Un relato breve de qué me ha pasado recientemente

[Post titles, which will be in Spanish per my first blog's format, are dedicated to Dad, in his Spanish studies, and in memory of Granddad, who would be positively titillated if he could see it.]

Finally! Here I am in Granada, the city itself, with my first quiet moment in two days--what better time to blog?

A brief explanation. As anyone reading this blog knows, a few years ago I was an exchange student in Slovakia for a year. As that was basically my only other exchange experience, naturally I've been mentally comparing just about everything possible to that experience, both in my prior and current expectations and everything I encounter. Expectations are the worst when it comes to exchanges. "Just be free, man, like, keep your mind open," is what the pothead-dreds-guy component of my subconscious always tells me.  He's got a point. But setting expectations, along with making connections and referring back to whatever prior experience I have, are basic elements of my information-processing software, and in always trying to put the pieces together I feel it's inevitable, beyond what effort I make to check my conscious. When I find myself making comparisons I try to reign myself in and see whatever I'm seeing as something unique, or at least distinct from, whatever I'm recalling. I keep trying to keep myself fresh, assume I don't know, even when it feels like I do--etc. That's not to say all connections are badly drawn. I don't think there's any harm in noting all the similarities to Slovakia--and I'm pretty shocked at how many there are, on a purely superficial level; apparently lots of things I took to be "Slovak" are actually just European--so long as I can keep myself from extrapolating into too many expectations about what Spain may be like.

On that count, Spain--what little I've seen of it--is amazing. Flying down into Málaga (it turns out they sent us there for orientation because flight connections are easier and cheaper than those to Granada, so good thinking on their parts), I was inwardly oohing and ahhing over the gorgeous mountains and hills (some snow on the highest peaks), the stonewashed little villages nestled between them, and the sparkling ocean. To be fair, most places look decent from high enough up in the air. I'm still going to give Spain the benefit of the doubt on this one. It was gorgeous. The sun coming in through the plane window was intense, and actually my cheeks got a mild burn from sitting in the window seat. I'm not complaining--it was lovely. Similarly, once we were on the ground and sitting in the taxi, the sun was intense and quite warm, at least while you were in its full glow. Spanish winter! It certainly does get colder (I was really surprised by just how cutting the chill was today), but I'll take the sun whenever it shines.

I enjoyed the glimpses of Málaga we got during our fifteen-minute taxi ride: it looked like a mating between Italy and the Czech Republic. Very bright, very colorful, and very charming. What I liked about what I saw is that it had that Mediterranean luster, with palm trees and that certain palette of colors of paint of the buildings, while also having a certain hard-to-describe quality that I wouldn't go so far as to call "gritty"--ruggedness?--that isn't characteristic of, say, somewhere in the Swiss Alps where the sidewalks have been sprayed with hand sanitizer and all the little cookie-cutter chalets are freshly-painted. It had a kind of authenticity, but one that didn't stray into shabbiness or uncleanliness.

I don't want to talk much about our mini-orientation in Málaga (we still have another week of orientation here), but I'll mention some memorable particulars.

The night we got there, when all I wanted to do was sleep and/or die (whichever would be more refreshing), we had to go and buy Spanish cell phones. I'm glad to have gotten that done, because having a cell phone is really essential. (If you want my number, send me an email.) I had to wait in line for an hour and a half, though, and I was one of the lucky ones who managed to arrive during a lull. It wasn't a trying experience except that I had been ready for bed about a day earlier. And a little later I slept really well.

Random: there's a Slovak girl in the program! Most everyone is American, but yeah, a Slovak. I introduced myself and we chatted a little in Slovak. It felt so strange to speak the language to someone who would understand it. I don't know if I'll see her much in the future (there are 107 of us!!! just shy of an all-time program record--with a gender breakdown of 20 males to 87 females. And I thought Whitman's gender ratio was severe!), but fun nonetheless.

One thing I found very interesting that our program director mentioned in his little talk to us about Spain culture and customs was his description of personal space differences. Okay, we all know certain cultures are more "touchy" than others. I don't know how Americans rank in the grand scheme of things (compared to, say, Germany or Scandinavia?), but the Spanish "personal bubble" is definitely considerably smaller. When he demonstrated the difference, standing so close to a girl that he was grazing her shoulder, telling us this was a Spaniard's comfortable talking distance, I felt very uncomfortable indeed. But one thing I'd never heard before that he told us is that Americans are very sensitive to people in their surroundings. How so? He demonstrated: he told a girl to walk towards him, going the opposite direction. She did, and they passed each other without incidence. Then he noted how she had subconsciously walked so as to avoid touching him by a reasonable margin. That's not something I've ever considered, and one of those moments of mini cultureshock: wait, you're telling me that this is culturally learned, and not innate? Then he demonstrated how he might walk down the street: again they walked, and this time he bumped her shoulder as they passed--not too hard, but they definitely made contact. He explained it was a difference in attention: for Spaniards, passing distance, for example, is not something they note, and if they do bump each other lightly (which apparently happens often), they don't think anything of it. (He also marveled at how Americans' personal bubble exists in grocery stores: if you're standing in front of some shelves looking for something and someone passes in front of you, it's kind of an affront.) I hate being bumped on the street, so I'm really glad I can have this in mind.

