Payazo

I had such a great time at my host grandma’s birthday party last week. Five of her eight kids, three of their spouses and three of her grandchildren were here to celebrate and it was so much fun for me to sit with everyone and feel so much like a part of this family. I see my host grandma almost every weekend, but it was great to see her so very, very happy. Before she went home I asked if we could take a picture together and she very proudly put down her cane and stood up especially tall. In the picture that’s me, Domonique, abuela, my host mom and three of the other siblings.

Saturday was Dia de los Cruces and even though I still don’t know what Granada was celebrating it was fun to walk the city and see all the people. Every major neighborhood here gets together to decorate a huge cross and then judges select winners based on different categories (best cross in a plaza, best cross by a school, etc.). What was most surprising to me was seeing so many baby girls, little girls, women my age, older women all wearing flamenco dresses. I knew Spain was proud of its flamenco, but people were dancing to music all over the city and it was incredible to see groups of people my age standing in the street and clapping the rhythms so their friends could dance.

Then Sunday was Spanish Mother’s Day so our host mom made salmorejo, a special and very typical Spanish dish, and the whole family and a family friend sat around the table and ate together. After lunch Domonique and I brought out the flowers we bought for Araceli and she was just so happy that we had thought of her.

Later that night I went with our program director, who is also my theater professor, to a local club/bar because a small theater company was putting on a short performance. In true Spanish style the performance started 45 minutes late, even though the three company members are from Argentina, Italy and France, but fortunately it was worth the wait. It was a unique performance because the dialogue was entirely replaced by music and sounds generated by a live musician and the other two performers did all sorts of funny and bizarre tricks involving a large box, pies, a mattress. You had to be there to really understand what I’m trying to say. Anyway, I laughed very hard and thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to sit and watch very talented and imaginative actors in a cool venue.

I’ve been very fortunate to be in this theater class that has offered me so many unique opportunities here in Granada. This week our theater class was visited by an actor and teacher of a clown class here in the city. One of the workers here at IES bought red, squeaky clown noses for all of us and we spent about two hours with Alex doing acting exercises that he does with his group of payazos (payazo is the Spanish word for clown). We were all so embarrassed because each of us had to do each of the activities, which involved doing improve in front of the whole class, but we all laughed so much and really had fun. The picture of me rocking the red nose was during a game he called dancing musical chairs. We had to dance around and when the music stopped find a chair. The person who lost (which that round was me) had to make some sort of sad noise, pound on his chest and yell like Tarzan and then stand in front of the class and do something. For my big moment I told the broken pencil lead joke Clare taught me years ago and fortunately all but two people laughed really hard, which kept me in the game. Of the two people who didn’t laugh one didn’t speak English (Alex, our instructor, is from Brazil) and someone who didn’t get it. But to her credit, and mine, or maybe Clare’s, when she understood she laughed pretty hard too. At the very end of class Alex taught us the song that his students sing at the end of every class and we had a blast belting it out. It goes like this "Sale el sol por la manana, por la manana sale el sol, sale el sol por la manana y por la noche salgo yo". We loved it.

All of our classes are winding down so we have a ton of work the next couple days to prepare for the end of the semester. But for my flamenco class I think the most stressful part of this week is our dance performance on Thursday. Granted our choreographed dance is short and very basic, but we just finished learning it last week. So last night we all met at Maria’s dance studio to practice with our live musicians, I know, no pressure right. Actually it was great and for whatever reason really helped us get our act together and it’ll be so neat to dance to live music in a theater for all the other IES students Thursday night.
bss

Happy birthday Abuela!

Happy May Day! In the states my mom usually gives Clare and I a little May Day present, usually including a pair of socks. Here however it’s the Spanish equivalent of Labor Day so the entire city is off of work and essentially closed down. Between today, the festival el Dia de la Cruces on Saturday and Mother’s Day on Sunday Granada has a big weekend, which means I had only three days of classes.




And to top things off it’s my host grandmother’s 91st birthday today so my host family is throwing a party and judging by the Coke, Fanta and six pack of beer in the fridge it’s gonna be quite the fiesta.

