Day to Day Life

Life is starting to fall into a general rhythm here, now that school and housing are taken care of. Everything in Spain moves a little slower, and I’ve never been so relaxed in my life. My weekend is longer than my school week, as I only have classes Monday through Wednesday. Technically I have a Tuesday/Thursday class, but half of the class is virtual so we only have to attend on Tuesdays. This works out perfectly for me, as I am trying to travel a lot.

My campus is a half-hour walk, and a large chunk of that is up a hill. Most people take the bus, but I am trying to be valiant and cheap at the same time, since I’d rather spend my euros on gelato than a bus ride (which, in the end, must cancel out the exercise). In any case, I show up essentially drenched in sweat for every class, which I’m sure has something to do with my next topic of conversation: difficulty in making friends in class.

I don’t know why I’m surprised that I haven’t really been meeting people in my classes. In my two years at Santa Barbara, I’ve probably only made less than a handful of friends from my actual courses. The definition of a lecture is generally a professor talking at his students, not students engaging each other socially while the professor takes a nap. Either way, I had big dreams about meeting so many long-lasting Spanish and international friends once school started, which so far isn’t the case.

The classes themselves are very mixed. On the one hand, I feel like someone is constantly pulling a prank on me. It’s hilarious to sit in a classroom and have someone talk at you for 2 hours in a foreign language. Every once in a while, the professors will clearly make a joke, and I awkwardly join in the other student’s laughter and realize that I need to quickly learn about 1,000 more words of this language. My Geolinguistics professor (don’t know what Geolinguistics is? I basically don’t either) talks so quickly and with the thickest Andalusian accent (read: he drops essentially every letter that matters) that I don’t even have time to think that a two-hour class seems long: my entire being is absorbed in translating. It is hard to get stressed out, though—in fact, it’s hard to get stressed out in this siesta-loving country in general. No matter how hard it is to understand, or how ridiculous it seems that I spend a nauseating amount of time reading one 16-page academic article, I just remind myself how cool it is that I’m actually surviving—and thriving—in a country whose language is entirely different. Not to mention a subset of that country that, many years ago, got a little lazy with proper pronunciation. (Although my linguistics professors would shun what I just said. Andalusia’s accent is “different,” not better and not worse. Although quite a lot worse if you’ve spent seven years studying Madrid or Mexico City Spanish, in my opinion). All said and done though, I really do understand a lot of what’s going on in the lectures, and I can feel my Spanish improving rapidly.

I’ve been treating friend-searching like a full-time job here. For one, I don’t live with Spaniards, so I need to find other ways to get advanced practice in. For another, there’s only so long you can justify living in Spain and hanging out solely with Californians. I’ve been spending a lot of time with the people I met at the beach house, and they are so nice and fun. Being social is conflicting with my bank account, however, and I forget that tapas are not actually “free,” since you have to buy the drink they come with. Oh well, I pretty much count on living it up for a year, draining my life savings, and returning to Santa Barbara a beggar.

The most famous tapas bar in Granada, Bodegas Castañeda. The one blonde amongst all the Spaniards is a sad giveaway that I'm a foreigner. (Ignore the crazy red-eye touchup, but that's what you get when the photo is taken with an iPhone. RIP Steve Jobs.)

Making lunch at my piso with Amalia and Anna!

Anna, Natcho, Paco and me having a "low-key" night for Spanish standards--drinks at a bar and home by 4:30.

Because I haven’t rambled enough in this blog entry yet, I’ll share one anecdote that I thought was especially hilarious. I was sitting next to a girl from Turkey in my Anthropology of Development class the first day. I asked her if she’d ever been to the U.S. and she said she’d been to Miami (that seems to be the city every one has been to if they visit the U.S.—not sure why). Then she got very excited and asked me, “Do you know Joe?” I asked, “Joe?” and she said, “Yes, I met someone named Joe while I was in Miami. Do you know him?” I really wasn’t sure at first if she was kidding. This was almost worse than when people ask me if I know Brad Pitt because I’m from California. Turns out she was completely sincere, and I had to apologize for not personally knowing all of the 300 million residents of my beloved nation.