Foreigner

2/9/09

I know I am getting less consistent with my updates, but luckily a journaling assignment has made me write again:

            I am sitting in a café across the street from my apartment, I ordered a café con leche, which I am quickly starting to become addicted to, which is weird because I generally don’t like coffee. Maybe I’m like a real grown up now.

            I came here to force myself to do work. I had nothing important this weekend and somehow managed to not do any of my homework for the week. I truly astound myself sometimes with the amount of time I can waste.

            I just finished doing the reading for my Barcelona class. I accidentally slept through it this morning. I will never understand the design of cell phone alarm clocks with the snooze button on one side and the off button located just one space away. When my alarm goes off in the morning the only thing I want is for it to shut up, so I slap it across the face with my finger and sometimes I hit the wrong button. That was the case today.

            The class I missed was a field trip to the Gotchic Quarter, which is a bummer because of any of the classes I would want to miss, a walking tour is not one of them. I have really been enjoying my Barcelona class. It’s gotten mixed reviews from a lot of students and generally the class is not that exciting, but getting to see and touch and visit the places we’re learning about has made it much more interesting. I really feel like I’m walking on history in a lot of places here.

            The reading we had to do talked a lot about Catalonia and the Catalan pride. It’s funny to see the differences in attitudes toward the Catalans. My senora hates Catalan, refuses to learn it, and gives her calendar, (written in Catalan), dirty looks when she has to look at the dates. My friends just got back from Valencia and said that they have their own language there too, which apparently was a fairly recent ‘take back the culture’ movement there. She was a little salty about the fact that, while in Spain, we have to decipher so many other languages. I haven’t really minded it. At first I was aggravated with Catalan, considering this IS Spain, why isn’t everything just in Spanish. But I have gotten used to it and I can see the point of wanting to preserve the language of your ancestors and taking pride in Catalunya. It was after all, a pretty powerful territory at one point. 

            I have a meeting with my intercambio partner tomorrow, which should be interesting. I feel a lot more confident when I have conversations in Spanish now, since I have to do it so often. But still, sometimes I can’t help but think about HOW DUMB I must sound. It’s almost impossible to appear at all intelligent in a language you struggle to speak. The other day I caught myself having just said a sentence that must have sounded something like, “I no need the dinner this night. I go to bar for futbol.” Eventually I put it more eloquently, but still, I think I sound like a caveman a lot.