This Week's Best Moment in Teaching

As all of you know, every Wednesday I teach two 15-year-old girls. I’ve lately gotten them to speak more and caused more than the occasional eruption of teenage girl laughter. Their comprehension, especially while listening to native speakers, has markedly improved, and their Spanish accents have eased ever so slightly.
Yesterday, we were working with the second conditional. An example of this, for those of you who don’t spend most of the week either planning or teaching ESL lessons, would be: If I were you, I wouldn’t touch that burning hot stove.
Student A, Cristina, had to ask Student B, Laura, the question, “If you could be a member of the opposite sex for one day, what would you do?”
Laura looked confused, and as I opened my mouth to try to help her along, she looked at me and asked, “But, what can a boy do that we cannot do?”
She wasn’t stumped by the grammar. She had no issue understanding the question. The mental block resulted from her utter inability to think of something that a boy could do that she couldn’t.
After recovering from the week’s best moment in feminism, I of course replied, “Nothing. Well, they can pee standing up.”

Carnaval

I believe in the communal need to put on costumes and get wasted. (Apparently, so does Nietzche. Something about Dionysian revelry leading to a sense of belonging to a higher community thus causing us to momentarily transcend universal suffering. Whatever. I believe in alcohol).

A few weeks ago, after much deliberation and complication, I went to Cadiz for Carnaval. The University of Malaga sent 29 buses full of students and other costume-clad enthusiasts to Cadiz for one night. We left at 4pm and returned at 8am. After my friend saved me from my original plan to go alone to a city packed with drunken fairies, nuns and devils, I ended up going with a group of Spaniards. The girls dressed as Eskimos and the boys as monks. (I dressed as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Ask me how many times I had to explain that one). As monks were once the keepers of alcohol, these young men carried their own barrels, filled with mojitos.

From what I remember, which is far more than I expected to, the whole night was a rush of conversations with strangers in black face or dressed as clowns. After seeing my second group of Spaniards dressed as black people (honestly, “What are you?” “I’m black.” “Seriously? Just black? You’re not even, like, Beyoncé or something?” “Um, no. My costume is that I’m black.” “Oh, yeah. Sure. Ok.” Except in Spanish), I gave up on trying to explain the historical significance of the offense and had another mojito. All in all, the night was joyous, and although everything in my basket was stolen including Toto, I felt very close to my fellow man, if only because I saw him pissing on every street corner and tree in Cadiz.

I’ve also included, for your viewing pleasure, a video from a drag show I somehow stumbled upon the night before. Every year, in Plaza de la Constitución, at the top of Calle Larios, there is a parade followed by a drag show. Needless to say, between the lip-syncing to “We Are Family” and the sparkles, I couldn’t have been happier.

Midnight to Midnight, or The Short Version of a Typical Sunday in Spain

By midnight, I’d already made it past drunk because my stomachache had replaced the beer in my hand with water. But, I definitely couldn’t leave as the party had finally begun. Lorena left, making me the only American in Yasin’s new apartment. He’s a serial Erasmus roommate-seeker hailing from Morocco. Since moving here seven years ago, he’s learned Italian just by living with Erasmus students. Not being a student himself, his long-stay here seems curious, as it can be incredibly difficult for Moroccans to secure visas. Turns out Yasin got his visa on September 10th, 2001. He was one of three passengers on his flight a few days later.

Yasin’s house is home to six flat mates, one is Italian and the rest are French, but “French from the North,” as Eric kept insisting. Perhaps that’s why he kept picking girls up and carrying them about the room. Huge displays of strength and vibrato never tend to be something I associate with the French. In an hour, the mass of French, Germans, Spaniards etc. had devolved into a dance party in the kitchen and a guitar session with Rafa, basically the Israeli Kramer, in the living room. I attempted my Spanish goodbye, and an Alka-Seltzer and two hours later, I left my friend Nicole with the far too drunk Russian girl we’d come with and finally convinced Yasin to walk me home through a surprisingly silent section of Málaga. The Spanish goodbye always takes several hours and was frankly made for me. You say, ok I’m leaving, and then stay for three more drinks. I don’t know why the Spaniards do it, but for me, it’s a godsend to my indecision. At 4am, the party moved to the disco, and my pillow and I finally made precious precious contact.

