Differences

So I posted earlier about how walking on the street in Spain is different than walking on the street in America. Which led me to dig out another post I'd been working on since I got to Spain, which is a list of the differences I've noticed while I was there. Some of them are interesting, some of them aren't, but I feel like it merits posting because it describes some of the daily life that I forget to mention in my normal posts.

• You always wear socks & shoes in the house. Always. You want to go to the bathroom across the hall? You wear your flip-flops.
  
• There is graffiti everywhere and it doesn't seem to be a very big deal. It's on the garage doors over closed shops, abandoned buildings, walls of the city… everything. Some of it is artsy, a lot of it is scribbled words, kind of like the USA.
  
• As a foreigner, you get to walk that tricky line between taking large amounts of money out of the ATM to avoid too many fees and then being hated by cashiers for handing them 50 euro bills when your coffee & pastry comes to a grand total of 3.20.
  
• ALWAYS turn off the lights, because electricity is so expensive here. The government controls it, and they keep raising the tax on it. María likes to talk about this. A lot.
  
• People don't go over to one another's houses very often. Houses are for family and close friends. I wouldn't even ask María if a friend could come over to the house to study or watch a movie. Everybody does those things in town. I once had a conversation with my host brother about the kind of house parties that happen in the USA, and he can barely wrap his head around the idea.
  
• They don't use dryers. Which is probably really good for my clothes… it's just annoying when it rains for two weeks so when you pack for Morocco, half your clothes are wet and you have no idea how to pack.
  
• People don't sit at cafés by themselves. If I'm wandering around town on my own, I usually get coffee to go and find a library or some other location to sit at in lieu of taking up a whole table to myself.
  
• People are much better at conversations here. There's a lot fewer awkward pauses when everyone just decides to get on their phones because the topic ran out. That's something I'm going to miss. Plus they all talk over each other, so following a conversation is like trying to watch a crazy ping-pong match, I'm surprised I haven't gotten whiplash yet.
  
• Lunch is the main meal of the day. You know how in America (at least in my world) kids tend to eat lunch with their friends or out of the house, but for dinner you go home and eat with your family? In Spain, you go home and eat lunch with your family, it's the biggest meal of the day. Dinners are much, much lighter (María just eats fruit or something little), and if you're going to eat out with friends, it's usually at dinner.
  
• They have ham-flavored potato chips.
  
• They also have paprika-flavored Pringles.
  
• Pharmacies here are like going to the medicine aisle of Target. If you're sick, you go in, you tell them your problem, they give you something to fix it. Even if you just need something like Nyquil or Ibuprofen, you still go talk to the pharmacist.
  
• Dinner isn't until 8 PM at least, which means kids don't leave to go out with their friends until around 10, depending on the age. I meet my friends in the Plaza around 11 most nights.
  
• It hasn't snowed here. And some of the trees still have leaves. It's rained like nobody's business (although I've been told repeatedly this is not normal…), but I've seen no snow.
  
• Gyms are expensive. So I haven't been to one for months, given that when I asked about a pass for the month, I was told it would be 75 euro–50 for the gym + pool, and a 25 euro joining fee. It's nonsense. I tried to do push-ups and stuff like that, but there's so little space in the apartment. I really can't wait to go back to the gym at home, even if it will be overrun with people who just made the New Year's Resolution to work out more.
  
• The food… is just not same. Don't get me wrong, I love María's cooking. And they do breakfasts right, especially at the hotels we've been staying at on our excursions. I don't know exactly how to describe the difference, because the only words that come to mind are "bland" and "heavy", and those ones sound so negative to me. They just use a lot fewer seasonings, and a lot more olive oil. And especially coming from Colorado where people are stereotypically in love with salads and anything fresh-tasting, and believe fats and anything fried is food of Satan, food with this much oil just makes me feel heavy.
  
• If you go out to eat, there is rarely a host to great you. Depending on the caliber of the restaurant, you either just seat yourself or a waiter will snag you between waiting tables to tell you where to have a seat.
  