It’s been another eventful week here in Granada. On the 20th of April a group of IES students met for the Seder, which was hosted by a few of the Jewish students in our program. It was quite the success and it was a great experience for everyone. Two of the students led us through the service, explaining everything and sharing stories and then the whole group ate a dinner together that they had prepared. For me the highlights were listening to the daughter of a professor sing for us in Hebrew and watching the kids tear apart the library looking for the hidden matza.

This week a few of the Arabic and Islamic Art and Architecture professors hosted a calligraphy workshop for their students, which fortunately some others got to sit in on. After the short presentation the wife of one professor and a calligraphy expert gave us a short lesson in the techniques of writing Arabic. Granted we didn’t have much time, but she wrote my name for me in two different styles of Arabic writing and then I got to try writing my name with the traditional tool and ink. It was so different and really hard, but so much fun.

This past weekend my theater class took a trip to Madrid to see a contemporary work called La Paz Perpetua that we had just finished reading and discussing in class. Getting to see the play itself was incredible because it was written just last year and went the second night and we went to a beautiful, old, opera house style theater to see it. The piece itself is unique because it discusses rather deep topics like the existence of God, war, terrorism, torture, but the three main characters are dogs. Anyway, it gave me a lot to think about, strangely, or maybe not so strangely, the issues seem much more profound coming from the mouths of animals. We had such a great weekend in Madrid and we played the role of the tourist and walked through the Palacio Real, the Reina Sofia and the Parque Retiro.

Since we are getting down to the end I have a lot of work so I’ve spent a lot of time writing lately. This Monday I had my last Mediterranean Ecosystems class and on Monday we already have our final. Crazy, but it’ll be so nice to have one class out of the way for my last month here. We went on our last MedEco field trip last Friday, though it turned out to be more like a mountain climb than a leisurely walk with discussion about plants. We actually climbed to the peak of this mountain in the Sierra Nevada and through the climbing part was brutal the view was incredible. On one side we saw part of the Sierra Nevada that is still covered in snow and the other way the land just stretched forever.

I feel like there is so much more to tell, I’ve been going to quite a few live concerts, plays and have been trying to go to new places and restaurants. It’s a busy life. Alright grandma’s here, gotta get ready for birthday party!

bss

April in Granada

Ok so I’m a month behind, I’ll try to be better, but it’s been such a busy one including

major events like a 21st birthday (mine actually) and a trip to Morocco, that it get hard to find time to blog. So put on your reading glasses, this is gonna be a long one with lots of pictures.

I’ve been developing a great relationship with my university professor and I usually sit an talk with him for about 45 minutes an hour every week about the class, my experience here, etc, which is great practice for me and just in general a lot of fun. So, I went in to talk to him one week and expressed some concern about doing sufficient work for our group project and his reply was, “Hey I’m friends with the first female gypsy lawyer in Spain, do you want to have coffee with her tomorrow morning?” The next morning I met with Jose Miguel (my prof) and Paqui Fernandez and though it wasn’t so much the interview I was expecting (Paqui pretty much dominated the conversation) I learned an incredible amount about the gypsy population here in Granada and the Ccentro Sociocultural Gitano Andaluz where she works. I’m totally spoiled to have developed this kind of connection and I’m really looking forward to the other meeting I have set up with Jose Miguel. The plan is that before the end of the semester I’ll go with him to the women’s prison in the area, the juvenile center where he works with immigrant children and a music festival.

Biology continues to be interesting and a constant source of amusement for us, the language barrier always manages to produce a few funny jokes. Since my last post we’ve gone on two more excursions, one to Hoja de Baza the Spanish badland and one to Lajaron an area in the south of the Sierra Nevada. For these two trips we’ve been packed into a tiny bus that we now jokingly refer to as the bio party bus and despite the tiring walks and the long day they have been pretty incredible. During this last trip to the mountains the bus took us all the way to the top so we were actually looking down on some others and were able to see the Mediterranean and had the day been clearer we would have been able to see the outline of the African coastline as well. This particular area had been affected by forest fires so we discussed the effects of fires on the environment, the effects of savage logging and counted pine saplings to better understand.

