La odisea

One of the initial draws to the IES program for me was the option of direct enrollment, that is, the option of enrolling in classes at the Universidad de Granada (UGR). Taking classes at a Spanish university just seemed to me to be obviously a better choice than being insulated taking classes exclusively at the program center, isolated from the culture beyond. Since coming here, I’ve developed a slightly different view of direct enrollment: that is, I think a mix of some UGR classes and some IES classes is the best option, not all one or the other.

The classes at IES are all really interesting and exciting (they were really hard to pick from!); and in contrast, most of the classes available to us at the UGR are pretty dry (much drier in comparison, certainly) and follow the format of almost exclusively lecture-based classes where there are few assignments over the course of the semester and the final exam is what really makes up your grade. Of course I’ve heard of such class formats in the U.S., too, but basically there are just a lot of differences in the system that can make UGR seem like a much more difficult choice than the default IES classes.

But hey, I’m here to learn about such differences, and I want to take advantage of this opportunity to study within a totally different school system. And although all my IES classes are taught in Spanish, the professors speak moderately-slowly and simply—not excessively so, but they definitely go out of their way to speak clearly and accessibly and make sure that everyone is understanding everything. Obviously there are no such concessions in an actual Spanish classroom, which bumps up the difficulty a bit; the material is more academic (IES classes are academic, too, but they try to be fun and engaging as well, which isn’t necessarily on the UGR classes’ agenda—you’re simply there to learn information as it’s written in the book and get the required courses for your major); and with classmates also being Spanish, everything just proceeds at a faster pace. (Also, Spanish classmates = a way to break out of the American program bubble. That’s a big one.)

The class I really wanted to take at the UGR was Arabic. I find myself awkwardly between Arabic levels at the moment, having taken a summer course which amounted to about half a semester’s worth of material. IES offers a beginning Arabic class, but I didn’t want to take it because the first half of the semester would all be review and the class is taught in English. The Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación (School of Translation)* at the UGR offers a vast smorgasbord of language courses (Bulgarian to Gallego to Mandarin to Hebrew), and I decided to give second-semester beginning Arabic a shot and see if I could make that half-a-semester leap in knowledge.

[*Note something interesting: in Spanish (and this I only learned since coming here; I had no idea beforehand) the word “traducir” (which I always learned as meaning ‘to translate’) actually refers exclusively to written translation, while ‘interpretar’ (like ‘interpret’) is used exclusively for spoken translation.]

The Facultad de Traducción e Interpretación is actually about twenty seconds’ walk from where I live, which explains why 99% of the Spanish kids who live in my residencia are language students. The building was absolutely gorgeous. It was all marble on the inside, very ornamental; from the second floor I could see how the back of the building was built in a U-shape, with a large courtyard-garden (the ubiquitous orange trees!) in the middle, the hallways facing the courtyard a series of large windows filled with the lovely view. Really a beautiful place. Again, that hallowed-fount-of-higher-education feel, strong and stately and distinguished and impersonal. I can’t imagine what it would be like to exclusively attend such a university (if I had no idea of what small U.S. liberal arts colleges were like?), but I certainly enjoy it as something different.

Well, I’ll skip to the punchline. Unfortunately, I’m not going to be taking the Arabic class. It’s simply too hard for me. I thought I might be able to muddle through, maybe do some intensive catch-up—and then the nice guy sitting next to me showed me what they’d gotten through last semester: nearly two hundred pages in Al-Kitaab. Al-Kitaab (“the book”) is the book for learning Arabic, and you certainly learn a lot of material, but it’s also very intimidating. In my summer Arabic class we got through Alif Baa, which is basically the prologue to Al-Kitaab. Our teacher showed us the first chapter of Al-Kitaab, and I was, as I say, intimidated: there seemed to be a disconnect (which my teacher confirmed) between where Alif Baa ended and where Al-Kitaab began, although the two are part of a set; a sudden and pretty significant leap.

