I’m writing this from my living room in Granada, the electric heater blowing warm air down on me as I sit on the sofa, bundled up with tights under my jeans and a heavy sweatshirt. Our table wears its three layers of winter tablecloths, and underneath the space heater is chugging away. The windows are fogged up, but if I get up close or crack one open—as my flatmate did just moments ago—I can see the sleet, yes, sleet falling outside.

Welcome to southern Spain in the winter.

The other day I received an email from my best friend’s father, and he said, and I quote: “Baltimore is rainy and cold today-I’m picturing [you] warm and sunny in the south of Spain. You needn’t correct me if that’s wrong.”

I won’t correct him (though he may be reading this, and if so, I offer my apologies), but I think that you all have the right to know the truth: Granada in the winter is not warm, nor exclusively sunny. This city, located in a valley surrounded by the Sierra Nevada, is known for the most extreme temperatures in Spain, according to my flatmate. In the summer, I’m told, the heat is often unbearable, and in the winter, it’s not uncommon for temperatures to dip below freezing.

Though the weather here is positively mild when compared to the Midwest or northern Europe, the almost universal lack of central heating does require some rather creative solutions to the cold. One is the use of long, heavy tablecloths, under which hide legs and space heaters. Sometimes, the heater is built into the table. I’m also a fan of the electric blanket (perfect when switched on fifteen minutes before bedtime), and have taken to going for a run when I need to get the blood running to my frozen hands and feet. When you add to these the ordinary techniques—coats worn inside, tights or leggings layered under pants, laptops lying on one’s lap, cramming onto small sofas with three of your closest friends, imbibing a constant stream of hot beverages—it makes for a rather comfortable winter, overall. Still, waiting while the laundry hangs to dry is a rather long and laborious process.

The sun’s supposed to reemerge tomorrow, and by midweek the temperature’s predicted to reach fifty again: more normal weather for December in Granada. Until then, however, I’ll keep layering on the clothes and tablecloths, and hope that the freezing rain doesn’t make the paving stones too slippery. You can bet they’re not salting the pavement.

física o química... some sort of strange obsession

Among the many things I've been up to lately (going to Aguilas, Barcelona, and London in the last three weekends being among the chiefly notable "things"), I have found myself becoming more and more confident and natural in my own práctica del idioma (loosely, "usage of the language"). In the past few weeks I've had many moments of fluid and coherent conversation in Spanish.  I don't find it a matter of vergüenza (shame) to admit that these moments come in between others that are not as great or as glamorous, for instance one in which I found myself studdering just trying to ask a Spanish couple if they'd been waiting long at a London Italian restaurant we were in last Friday night, but it's all a part of this happy progress. Granted that like my fellow bloggers I came to Spain with a bit of prior experience living in a Spanish-speaking environment, and thus I'm a bit more used to this process. Two steps forward with a step back de vez en cuando (once in a while), entendés? As I like to describe it, it's like starting up a car in the cold: the car moves regardless the temperature, of course, but it usually takes a little time for it to warm up.

One thing that I've added to supplement my understanding and immersion in the language this time around has been spending a little time in front of the television at least once a week. I say "supplement" because I do not think that television is the best way to straight up learn a language; for that you need context, conversation, and the ability to ask questions and check understanding in an interactive environment. It is certainly a fun way to test one's understanding, or at the very least, test one's comprehension of vocabulary.

Discussion of television's didactic uses and advantages or disavantages aside, watching television is something that at home in the states I never really did with too much regularity, and when there was a show that I did want to watch, it was usually in the comedic, cartoonish, or historical vein (Quite the spread there, huh?). True to form, I do find myself watching comedy shows and the occasional Garfield and Friends rerun on Saturday mornings. Plus I have been known to watch whole movies some Saturday and Sunday afternoons and all programs, and movies for that matter, that were written and produced in English are dubbed entirely in Spanish.

But the show that I've quickly grown addicted to is Física o Química (literal translation Physical or Chemical, as it pertains to relationships). It's a weekly drama about students and professors at an instituto (high school) in Madrid. It's the kind of thing Fox would run (or maybe the WB if it thought to be a bit more daring in its on-screen explict amorous behavior), complete with beautiful people, overly exaggerated situations, giving way to exaggerated problems, allowing for exaggerated acting-- you know, the sort of situations that could be so easily laid to rest with just a little bit of honesty-- but then, that's what makes a show like this so successful. And of course it's the show that all the pibes, chavales, and cool tíos y tías (slang for kids, teens, and cool and other assorted people) watch when they should be doing their homework on a Monday night. It's quite a bit of the pop-cultural tortilla española. hehe.