For my university class our final project, and apparently the only real sort of work required for us this semester, each group has to select a marginalized group represented in Granada’s population and do interviews to better understand their point of view. So my group decided (ok mostly they decided) to learn more about drug addicts and the rehabilitation process of the Spain based organization Proyecto Hombre. We set up an appointment one morning during the week with a counselor for the organization, he obviously wanted to go over our questions with us to make sure we weren’t asking anything to personal or provocative, and with a drug addict going through their program. The interview was incredible and intensely emotional for each of us and at one point the woman began to cry talking about the effect of drugs on her family and her relationship with her young daughter. I was so impressed by her courage and her willingness to talk to a group of students and I feel like it was an important opportunity for us to gain that sort of insight into her life.

I continue to go to lots of theater performances with my theater class and I’ve seen two excellent productions recently. The first was called 2660 (ok I think the last number is wrong, but it’s something like that) and was a five-hour long work that consisted of five different sections. Going in I was counting on it being amazing because it’s really gutsy for a theater company to put on such a long show, but it was definitely worth the time. Overall the pieces seemed completely disconnected except for one theme, which was a reference to ciudad Juarez and the murders of the hundreds of women there, though by the last piece we were able to see the full circle of the play. One of the reasons I loved it so much was because it was a very alternative type of theater with very creative ways of telling the story. In my favorite section all 8 actors squeezed into a small portion of the stage and while telling their story were simultaneously videoed and projected on a screen above them. Occasionally instead of the live feed a previously shot dinner of the 8 actors in costume at a Mexican restaurant was shown instead and there was lots of fast paced jumping and dancing. Then a few weeks ago I went to another production called Sindrome Clown, which was by far the funny play I’ve seen in years. Granted it was in Spanish and I only understood half, these guys had intense accents, but I was holding my sides I was laughing so hard. There were only two actors and then one guys sitting on the side playing violin and basically the these two “clowns” were attempting to hold the entire audience hostage. Then for an hour and a half we laughed as every possible thing went wrong with the process, including the making of a “torture video” of an audience member (they videoed him eating stale bread on a cell phone and yelling help with his mouth full), multiple phone calls to the police and the writing of their list of requirements from the police (which included the ingredients for pisto, a traditional Spanish dish).

I also continue to go to flamenco performances with my flamenco class and last night we went to a show depicting Frida Kahlo’s life in dance. The live music was incredible and included some jazz and folk music along with traditional flamenco music and it was very interesting to see a group perform choreographed dances instead of individuals improvise. What made this performance more unique though was the fact that the role of Frida was performed by a male flamenco dancer.