• People are much more direct. This is something I was personally prepared for from everything I'd learned about Spanish culture and from having a native Spanish professor, but my family was not. It came to light one night at dinner, when my English-speaking family was under the impression the waiter was annoyed with us, when to me he seemed just a little rushed because he had a lot of tables to get to.
  

12.12.12

• I developed what I'm now calling the Salamancan plague, since being sick with the plague sounds far more legit than being sick with a cold. It's much, much better than the Moroccan plague, on the bright side. Just a cough and a runny nose, but it made me feel very sorry for my poor classmates who had to sit next to me when I started coughing up half a lung in the middle of the front row. Nothing like being the sick kid. Especially when you're already the foreign kid…
• I got better! Moving on.
• My classmate decided we were going to speak English more often–which led to me teaching her curse words. In my defense, she said them first when we were talking about our presentation. But the really fun part about this was that I have a much better personality in English than I do in Spanish–mainly because I actually have a personality when I speak in English, and my Spanish personality is a very simplified version.
• We had a magical palindrome day! Which meant that my American brain could relax and not worry about messing up the date when I wrote it on my Spanish notes. It's the little things. Happy 12/12, everyone.
• I started writing an essay about cancioneros del renacimiento–which basically translates to "song books of the Renaissance." That basically translates to me metaphorically banging my head against the internet for a million years (I exaggerate during finals week, get used to it) and hoping something that sounded vaguely like an intelligent Spanish thesis. Minimal success, owing largely to the help of a few classmates. Note to future study abroad students–if you decide to take the hard classes, MAKE FRIENDS. They will keep you sane and afloat come finals time.
• I also drank a lot of coffee–Mandala, Pancake, university café… This also means I consumed a lot of sugar, since I put so much in my coffee.
• Fake New Years! Basically, since Salamanca is chock-full of international students who go home for the holidays, the Salamantinos decided to start doing their own New Year's celebration in December, before everyone left. This way, the international students get to see how the Spanish ring in the new year (it involves grapes), plus they never turn down a chance to celebrate.
  
  In all reality, it involves packing 30,000 people into the Plaza Mayor, aaaaand it's incredibly crowded. The countdown was a lot of fun, and then we all dispersed and every girl in the world had to use the bathroom–meaning every bathroom in town had a super long line. It was sheer nonsense, and meant we went home pretty soon afterwards. The plaza part of it all was fun because they gave out grapes to eat during the countdown, which is supposed to be good luck! They had a giant stage set up and everyone counted down together to midnight, when our "new year" started!

• I packed up my suitcase a little bit and grabbed my backpack to go meet Jake at the airport in Madrid! And I ate my last dinner with Megan at our little kitchen in María's apartment–spinach tortilla. Yumm!

"Productive time" before class–mostly I just wanted Pancake coffee
#abroadlove #finalscram #dontmakemeleave

via Instagram http://instagr.am/p/TIoyNToVY2/

This Year I'm Thankful...

(Warning: Cheesiness abound in this post)

This Year I'm Thankful...

My mommy and daddy love me enough to let me run away to Europe for a semester.

I have the type of friends who send me silly cat photos and
travel budget postcards because they miss me too.

My boyfriend is the kind of guy to help me with my fantasy football lineup
even though I haven’t been there to watch a single game with him this season.

My brother is a super smart engineering nerd and seems to be kicking butt at it.

My host mom is an awesome cook & my host brother corrects my Spanish.

I got to visit two different continents in the last month
(but also thankful I don’t live in the Sahara...).

I have new friends I made an ocean away from home
but will hopefully keep when I go back.

But mostly, I am thankful I am taking a picture of this outside one of the most beautiful buildings I’ve ever seen in one of the most amazing cities I will probably ever live in. And I am so thankful to everyone who helped me even the littlest bit to get here! So, that is to say pretty much everyone who reads this. Thank you to everyone! Even though I don’t get a “real” Thanksgiving here, that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking of you all and how happy and lucky I am to have every single one of you!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Social Struggle Bus

So here's the way my day went. I woke up, ate breakfast, then got back under the covers to read Bossypants on my iPod. When María knocked on my door to tell me she was leaving, we had a conversation about me being back in bed, in which I decided it was easier to let her think I was napping than to explain I was reading a novel on a 3-inch touchscreen.

