Wow, i really live in Europe

So as life in Spain begins to really set in and be in full force, I am already finding it harder to make myself sit down and blog, and when I do, I think back over the week and decide it is not possibly let my family/friends know everything that is going on with my life. So for those that I don’t talk with on a regular basis, and the primary way of following me is through this blog, just rest assured that life in Madrid is amazing, I feel truly fortunate to have such great friends here, and to just be in an amazing country immersed in a one-of-a-kind culture.

Proceeding past my love affair with Spain, my week started off not so good. When I was at work on Monday I started feeling light-headed, hot, and just overall not well. So I came home, slept 10 hours, got up, got on the metro, and half-way there I started feeling light-headed and just overall dizzy like I was going to faint. So I get to the school and walk up to my director (she is a smoker, as well as almost every other teacher, and they stand outside the gates and chain smoke while the kids and family members walk up to them and say good-morning) and tell her that I am very sick and I need to go to the doctor. So she feels my forehead and says I am burning up. So long story short, she got one of the bilingual teachers that I work with (Julia) to take me the hospital. I don’t know what I have done without her because she did all the speaking and interpreting, I was just overall really thankful. So I stayed home from work for 2 days because I had a fever and was therefore contagious. It is no fun whatsoever to be sick abroad in a country where you don’t speak the language. It is definitely an incentive to use a lot of hand sanitizer and to take my vitamins.

So that brings us to Thursday. Thursday (which is our Friday because we don’t work on Friday’s) I met up with my expat-fam in Sol and we went to a bar and just hung out and then went to this horrible imitation of an “American club” with “American music” where all the expats hang out because they feel more comfortable with it, Joy Eslava. So being the expats that we are, we felt we had to experience it at least once. All I have to say is that I felt like I was at a high-school dance surrounded by 18-year olds that were out for the first time. It was just overall, not an enjoyable experience nor one that I would suggest for others. After that followed a series of unfortunate events that I will not go into detail here to save my mom from a heart-attacks, but I at least once to mention them for my own memories. Friday, me and the rest of my expat-family had taco night and it was great! There is just something so nice about having an “American” family-unit while abroad. Its not like we sit and sing the star-spangled banner, but there is something much more unifying about being an American when you are outside of America.

Now we arrive at my best weekend in Spain thus far. On Saturday me and Alissa went out on the town with Gonzalo and his friend Carlos and really had a great time. We went around to a couple bars in La Latina and just had drinks, conversations, jokes, and of course talked about cultural norms that me and Alissa aren’t use to. It was my first night out until the metro reopened! Yay for leaving the club at 5:45 a.m. ! Sunday, Gonzalo invited us out with some of his friends from school and such. They seemed to be really nice people, despite my self-inflicted inability to understand a word they said. However, because of my inability to communicate with them, I did a lot of observing. The one thing I have to say is that it is almost an out-of-body experience to see other cultural norms, and then reflect on how that would be viewed back home. As I am around more and more Spanish people, I think in general, we (Americans) just take some stuff too seriously. We are so caught up in political-correctness and how we are going to be viewed, that we confine ourselves to boxes of decorum and just become overall boring.

New Insights:

The more I am around non-native English speakers and attempting to absorb Spanish in various forms, my English is changing. I have noticed I have begun using inflictions of words that is perfectly understood in a monotone voice, I’m leaving out key words that don’t really exist in Spanish, and my sentence structure is getting all messed up because I am attempting to imitate Spanish. By the time I leave Spain, I am going to have a horrendous mixture of Spanglish and will be rendered incomprehensible by all.

I am also having to think more about English and why we say things the way we do. For example, Thursday at work the auxillaries had a meeting with the bilingual teachers and they were asking us questions about phrases we use to control the classroom. They were confident that we say “sit on your seat”, but I said no, its “sit in your seat”. They had a strong case because they were saying that we sit ON a couch, not in a couch, so why do we sit IN a seat. The truth is, I have no clue why we say the phrases we do, but we do. But when you hear their justifications for a wrong phrase, you start thinking, maybe I am mistaken. So in short, I spend all day in self-doubt on a topic that I am considered an “expert” on. EXHUASTING!

Quote of the week: “In the winter, I am yellow like a Simpson”- Carlos

*The quote of the week is becoming more and more competitive because I am around so many people that say hilarious things, especially when in a room of about 10 Americans that have been drinking a lot and are able to say anything they want and know they will be understood, for better or worse. However, most are extremely inappropriate so why these may not be the “funniest”, they definitely hit near the top.