Almost two weeks ago now I celebrated my 21st birthday! I had a very nice night, ate dinner with some friends, went to a bar owned by a friend who opened a bottle of champagne for us and went out dancing for awhile before going home. But, what made this birthday so special for me was my trip to Morocco. We actually left the morning of April 10th so I spent my day in Gibraltar walking around the Rock of Gibraltar, through the St. Michael’s caverns, watching the monkeys and a group of us went out for fish and chips that night. I had a great day, but we were all exhausted and I was in bed by 11. The next morning we woke up and took the ferry across the strait to Morocco and then took a bus into Tangier were we ate lunch. I had a lot of stereotypes about the oppression of women, many of which were proven true by this trip, but that first day we stopped for lunch at the Darma Women’s Center in Tangier and I was also given hope. The center is designed to teach women how to read, write, program computers, weave, or various other tasks in order to allow them to work or open their own stores. That afternoon we drove into Rabat where we were paired off and sent home with a Moroccan host family. While this was one of the most interesting parts of the trip it was also one of the most difficult because of the obvious language barrier. In our host family we (I lived with two other IES students) had a mom, two sisters and then three family friends who lived there as well, so in the eyes of Moroccan society there was no male figure in the household definitely limited the opportunities of the girls in the household, and therefore us. During the next few days with my family I learned the art of using a Turkish toilet, took a bath in the Hammam (the public Arabic baths), ate incredible food, heard the morning call to prayer, saw our family’s bakery (which also meant lots of fresh bread every day), saw part of a Moroccan wedding, walked through the night market (with a male escort of course), had a discussion with a Moroccan professor, talked with Moroccan university students over tea and held very “conversations” over lunch that consisted mostly of gestures and funny faces. At the end of the time with our host family I was very sad to go and our sweet, sweet host mom gave us huge hugs and kisses as we said bye. From there we drove to a very small, rural town and ate lunch with a family in the community. The idea was to give us the opportunity talk with them and ask questions about rural life in Morocco, but they were so soft spoken and shy that the highlight for most of us ended up being the walk up the mountain, the view from the top and the time we spent playing with the young children. Then we drove to Chefchauoen where we spent our last night. Our huge IES group had been split into four groups of about 16 students so the 16 of us took over this tiny but beautiful hostel in the city and spent the rest of the day shopping and exploring. To celebrate our last night we went to an incredible Moroccan restaurant called Casa Aladdin that over looked the Kasbah of the city. After dinner we all met up on the roof of our hostel with big blankets to talk about our experiences, the highlights and surprises. For me at least it was a great opportunity to talk out some of my frustrations about the experience and Moroccan society and to reflect on the major differences between American, Spanish and Moroccan lifestyles. The next morning we woke up drove through the shanty towns in the city so that we could see the extreme poverty and the effect of tourism and resorts on the area and then went back to the port to take the return ferry to Spain. For me there were many shocking parts to this trip, but the experience that by far shocked me the most was watching the interactions between officers and women crossing the Spanish-Moroccan border and seeing the way I was treated as an American citizen. My little blue passport and my white face gained me incredible treatment and as an American I was waved through almost every line, past waiting Moroccans, without being stopped to have my id checked. One of the few women who actually looked at my picture seemed to really only want to strike up a conversation and wanted to know what I thought of her country and her people. But then I watched them literally shoving older Moroccan women carrying bags on their bags and in their hands only to turn to me and give me a huge smile. It was such a sick power trip. Overall it was absolutely eye opening, I’ve never been exposed to such poverty, such discrimination, such sexism and I have never in my life been so uncomfortable being a woman. It gives you a lot to think about and I’m still thinking. It’s the sort of trip you’re not really supposed to recover from.

It’s so hard for me to believe that my experience in Spain is coming to an end. I only have a little over one month left here before I return to the states. From some obvious reasons I’m so excited about getting back, but it’s going to be so hard to leave a place I’ve come to love. The end of the semester also means a ton of work and I’m beginning to tackle my final projects, which thanks to great grades on my midterms I’m a little less worried about now. Still though, my time will be packed, there is so much I still want to do and see here in Granada. I love you and miss you all!

bss


Pictures: So they are pretty much all out of orders, so here's what they're of from top down. #1 - the view of the city of Chefchauoen and the Rift mountains in the morning from the roof of our hostel. #2 - some of us with a few of the girls from the village we visited at the top of the hill. #3 - me on a camel on a beach in Morocco, I had no idea it was so hard to hold on as a camel stands up! #4 - where I was standing in Gibraltar to take this picture I could see where the Atlantic and Mediterranean meet and the coastlines of both Spain and Africa. #5 - this is most of my university group with the woman we interviewed from Proyecto Hombre. #6 - my Mediterranean Ecosystems pine sapling counting team in the Sierra Nevada.

Happy 13th birthday Clare!/Semana Santa

Ok so I’ve been slacking a bit, but I partially blame it on my lack of internet over Semana Santa, or rather the only available internet was on a French computer and because the key placement is different trying to type even short emails was intensely frustrating. But there’s been a lot going on so here it is, probably not in correct chronological order….

My theater class went to a private showing of a production called Experimental Lady in a tiny “theater” where most of the class ended up sitting on the floor around the stage. Our professor is friends with the two directors so we were able to discuss their goals and creative process with this experimental type of theater group with the directors and actresses. The play itself was about three women who planned and executed the murders of random men as a way to get revenge on the men in their lives who had mistreated and hurt them. There was a lot of fake blood and stabbing at a table and a mannequin with large kitchen knives and since the women were clearly crazy it made us uneasy to be sitting in such a small setting. I still don’t know how I feel about it and I left the theater really creeped out and kind of disturbed.