Actually, it made me think of something that happened to me in Slovakia once that really irritated me. I was standing so far to the side of a sidewalk that I was almost in the mud, waiting for the bus. This particular stretch of sidewalk was extremely broad, at least fifteen feet across. In the ten minutes I stood waiting for the bus, at least ten people went past me, and instead of simply altering their path by a foot or two, they walked in a straight line, narrowly missing hitting me by a few millimeters, with two people actually even bumping into me. I was incensed. I gave them dirty looks. (Which they heartily returned.) I felt, would it really be that much to ask them to step a few inches to the right, when here they were on one of the widest streets in the city? I kept looking around the spot where I stood, trying to see if unbeknownst to me I was standing on some magical point of convergence, or there was just some, any reason why I seemed to be drawing these people to me like magnets. I couldn't detect anything unusual about where I was (and I stayed in that exact spot out of spite), so I just chalked it up to Slovak stubbornness. Now I wonder if there was something else going on. Slovaks don't particularly have very different "personal bubbles," than, say, what feels natural to me, but there may be a difference in attention there...

Anyway, we arrived in Granada this evening. They divided us into five groups, a charter bus apiece, and it was about an hour and a half bus ride from Málaga. The vast majority (95 of the 107 total) of people in the program are doing homestays, and when they arrived at the hotel that was our dropoff point their host families were there to pick them up. The organizers had worked out alternatives for those of us not in homestays, however, and myself plus the two girls who are also going to be living in the residence hall with me, and a girl who has already been here for a semester and is briefly living in the residence hall before she moves to other housing, shared a taxi to our place.

Originally I had heard that I was going to be staying in a colegio mayor, which was my first choice of housing option, and then about a week ago I got an email saying that the colegio mayor in question wouldn't work out after all and I was going to be placed at this place instead. I had thought it was a colegio mayor as well, but apparently it's actually a residence hall instead. What the difference is between those two I'm not exactly sure, except that one of the girls who's already been here for a semester described the colegio mayor as a sorority-equivalent... I don't know what that means.

Regardless, I'm quite happy in my residence hall, and really glad I'm here as opposed to in a homestay. I'm not really sure why homestays are so emphasized as "the default" in the program, which is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy (always described in terms of "most everyone does one; highly recommended." Maybe there's a fiscal incentive here?). My biggest issue with them is you're placed in a household with another IES American student as your roommate. In contrast, in the residence hall you're surrounded by Spanish students. It just seems like a much better experience to me, in terms of language immersion and who you get to know.

As I've said, there are two other IES girls in the residence hall with me; they're sharing a room two floors up (great people! lucky on that count), and I'm in a single (I suppose because of the last-minute housing change--but I don't mind). I don't know the exact numbers, but there are definitely at least five other Americans in the building, non-IES'ers; I saw some of them at dinner. What can you do.

I say "residence hall" because that's the term IES uses, and I guess that's the best translation, but don't imagine Jewett or Anderson, with the long hallways dotted by rows of doors on each side. Instead, picture an old apartment building. The location is pretty central, but tucked into an alley, so it's quiet. There's a floor-to-ceiling wrought iron grate out front; the entry hall is floors and ceiling made of old, polished stone, similar to marble. There is no elevator, and the one staircase (dark wood bannister) criss-crosses direction by floor. Each floor is a deceptive maze. It presents itself as a landing maybe twenty feet long, with one or two doors at either end, on the corners; but unlock one of the doors, and you enter a little vestibule that then takes you back to two more halls (extremely narrow) with five or six other doors for rooms, as well as a bathroom or two (very nice) and a kitchen (fridge and stove, counter space). I have three different keys on my chain: one for the outside gate, one for the heavy door on the floor that hides the halls behind it, and one for my room itself; all the doors automatically lock when you close them, so I've got to be careful.