I repeat: the class had gotten through nearly two hundred pages of Al-Kitaab. In a way it was good, because it was just a very obvious, clear dividing line of demarcation between what I could try to do with the modest amount I’ve learned and what was simply beyond my reach. It was also very disappointing, though. No Arabic for me, and here I am, still caught between levels. I did, however, get one thing out of my brief time in the class…

One thing that seems to be very common here in Spain is the use of “fotocopias” in lieu of textbooks. Fotocopias are printing stores (very small-scale operations) that, just like a college bookstore, have materials on file for various university classes (though note, real university bookstores exist, too). You go in, tell them which class you need the book for, and then they get out the pages they have on file for that class, kept in an envelope. They put them in the copy machine and print out the pages right then and there. They also—and this will probably never fail to fascinate me—bind the books by running the pages through a micro hole puncher and then thread the spiral through the holes by hand. The first time I saw a man get out a fat spiral from his drawer (he had them in all sizes) and take it to the thick stack of pages waiting on the counter I was astonished: surely he couldn’t actually do that by hand? I though there were machines for that; I thought only machines could possibly do that! And yet it’s actually extremely speedy work which only takes a few seconds, and then they use a pliers to bend off the end and close the spiral. Amazing.

Back on point, after class I went downstairs to the Facultad’s fotocopia and requested Al-Kitaab. The actual textbook is colored and glossy, as American textbooks are wont to be, while the photocopied-and-bound version was in black-and-white on plain paper, as you might imagine; but hey, it was less than the quarter of the price of what I would otherwise pay (I’ve priced it online several times), so I saw it as a good opportunity to get my hands on a cheap “edition.” (Also, it could actually be nice to have a plain-paper version, because now I won’t feel bad writing in the book itself for all the exercises.) I could only get the first ten chapters, but that alone is over two hundred pages (jam-packed, as is the way of Al-Kitaab), so quite substantial and sufficient.

A funny story: I’m in the Arabic class, and the professor asks me, in Arabic, what’s my name. I tell her it’s Rhiannon, and, like everyone else ever in a foreign country, she looks confused, tries it out, asks me to repeat it—the usual run-through. Then she asks me, still in Arabic, where my name is from. Well, it’s Welsh, but God help me if I know how to say that in Arabic. I do have a stab at remembering the word for “Irish,” though, so I say that instead—who’s going to know the difference or care? And then, immediately, the girl to my right pipes out in Spanish, “No it isn’t! It’s Welsh! I am also Rhiannon!” WHAAAAAT! It was so crazy. We talked afterwards—I quickly assured her that I did know the origins of my own name, explained my thinking, and she told me she’d assumed as much—and she’s actually from Wales. What a hilarious, strange coincidence.

With Arabic unfortunately not going to work out, I had to figure out what class I would take at the UGR instead. I found some really exciting options, my top picks of which were Contemporary Arab Literature and Classical Arab Literature. Both sounded great. But here’s the tricky part: this is the only week you get to ‘try out’ classes at the UGR: come Monday, you are enrolled permanently in a class, or none at all. (Well, I think you can still drop classes later, but you can’t add any.) Since the only classes that would work in my schedule were on Tuesday/Thursday at the same time as each other, and I’d already used up my Tuesday of this week going to Arabic, today, Thursday, I would only be able to choose one to attend and would have to hope it would turn out to be The One. This felt perilous to me, so just to be safe I also met with IES’ UGR advisor, who’s there to help us coordinate UGR classes. And it’s good that I did! It turned out my three top choices of classes all had prerequisites that occluded me from taking them. That left me with Islamología (Islamology? That’s not a thing in English, I don’t think), which was my last choice because of its less-than-desirable scheduling: it’s 7:30 to 9:30 at night, at the very far away Facultad de Filosofía y Letras.

But no matter. Today I went to Islamología, crossing my fingers desperately that it would all work out fine—because if not, there would be no more UGR classes for me to try, and I would be left stuck taking another class at the IES center instead, which would be disappointing. My friend Haley also had a class at 7:30 at the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, so we decided we’d walk over together. I told her I was really OCD/anxious about being on-time/preferably extremely early to things, and asked if we could leave a full hour early, especially since neither of us had ever been there, but had only heard it was far away.

Well, thank God we left when we did. That’s one way to get my adrenaline pumping. It was a series of misadventures which might have amounted to happy accidental exploring in another context, but within the crunch of time and what felt to me like so much riding on this, my last and only chance to take a UGR class, I was really anxious.