We’ve befriended a group of guys from Argentina who live here in Granada and they semi hosted/dj-ed an Argentina party at a club close to my apartment, so my roommate and I went, halfway learned to tango and spent the night being spun around the dance floor by a couple Argentineans. Needless to say we had a blast.

I went on my first date with a Spanish guy last week, which, though fun, kind of played out like a romantic comedy gone wrong. Turns out the reason Carlos was such a gentleman was largely due to him being a Spanish Marine and as the conversation turned political, as it inevitably does with me, I slowly found that he is one of the most politically and socially conservative people I’ve met in my life. He detests the Socialist president who was just reelected in Spain because he thinks Zapatero does stupid things like grant homosexual couples the right to adopt children, is intensely Catholic, is extremely against a woman’s right to an abortion (though his biological reasoning was WAY off), thinks voting is a right not a duty and refuses to do so because he doesn’t like anyone, and on and on. Unfortunately I have a hard time expressing my thoughts on these issues in Spanish because we would have duking it out over coffee. On the bright side I spent my afternoon practicing Spanish.

This past week was Semana Santa/Spring Break for all the students and four of us spent the first part of the week relaxing in a quaint seaside town called Nerja. It was packed with tourists, but it was nice to escape the busier life in Granada and go someplace where we know no one. And of course being on the beach on the Mediterranean was incredible. We also took the trip as an opportunity to eat everything but Spanish food and very happily feasted on Chinese, Brazilian and Italian food instead. The first picture is of our very stereotypically Mediterranean and beautiful view from the porch of our hostel at sunset. Tuesday night we found out that the bus drivers went on strike on Monday, so we ended up waking up really early with the intention of waiting at the bus station, with the hope of there being at least one bus running instead of spending another day on the beach, only to find that the strike had been resolved. I continue to be fairly confused by Spaniards.

My roommate and I stayed with a couple friends here in Granada for the rest of the week, which meant that we were well fed and entertained. Two of the three roommates are French exchange students who are also learning Spanish and English so I spent a fair amount of time the past few days hanging out with them and their group of French friends. I unfortunately don’t speak a single word of French (when asked I could honestly say that ‘bonjour’ and ‘merci’ are the only two French words I know) so that meant I also spent a fair amount of time completely lost in the conversation. Semana Santa is a huge production all over Spain and I was very lucky to be here to see some of the processions, usually with ice cream or candied almonds in my hand, in some ways it’s more of a carnival type of experience than a religious one. One afternoon I spent about two hours wandering the city and I think I managed to watch parts of four different processions in different areas. One of my favorites was the one that filed straight into the open doors of the cathedral and the other was one at night with beautiful music and lots of candles. Watching the processions was also a very Spanish experience as no one seemed to be in any sort of hurry and the entire procession would occasionally pause for reasons that are still unclear. Though I’m far from Catholic myself it was still a profound cultural and spiritual experience in its own way. The second picture is from the beginning of the first procession I saw.

While I had a great week, saw incredible things, read a lot, relaxed a lot, slept a lot, met interesting people, talked in Spanish, I was so happy to come back home this afternoon and it was a joy to talk and eat with my host family again.

I’m missing home, it’s strange to not be in the states for my own family’s Easter traditions and I feel a little out of the normal Easter spirit because I am so accustomed to attending church services this week, but it’s all part of the experience. I hope you all have a very happy Easter with lots of eggs and the energizing fellowship of family and good friends.