Anyway, I finally got productive and went to class, came back fro lunch, and looked up hostels in Rome & Madrid & Salamanca for future voyages & visits (more on that later).

At 6, I had to go to a rescheduled musicology class, which began a series of events that put me into a slightly unnecessary fight-or-flight-or-panic mode.

1. I didn't know which classroom we were meeting in. I made it to the right floor, then stood around like an idiot until I ran into some other kids who were like, "It's room 24, right?" I have no idea. I'm following you guys.
2. I was having a harder-than-normal time picking up the pre-class chatter. Usually, I get an idea of the conversation (even if it's not a good enough idea to participate in the conversation), but not today.
3. Several of my classmates had photocopies of papers I'd never seen before, leading me to believe I'd once again missed the memo on something I had to get printed to prepare for class.

At this point, my homesick, frustrated, stressed brain went int panic mode, and decided my desire to avoid yet another class where I felt lost, unprepared and alone was so strong, it was time to bail. (Mom & Dad, I know that's not what you want to hear, but sometimes at the age of 20, you have to bail on things for stupid reasons. No one died or got arrested. Or skipped class in the end.)

I almost got away with it, except I decided to take the front stairs instead of the back ones. And as I started up the stairs, I saw one of my almost-friend classmates coming down them (We bonded two days ago over the fact that we can both pop our knuckles loudly and the fact that my ability to pop my thumb out totally freaks him out. I'm not sure if our professor didn't hear us laughing or just ignored it because I was finally doing something other than sitting there like a terrified deer in the headlights). This put me into panic mode again.So there I am, taking the stairs 2 at a time with my head down, but halfway up I hear, "Hey man, where you going?" in a Spanish accent. Now tell me, is there any possible way you could ignore that and just keep going? The answer is no, because it was just too awesome to hear out of nowhere from a native Spanish-speaker.

So my knuckle-cracking friend, two other friends from class, and I had a weird bilingual conversation on the stairs where I gave them my silly panic-mode reasons and they basically shut them down.

"I don't have the copies"
"But the printer is downstairs…"
"Well, yeah. I'm already late."
"So are we."
"I don't have the copies!"
"You can look at ours! Come on!"

And that was that. Class was not the torturous disaster I was apparently expecting (Panic-Mode Corinne is beyond overly pessimistic). I wasn't prepared. I was definitely lost part of the time, but no more than usual. But I survived. And I swear my life had one of those movie moments, one that belongs in a new-kid-in-school movie where the tortured protagonist finally has a table to sit at during lunch.

Cheesiness aside, turns out going to class was a good plan. Because I finally actually participated in class too! Mostly because we were talking about the silly way of calculating when Easter or the festival of Corpus Cristi was… or something… and my professor brought up the American presidential elections. Because (in case you didn't know) those are held the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November. So it can't be November 1. So I got to explain that to the class, and show them I'm not a complete moron, I just don't know how to answer music questions.

So I'm not sure if anyone but myself finds this interesting (I hope you at least enjoyed that my friend knows enough English to feel comfortable saying, "Hey man, where you going??" because I found it to be hilarious), but this is the highlight of my week so far. Although I am going to Karaoke tonight. And we have a Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. And I go to Lisboa on Friday. So there are more interesting posts coming. I just really felt like writing about my social struggles and why they sucked a little less at the end of today!

Chinese Food & English Practice

Last night, we decided to go out for Chinese food. So this is what it looks like when six American girls order Chinese food in Spain

They also set Orange Duck on fire when you order it... my friend's face looked like a little kid on Christmas, it was priceless

And we cleaned up pretty decently. Very good food, and the best part was it comes in slightly smaller portions. We all ordered two plates and just shared among the table. Deliciousness abound. A very good find, especially since if we just want to do one plate each, it's just 3-4 euros per plate. Last night we were all kinda starving for some reason...