We knew the basic way: up, up, up. But along the way I saw a road I’d gone up once before, and I knew where it came out: it was a short cut, so we took it. Up, up, up, vertically, to emerge—nowhere. This is what I get for thinking I know what short cuts are. Luckily there happened to be two policemen milling around on that corner, and I asked them for directions. My heart sank as one described to me how we needed to go down, down, down a different road, turn at the big stoplight, and then go up, up, up again—the Facultad was on a totally different hill from the one we were on. And only a half an hour to go before class. It was a long way down. I enjoy climbing hills, so that element didn’t bother me, but the fact that we were so far from our destination was really worrying.

We finally got to the stoplight and started our ascent once more—the Facultad has to be on top of one of the highest hills in the city; you just go straight up for forever. (The view is fantastic and never more so than in the twilight; we were treated to a gorgeous sunset at our backs and got to watch the city light up for the night.) We emerged—somewhere, and I pulled aside an old man and asked him for directions. Dear God. Even worse news, it seemed. His eyes got wide when I said the name of the Facultad, and he gestured with his arm way, way far away as he said, “It’s completely on the other side of this hill.” I pressed him for more: “And how can we get there?” He told us we would have to go all the way to the end of the road we were on (which was more up, up, up, predictably), and then we could turn in to the Facultad. Okay, maybe this was doable.

Actually, once we started walking in that direction, it seemed crazy. Just how long was this road, anyway? Then I remembered the route I’d looked up on Google Maps beforehand: there had been a very strange bit at the very end where you had to walk far past the Facultad in a straight line and then double back the same distance. I hadn’t understood why, and now I did: the whole complex of houses and schools and other buildings, really whole neighborhoods and more, was contained within walls so thick and high they might have made South Africa proud (that’s before the electric wire, razor blades, and armed security guards, of course). Tingling with anxiety, I was looking for any opening where we could possibly jump the walls, but it was just impossible: too high, too solid.

The walls seemed to stretch around a ludicrously long ways, but finally there came a break, where we were able to turn. We were heading in the right direction! We came to another road that stretched on forever, and although we experienced the success of being in the university complex, how to find our particular building? Luckily Haley had another map and not too much later we found the building of Filosofía y Letras itself. I still wasn’t ready to celebrate. There were fifteen minutes to go, but who could guess how hard it might be to find the right classroom?

Predictably, it was really hard. I have no idea what kind of logic the numbering system operated on. I finally found a directory board that listed where the classrooms were, and it was crazy: 5, 19, 6-13—floor one; 42, 15, 33—floor two; etc. My classroom number was listed as “accessible from the exterior of the building.” This is an enormous, sprawling building complex. Was I going to have to run around the perimeter of the thing to try to find where some door on the outside was? With five minutes to go, I was getting desperate. I asked several people, without luck, until I approached a girl, opened my mouth to ask, and saw from the corner of my eye people disappearing into a door that had to be mine. I shut my mouth, and she read my thought process instantly and laughed as I ran off. It turned out my classroom was in a kind of separate, add-on building, like a portable. Success at last, and exactly to the minute. Whew, that was cutting it fine.

Nobody was there. But they had the class number posted on the door. I thought it was quite possible that on Tuesday, when the class had started, they had discussed changing the classroom, perhaps; I’d glimpsed this kind of flexibility in the Arabic class, when the professor had said, “I know you guys probably aren’t too keen on this class schedule—so everyone, get out your schedules and let’s pick some other day or time to have class!” Luckily for me, this wasn’t the case, and the other students came by shortly. (For all I’ve ever heard about the Spanish culture of not placing so much importance on being on time to things and all that, everything I’ve seen here has been the model of punctuality. Maybe the stereotype is more true of Latin America?)

Well, good news at last! Islamología looks like it’s going to work nicely for me. The professor was wonderful, there are only twelve people in the class, and the class actually happens to be structured the way I’m used to it, with a more lecture-discussion mix, where participation is worth a considerable amount of your grade and the final test is only worth 40%.

It would actually probably be much easier for me just to have the lecture-format and have the final test be worth everything, because as the professor reviewed the syllabus I realized it’s virtually identical material to what I studied last year in my History of Islamic Civilizations class. I could probably do well on the test, whereas participation in such a class is a lot harder. I participate easily and often in my Whitman classes, but that’s a far cry from doing so in Spanish, in front of Spanish people. That said, I’m sure having to participate will be really good for my language skills. Even if it’ll be embarrassing to stumble in my words in front of everyone (there are several other foreigners, but they’re all extremely fluent), it’s the better thing in the long run.