bss

psicología social

This week has been well, as my roommate would say, extra. I finally got my university class worked out, it turns out the Education and the Environment class was a complete bore and the class I loved so much was a Social Psychology class. Since the UGR (University of Granada) website is incredibly un-user friendly I spent a miserable hour navigating and desperately looking for this class and professor, neither of which name I knew. When I finally found what I thought was right I took a gamble and registered for it and thank goodness I did because very fortunately I was right and the class is incredible. I was finally able to go to class this Thursday and it’s easily over 100 students, which coming from Southwestern is already a huge change for me. So I sit down and prepare myself for taking notes in Spanish, which is a beast of a task in itself, when the professor walks in and tells us to arrange ourselves in small groups. Asking to join a group is still a social challenge for me here, but I paired up with four Spanish women all of whom were very friendly and accepting of me. The prof starts to explain the exercise he wants us to do and the idea is that we have to select one person in the group who is, for whatever reason, different to be the “marginalized” person. **As a side note, any dialogue in my story is, of course, in Spanish.** None of the others wanted to be that person and I figured it was a unique opportunity to talk so I introduced myself and said hi, I’m Anna and I’m American so I feel like, for obvious reasons, I’m the marginalized person in our group. So we talk about what makes me different, I’m a foreigner, they had never met me, I was wearing red, etc. The professor then has all of the marginalized people stand in a corner at the front of the room because, as he explains, society views marginalized people as being outside the norm and therefore the groups don’t mix. He then has the marginalized people stand up on his desk in front of the class while a group leader explains to everyone what makes us different. Granted it was awkward to stand there on display, but no big deal it was otherwise quick and painless. But then he has each of us stand on his desk again and describe to the class how it made us feel to be considered the marginalized person of our group. For most of the students they were different because they were the only guy or had a different haircut, so most of their explanations and sentiments weren’t terribly profound. They were after all standing in front of a group of their friends. And then there was me. So I climb back up onto his desk and say, “Well as an American student in Spain I’m going to be the marginalized person in many situations for the next four months”. Because I didn’t really know what else to say I hesitated and a girl in the front row rather maliciously calls out to me to speak in English. I explained that I was in Spain to study Spanish so I was going to speak in Spanish while I was here and my sweet professor said that I was a good person for him to practice his English with, but that I was going to continue to speak in Spanish. So I keep talking, explaining that I feel it’s normal that I’m seen as different and that generally Spaniards have lots of questions for me about my country and my culture and that that’s ok with me. This same girl calls out again and says great! now we have someone who is marginalizing herself. Ok it’s really hard to defend yourself in a foreign language especially standing in front of 100+ people you’ve never met, but I tried to explain that it really is ok that people are curious, because I do come from a different place and that it’s really important to have conversations about our cultural differences because that’s how we learn about each other. Anyway I got down, again, a little shaken, but so incredibly proud of myself. It’s a very empowering feeling to take on a challenge like talking in Spanish before such a big group and feeling successfully when it’s over.

The next day we had our first Mediterranean Ecosystems excursion to a place right on the coast called Cerro Gordo. One of the professor started talking and the first thing he said was, “Ok this is the Mediterranean and you can’t see it, but straight that way is Africa.” How many times in your life do you hear that? Any day that starts off that way has got to be good. We hiked around this beautiful area and stopped to look at all these different species of plants, pines, orchids, grasses, etc., and they would explain to us their special adaptations to the Mediterranean climate or their reproduction patterns. I’ve never been big into ecology, but if you are going to study plants this is absolutely the way to do it. Later we ate lunch on the beach and returned home. Despite the horrendous bus ride (apparently it’s normal to speed up to go around turns?) the views in the mountains and of the sea were incredible.

I feel like I’m a little behind on pictures so here are two today. The first one is of one of my biology professors with a grasshopper on his finger. I think it will help you understand why I love the class, these guys are precious and WAY into plants. The other is of my group doing an exercise in my theater class. We had to “create” a machine that represented an emotion or feeling. We were assigned loneliness and though you’re obviously missing the motions it was an interesting and very funny moment that seemed worth sharing. And just for the record, I wasn't dressed up because of some sudden fashion related inspiration, I was literally out of clothes and it was that or a dress.

bss

birthday paella!

It’s been a very interesting and very full week. Classes are still going well, I actually had my first midterm on Monday. It’s so hard to believe that I am already so far into my semester and it’s somewhat nerve racking because I have a hard time knowing what to expect from Spanish professors, but it went surprisingly well.