Today was back to the grind of school. Bright side: Even though I have to do a partners project, I did not get stuck with some super awkward quiet kid, my partner seems really nice. And like she has a cold, but that's kinda irrelevant for now.

Also, when I got home, I ended up helping David practice his English for a little while. We talked about jobs, and I found out that his first job was a pizza deliveryman. However, if you put in just the word for "deliveryman" on Google translate (without adding the "pizza" beforehand) it spits out "dealer." So I then explained to David that he was definitely a deliveryman because if he told people he was a dealer and left off the pizza part, people might assume some not so good things. Definitely one of the better conversations we've had, just saying.

First Day of (Real) School

So today was slightly terrifying. Because today I had to begin classes at the actual university, not the silly culture-conversation-grammar classes I took with International Courses when I first got here. And I swear, I was more afraid to go across town to my first class than I was to get on the plane.

The street my music classes are on–I was too nervous to take a closer photo!

But the first class went really well. I know that I definitely didn't understand everything he was saying, but I got most of it. And when he asked me a question in front of the whole class, I was actually keeping up enough to answer it. Even if I didn't know how to say trumpet. Turns out it's trompeta so I felt really smart after that, but at least I wasn't that foreign kid who's just like "uh…" the whole time. And I made friends with a girl from Granada and another girl from Salamanca. Win.
The other fun thing about being an exchange student is that errybody knows who you are, because the professor always asks you something about where you're from or what kinds of music classes you've had before (uh, roughly none), but no one else. My second class was a lot more terrifying than the first, partially because the professor asked what kinds of musicology classes I'd taken and I had to say basically none, and we actually started on the material. Here's a fun fact: the Spanish don't take notes like Americans. Most of them had notebooks with either blank sheets or graph paper (I was the only one with a lined notebook) and instead of bullet points, they basically write out entire sentences. It's insane, I do not understand how they do it. I couldn't even do that in English!!
But on my way home, while in my Spanish-fog-headache, I overheard some lost American tourists, so I stopped to help them out. I was basically the farthest thing from helpful, since I had no idea where the restaurant they were looking for was, but we totally had a small-world moment when I found out that one of them was from Steamboat Springs, CO! Plus, her daughter is best friends with one of my sorority sisters! Plus, that sorority sister is currently studying abroad in Sevilla, another town in Spain. Small world indeed.

Slightly Absent...

Hey team, sorry I've been slightly MIA, my week just hasn't had too many exciting bits for you, so I'm combining them into one entry today! Woo! So, here's the hilights from the last few days!

• Went to an intercambio where there are students like myself who are learning Spanish, and locals who are learning English, and we all get together and attempt to speak real good together. Actually, this one was pretty good because we're all so advanced and awesome like that. And we got free tapas & soda, always a win. It was slightly awkward, but overall pretty fun.
• I ate more ice cream. Please see the photo below to understand why it's so difficult to walk by all the ice cream counters here and not have some! Plus, it's sooo warm walking around town all day. It's quite the dilemma. 

Today I got dulce de leche but my other favorites include lime & mint.
I want to try apple and orange though!

• I had to take a test for class. Boooo. I did alright on it though, just no one loves tests.
• I registered for my "real" classes! These are the ones at the actual university, not with International Courses, which my last two weeks of class have been. Those are kind of a joke (they're two weeks long and we spent half of that watching YouTube videos in my culture class...) but the ones I just registered are the real deal. So I ended up with three culture classes: Hispano-Hebrew Culture, Music in Spain, and Music of the 18th Century. Something like that. Not sure why I have two music classes, it just kinda worked out that way. Heh. And I'm taking intro to French, so I can start on my totally random 3rd language. But it seems like a fun schedule. The nice thing about being here is that I can pretty much take whatever classes I want, and try new things like a new language or a random music class, because I came in with enough AP credit that there aren't specific college credits I have to fulfill.
• I went to Karaoke Night at this bar near my classrooms. And, while we were looking through the book (for things other people were going to sing) I jokingly pointed out the Celine Dion song from Titanic, "My Heart Will Go On". Obviously, that led to me being onstage singing that song.  Awkward. Fun. But awkward.