It would probably be nice to take a class that isn’t a repeat of what I’ve already learned before, but then again, maybe not: a lot of the reasons for why I’m taking the class have to do with language and culture, and not the content of the course itself. In fact, it might actually be very helpful to have already learned this stuff, because it’ll help me stay on track easily and not get too lost. For example, the teacher had many asides today, little throwaway comments, that I wouldn’t have understood without my background knowledge: about the Almohades, the Umayyads, the Nazarí, the ‘Umma, etc. So this might actually work out to be a very good balance indeed.

One last (considerable!) trial of my night. The professor let us out a few minutes early, and I saw it was 9:22 as I left the building. They stop serving dinner in the comedor in the residencia at 10. In the very near future, I plan on figuring out the bus schedules and system and taking the bus home from class at night, since it’s late, not the best part of town, and so far away that getting back in time for dinner would otherwise be impossible; but I wasn’t willing to right then risk getting on the bus going the wrong direction, not knowing when the bus would come to a particular stop, etc. I was going to walk back instead.

But I still had this time crunch squeezing me tightly: could I really get back to the residencia in 48 minutes? (Where Haley and I had set out from had been a good fifteen minutes from my residencia, so I was really looking to shave off thirty minutes from the walk.)

Had I known what I know in retrospect, I would have never attempted it, and would have either resigned myself to finding food on the town somewhere or chancing the bus system. There were no street signs anywhere in the area, so charting a route from my map wouldn’t have been possible, so I did the obvious thing: go downhill and hope for the best.

(I never worry about getting lost here. Sure, I take wrong turns, and I do often end up far from where I intended to go, but I’ve never been truly lost. That is, no matter where I end up, I can figure out where I am and easily get to a main artery that I know well—but it might take a little wandering. Which is completely fine, until I actually have a firm time commitment and then actually need to know the most direct route somewhere. What is very strange, though, is that for the first time in my life I feel like I have some innate, quasi-mystical directional ability. This has happened to me now on almost a daily basis, where I will be somewhere completely new and unknown to me, and without any visual landmarks I will intuitively feel in what direction I need to go, and everything goes fine. It’s so strange for me to have that feeling and be able to trust it implicitly, but it’s been one of my very favorite things here. Nothing is more fun than deciding to explore for hours and not letting myself ever use a map, purposely getting lost so I can find my way back again just by feel.)

I ran the whole way home. It started off really fun. The hill was steep and the road was a rollercoaster of delightfully-banked curves. I couldn’t believe how far down the road went. I was charging full speed, and it was at least fifteen minutes on that one hill, winding around and around and around. I emerged somewhere that, surprising to me (I’ve really gotten around), I didn’t recognize in the slightest. (I went down a different way than Haley and I had gone up, because we definitely hadn’t gone the most direct route.)

Never more so have I trusted my homing instinct (its accuracy is really unbelievable), taking turns and going straight and turning again in certain places because it felt like the thing to do, still running the whole time, trying to get myself to somewhere useful. I was getting really tired by now, in my two-inch heel boots and peacoat. I finally emerged onto a big road and consulted my map. Oh, bad news: I was some ways before Gran Vía, the main road that would take me back to familiar territory. I knew where I was, but knowing was much more disheartening. Gran Vía is a really long road, and here I was, so far down that the street wasn’t even called Gran Vía yet.

I had fifteen minutes till the clock struck ten. Running, it’s about five minutes from the corner of Gran Vía to my residencia, but who knew how long running the whole length of Gran Vía to get to that corner would take. That was a really unpleasant stretch to run. It was so long, so monotonous, I had a splitting sideache and was so ready to give up, except I’d already gone so far… I took a shortcut at the end (a verified one, this time), and finally made it back, at ten o’clock to the minute. I could feel from the burning in my face that I must have looked a complete mess, bright red with sweat dripping off me in sheets, but I plopped down in the comedor nonetheless. The old woman who runs the kitchen didn’t look the happiest to see me, and I felt bad, because I didn’t want to make her wait around for me too long, but victory was mine. At that point I’d lost my appetite, but it didn’t matter; I ate up anyway.

All in all, it was a tough run, though I guess getting some quality exercise in can’t hurt me. I'd like to go back this weekend and leisurely explore around that area. I’m really glad it looks like things have worked out and I’ll get to take this class at the UGR, and finally my schedule is all set. 

Love,