Although all the halls and rooms seem so compartmentalized and cut off from each other (spread between five--or six?--floors), one thing that makes the residence hall ideal is its communal eating room. The dining room is smaller than I would have imagined, especially given that something like fifty people live here, with maybe five--six?--tables of four and one table of six. I guess that's all they need, given that mealtimes stretch for an hour and a half each, so people come when feel like it. What I really like about it is that it lets you meet people from all over the building, and because there's little seating it's a perfect excuse to sit with total strangers--plus a table for four is nice and intimate.

My first mealtime was very heartening. The four of us IES people had made plans to go to dinner together, but when I came down (ever punctual) none of the other three were there, so I sat at a table with three Spanish students and had a great time. They were really friendly and we talked a lot. I really dislike new social situations where I have to mingle and make small talk with random strangers----in English, that is. In foreign languages I absolutely love it. There's nothing to lose, and only new friends and great language practice to gain. It's fun to have the same kind of boldness that I felt about meeting new people in Slovakia, especially initially, combined with an actual ability to make conversation with the language skills to match. (I had an especially good time telling one girl, who had taken a ferry across the Columbia river, about the irony of naming Washington state Washington, as opposed to Columbia.) Anyway, after a while my fellow American IES'ers came down, and we had a nice meal, too (though I'd finished eating by then--a big steak of swordfish, among other things).

My room is very tiny, but that's fine by me. It has everything I need: bed, mini-desk, chair, wardrobe, window, and heater. I'm a little claustrophobic, but I just need to unpack and settle in a bit. At least I won't be able to make a mess! Wonderfully, they come through and clean the floors/tidy the rooms every other day, and do laundry for you once a week at no extra charge. It's really a great setup. I'm so pleased.

My only bit of drama was when I went to try out my electrical adapter. (I bought a three-pronged one in the airport, Mom.) I plugged it into the socket, and then went to plug my alarm clock in and----ahh! There was a giant crack and a big spark shot up that really scared me. I went back and checked the packaging on the adapter and yep, it seemed legitimate enough, it had claims of "safety tested" all over it... Then I actually went back and read the directions, and apparently the order in which you plug things in matters: you have to plug the device in the adapter before you plug the adapter in, not after. Once I'd recovered enough to brave sticking plugs in again, I got it to work just fine. Lesson learned! However, I tried plugging in my power strip, and then sticking three devices into that, and then my alarm clock went dead suddenly (although my two chargers kept working fine) and a strange hot, metallic smell arose that made me very nervous... so I ditched the power strip and am going to keep it to one device at a time.

I'm almost ready to wrap up this post (which is not exactly living up to the title's promise of brevedad), but before I do I have to mention the language. My biggest surprise so far, which really took me aback starting on the plane, is how fast it goes. Of course I've always heard people talk about how "Mexicans talk so fast!" or whatever, but watching telenovelas on Univisión I never really felt that sentiment the way I do now. Whenever the Mexicans on whatever show I was watching did switch into a higher gear, I attributed it to emotional intensity (as you can imagine, there's plenty of that where telenovelas are concerned). I'm sure accent plays a big role in this, as I'm just so much more accustomed to the "generic" (by U.S. standards) Mexican accent/dialect, but I was surprised by how little of the Spanish I heard on the plane that I could understand. It just seemed to race past. I'm not sure how much I'd considered this before, but languages have relative speeds, not just dependent on their speakers. One thing I did note about Slovak immediately (also while on the plane on my way there) was how, although I didn't understand it, what I mentally labeled the "cadence" of it was akin to that of English. I didn't know what the words meant, but I could easily parse them. Whereas with this Spanish, I knew the words (I'm thinking especially of during the flight safety video, which had Spanish subtitles--I could read and understand everything, as the aural words flew by me), but they ran together in a relentless river that I was too slow at chopping into words and making sense of. Of course, actually seeing a person while they talk, as opposed to hearing a disembodied voice, makes understanding a million times easier, and one-on-one conversations that much more so. But I'm still surprised by the speed of it all. Maybe someday I'll catch up.

Predictably, I've already made my fair share of Spanish language gaffes (the embarrassment of each I can bring back with painful, blushing acuity). But I'm doing well and really thriving. Seeing everything written in Spanish everywhere around me has an interesting double effect: it's meaningless, because I understand it and absorb it in the same unaware way I take in billboards and advertisements in English; or else, if I note it consciously, I can't help from grinning. I just love it. Same goes with listening to Spanish anywhere and everywhere. There's definitely still very much a surreality to actually being here, but whether it's a dream or not it's the best kind of one.

A special shoutout to Deirdre, who is currently in Dakar! (And just barely in a different time zone from me.) Hope it's going wonderfully, and insh'allah we can talk soon.

Much love to all.