Yeah we're on their Facebook page, we didn't take this

• That's most of what I have for this week! I also went to a bullfight today, but unfortunately I don't think I'm going to have the time to write everything I want to about that tonight. Stay tuned for photos of that tomorrow!!

First Day of School!

Today began classes with all kinds of (mostly) American students. Don't fret Mom & Dad, my classes with the locals will begin after this two week intensive class. We had two hours of language (I forgot how much I hate studying grammar), one hour of conversation (literally talked in pairs the whole time, best class ever), and one hour of culture (no one knew who the president was…). But it was a lot of fun actually.

This is the view from my classroom building...

 After class, a bunch of us wandered back towards the plaza, then we split off and headed home for lunch! María made us paella, so I had to tell her I hated shrimp… but the rice was really good!! We had a long conversation about how they speak the purest form of Spanish in Salamanca, so this is the place to be to learn!

Anyway, after all that we decided to go be tourists, because Megan has an internship at the tourism office, so she has to go visit all the sites! So we set off with another girl from the program to explore the city even more.

So we went to see Casa de las Conchas, the library that literally has stone shells all over the outside of it, and the first building ever built at the university (see library photo above) and then of course we had to get churros con chocolate at this place called Valor that was recommended to us by Bea from ISA. It was delicious, as predicted.

After a few more wanderings and church findings and shop enterings, we got back to the apartment in one piece. Megan and I noted that while we've only needed a map to get home once, we still take a different route every time. Yeah, that's the kind of layout this city has, that you can be coming and going from the same place every day and take a different route at least four times. Maybe more, I'm not sure how many times we've come home from the Plaza so far!

María had dinner ready for us, which looked like those breaded chicken breasts at first, but it turns out it was ham and cheese. Jamón in Spain, of course! And french fries too, those were good. And of course yogurt. She always gives us yogurt for dessert at night because it's good for our digestion. We spent a long time sitting in the kitchen and talking about her life pre-ISA students.

A very long, but lovely day. Loving it here still, even if I have to take class now!

Chau, os extraño!
(I miss you all!)

Cookies for Breakfast

Yeah, I ate cookies for breakfast, I kid you not. I wish I had photos. They weren't super sugary, but they were definitely cookies, and there were small amounts of chocolate involved. So we downed all of that then sped off to the Plaza Mayor with our mamá to meet the group.

After we said goodbye to María and the rest of the group arrived, we went to the College of International Studies for our placement test. It was one of those sneaky ones where you think it's gonna be super easy and then the last page is like, "If you have four apples and John takes three, calculate the mass of the sun." The grammar just got more and more complicated. But it was all multiple choice, and then we had a little oral part of the test, where she just asked me about if I'd taken Spanish for long, and if I'd visited Spain/Europe before. Super simple.

Next, we took a tour of the city! La Plaza, Universidad, abroad program offices, post office, shopping street, etc.

They turned us loose after a short meeting at the abroad office. Megan and I went to shop! She ended up with a Universidad hoodie, I got a clearanced skirt from Zala.

We came home to a very large amount of spaghetti that Maria had made for our lunch. We ate, she chastised us for not eating enough, showed her our purchases, and then she went off for a siesta and we went out to shop and explore more. We ended up wandering the Plaza, going into more shops, finding the library (Casa de Conchas), then going down to the New Cathedral of Salamanca. We were able to go inside this one and look around. Also, the outside was restored in the last century, and the guy who did it carved an astronaut into the facade outside the church! 

After more exploring and buying school supplies (one notebook), we walked back to the ISA office to get our schedules. Congratulations to me, I am in the Superior level class! Tomorrow begins the classes at the San Isidrio building, not pictured here. We then wandered back home, and are waiting for la cena (dinner). I think it might be tortilla española again, this time with the leftover spaghetti since we apparently don't eat enough. Sorry María!

Also, a few more photos of our exploration. We made it down to the Río Tormes and all sorts of places.

Casa de los Conches (the library)

And that is a human arm on display in the cathedral. We're really not sure why, we think it was a bishop or something... still not sure why. But we are all about dead people this week, I guess.