I’m in a literature/theater class here at IES, though to my surprise it turns out to be more theater than literature. One of our major projects for the class is to select and direct a scene from one of the plays we are reading in class and then “defend” our work and our directorial decisions (in Spanish of course) in front of the class. For the last few weeks we’ve been discussing a play called “La Noche Dividida”, a short modern piece written by a female playwright, so I selected a quite funny scene and a couple friends and last Wednesday I got to watch them perform. It was quite a challenge considering I have no real theater experience, but it turned out well. One of the directors took pictures and I’ll be sure to post one or two when she emails them to me.

On Saturday on of my IES friends turned 21 so a group of us celebrated together over paella and chocolate fondue (check out the picture of birthday paella). My roommate and her friends from last semester are good friends with a Spaniard who is conveniently a fabulous cook so he and his roommate hosted a small birthday party for Kateri. To Kateri’s horror a couple friends gifted her a tiara that read “Besame, es mi cumplianos!” or “Kiss me, it’s my birthday!”, which I think was opportunely lost at some point. Anyway, it was an adventure and lots of fun.

It is a bizarre feeling to be settling into this lifestyle. I finally have a routine that I follow and everyday I feel like less of a tourist and more of a Granadina. But, all the same there are aspects of this life that catch me off guard. I absolutely adore my host family, but I find it very interesting, and sometimes difficult, to interact with a 50+ year old man who has spent most of his adult life raising boys and is suddenly taking care of two college aged women. We are, after all, very different from his sons and he is very set in his ways.

I haven’t been feeling very well the past few days and I spent most of the day yesterday in bed. It seems that my body has not been reacting well to Spain so I’ll clearly have to pick a different Spanish speaking country to live.

I continue to meet all sorts of interesting people here, I even met a guy from Wales living and teaching English here who spent sometime in Costa Rica working with sea turtles. What a small world. Speaking of sea turtles Allison, our one flippered turtle from Sea Turtle Inc., will be getting a prosthetic flipper sometime later this spring or summer. Because her story is so incredible STI has been getting all sorts of great publicity including from National Geographic and BBC. Check out the National Geographic story on her: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080229-turtle-picture.html. Needless to say I’m thrilled and can’t wait to get back to the island.

bss

riding the wave

It’s been an interesting few days here. In every study abroad orientation they talk about the highs and lows of this sort of experience. Sometimes I make a grammatical error or commit a cultural faux pas and it feels devastating and then sometimes I celebrate small victories. One of the most exhausting parts comes from the rapid fluctuations in my emotions. Yesterday my host dad and I had a very minor miscommunication about food that made me want to hide out in my room and then I had to go to class at the university (and I made it to class this time), which was terrifying because I was clearly the only foreign student in the class and was the only person to be sitting alone. Since we will be working on a major group project this semester I had to ask a few different groups if I could work with them before I found one. Ok now, this was probably the most difficult thing I’ve had to do this trip, going up to groups of students my age trying to conjugate verbs in a form they don’t teach in American Spanish classes the whole time hoping desperately that they will be generous enough to let me work with them. Thank goodness though my moment of courage paid off and when my group members asked where I was from they seemed just thrilled to meet an American student. It turns out not all foreigners hate Americans after all. After we all exchanged email addresses I talked with my professor, who is a very happy, laid back guy who was thrilled to talk to me, for which I’m very appreciative, we will be talking often as he has a very thick accent and I think I will have lots of questions. We ended up talking for quite awhile about his life (he showed me picture of his family on his camera phone), a relative of his who studies biology, his experience with biology, what we will be doing in class, etc. I’m so grateful to be in class with such a patient and gracious professor. So this was the high point of my day and I walked home with very high spirits.

Because it is just impossible to find spicy food here I made salsa this afternoon, though by my standards it is still a bit tame, my roommate and I decided to make a Mexican style lunch tomorrow and I’ll have to share salsa with Spaniards who have an incredibly low tolerance. My host mom is just thrilled that we are cooking and hopefully she won’t be too disappointed, cooking was never my strong point, but I miss American food.

bss