What's more, it's become something of a weekly tradition with my flatmate Mario and me: at 10:15 we sit down and watch the end of El Hormiguero, a comedy variety / current events show hosted conveniently just before FoQ (the popular abbreviation for Física o Química, and also the name of a fan-magazine about said show) on a rival channel so it can also grab some good pre-main event ratings, Mario with his computer and university classwork in front of him, me with usually just a bottle of water of my dinner if I haven't already eaten by then, and usually a bag of sunflower seeds between us.

The show starts at 10:30 and ends a little after midnight, as do other popular "prime time" television series. It's not actually much longer than an hour, but the commercial breaks add on extra time of course, each break's length is actually predetermined and told to the viewer as it is about to start, promising to take no more tha "30 seconds" or "one minute" or sometimes "5 minutes" (the imagination races to think what would happen to the channel's ratings should they go even a split second over this strict time limit...).

It's good fun, and I haven't missed an episode since beginning watching in mid-October. It recently finished up its second season, so naturally I had to ask a few questions about previous episodes, but it's pretty straightforward: girls like boys. boys like girls. some boys like multiple girls. some girls like multiple boys. sometimes professors like students... etc, etc. Sometimes someone comes down with some unfortunate disease, is found to be participating in some unsavory extracirricular activity, but it's all in a day's work for these characters.

Check it out for yourself, if you'd like. It's worth a gander.

Have a good week! Chau for now,

-Nick

links:

Official Homepage of the show

Física o Química on the Antena 3 webpage, the network that broadcasts the show.

El Hormiguero, for good measure (kind of a Jay Leno meets Conan O'Brien meets the Muppets type of show)

* note: all linked pages are in Spanish

Física o Química, Monday nights at 22:30 Spanish local time. check satellite listings (maybe?)

Keeping it Real

After almost a year of living abroad, I'm finally proud to say I'm American. I know what you're thinking: "radical Obama supporter. . . a la Michelle." Well, let me assure you that, while the results of the election are certainly a factor in my new-found patriotism, they're not the only one. The entire nature of my experience in Spain has encouraged me to take a look in the mirror and accept, for better or worse, my American nationality.

Only now, looking back, do I realize that when I traveled to Mexico and Argentina, I did so with the naive and impossible hope of actually becoming a local. The reasons were three-fold: 1.) I'd heard my parents' accounts of the ugly Americans they'd been embarrassed by during their own travels and was determined not only not to be one, but not even to be associated with any that my local friends might have at one time met themselves. 2.) I desperately wanted to speak fluent Spanish and without the American accent that made me cringe whenever I heard it on anyone else. And 3.) I was bored with America and thought everywhere that wasn't home was better. I remember passing local children in both countries and envying them for their perfect Spanish as well as for other cultural traits I assumed they took for granted, like the ability to move their hips to salsa or to make tortillas from scratch. In short, I wanted to be Latina.

In Spain, my perspective and goals have changed. Becoming Latina is, mercifully, no longer my objective. I speak a level of Spanish that I'm happy with and have accepted that I'll always have some degree of an accent that my Spanish friends have deemed either mild American with a Mexican lilt or Puerto Rican, despite my never having been to Puerto Rico. I have made some great American friends who have done much to lift the stigma I once held against my fellow Americans abroad, as well as who've given me the opportunity to honor American traditions like Thanksgiving which, only after celebrating in these friends' company, did I realize how much I loved. And finally, I am, probably for the first time ever, truly interested in American politics and current events and no longer shy about discussing them with locals.

You don't have to live in America right now to realize just how critical this moment in our history is. In fact, living abroad and seeing Obama's name and the word "crisis" on the front page of every newspaper each day probably makes me even more aware of this reality than I would otherwise be at home. The interest that Spaniards and the local international community take in American politics is both astounding and, for me, contagious. The days prior to the election, nearly all of the teachers at the school where I work knew how each candidate was doing and what the latest news was. The day after Obama won, I was congratulated over and over again as if his victory were my own personal achievement. Never before have I been more aware of my country's influence in the world, nor of my own responsibility for determining what that is. As a British friend of mine recently lamented, "When America sneezes, the rest of us gets a cold."

This isn't to say that I've come to see America as the center of everything; in fact, my opinion is quite the opposite. Getting my news through outside sources like the BBC news Podcast and local Spanish newspapers makes me realize just how self-absorbed as a nation we are, relative to most European countries. While these news media offer in depth (and much needed) analyses of the economic situation in the U.S., they take nearly as much time on the wars in Africa and the bombing in Mumbai which, for huge numbers of people, are much more immediate concerns than the looming American recession. If it's true, as my British friend suggests, that the rocks we throw send some of the biggest ripples through the world, I think it would do all of us some good to remember that we're not the only ones with an arm capable of rocking the boat. 

... In the meantime, I can't wait to be home for Christmas!

Video on the world's reaction to Obama's victory

Video on Cuba's reaction