Sunday was mostly reading and vague attempts to actually leave the house before it got dark. I managed my way out of bed in time to see the sun go down and meet Vanessa’s new Slovenian roommate. Jernje is a med student, and apparently he can insult me all he wants because when we finally get angry enough to bomb Slovenia, we’ll obliterate Slovakia instead. I then ran home through confetti-dusted streets, weaving my way through little girls in Cinderella costumes and parents with painted faces. The Christmas lights shaped like masks were the final tip-off that I’d missed the Carnaval show in Plaza de la Constitución. But, I made it just in time to join my roommate for an odd indie movie from England (clearly dubbed into Spanish) about some poor slob’s sexual misadventures in which he documents all his past relationships and learns nothing from them.

We left the movie around 11, the streets still full of families, babies in oversized strollers and teenagers with facial piercings and shiny sneakers. The five-minute walk home became twenty minutes, as we ran into a Chirigota, a street-performing acapella group that dresses up in odd costumes and sings raunchy songs. At midnight, I fell asleep with a book on my chest and the melodic humming of Spanish street singers crooning in my head.

Don’t Judge a Mid-Westerner by Its Cover

Kelly is 5’10’’, thin, blond and has extremely white teeth. She has a sweet, soft voice and hails from Northern Minnesota. These, of course, made me instantly decide she had nothing to offer. That is, until I found out she had called me a bitch. Ah, the pettiness of young women. We only respect each other once we find out that someone else is as rude and mean as we. Not so. It was a statement of fact. I met her at orientation. She kindly introduced herself, and I all but spat in her face, declared my lack of interest in American friends, and gave her my back once more. It was a statement of fact. I’d acted like what is commonly known in American English as a bitch.

Beautiful, boring Kelly has a soft and sniping wit and has more than once quietly said what I think loudly. Last Thursday, over maybe the third round of one tinto de verano, one beer, and a glass of wine, she informed Vanessa and I that she had worked in a morgue, and for as long as she could remember, has wanted to be a medical examiner. This is where my picture of Kelly shatters into little pieces of statuesque mini-Kellies asking for a scalpel and a camera for her 12th birthday. (She’s not actually that morbid. That image was my personal invention.) So, as she pops fried mystery cheese into her mouth, Kelly details how bodies are examined, which parts get removed, cut up and tested for confirmation of cause of death, jokes about mix ups between the tests on the old guy and ones done on the over-dose victim, and gushes about getting to take off and wrap up the clothes of victims of violent deaths when they arrive in the morgue.

Moral of the story, something most people learn when they're seven: just because she’s beautiful and from the mid-west, doesn’t mean she’s dumb or boring, it just means you’re an asshole.

Spanish Efficiency

The hardest thing to adjust to about a new country is its standards of efficiency. While living in Argentina, I learned to be perpetually late. (This would seem a blessing as the threat of being late had once been an anxiety trigger for yours truly, but sadly the fear of arriving late has now been replaced by obsessive consternation over arriving too early). Spain’s norms for this type of thing is only plus five to ten minutes, so this does lend itself to a lot less standing on dark street corners for twenty minutes wondering where the hell your friend is.
Spain’s particular brand of disorganization leaves your average frustrated American thinking that as everyone’s economy heads into the shitter, Spain might take a bit longer getting out. Example 1. A friend of mine had to go to a town about two hours away and use a special instrument to measure a river. The instrument itself was dying the slow death that all things that use batteries die and therefore couldn’t last for more than four hours on any given day. This meant that my friend now had to take this trip twice as many times in order to get the job done. His company pays him an extra stipend for each travel day in additional to what he normally makes, plus gas money, and they lose his day in the office. Instead of replacing the faulty equipment, they’re paying an employee more to do less work.
Let’s try a better example. Recently, my friend Raúl needed to sign a new contract. Since the head office is in Madrid, only a three-hour train ride away, instead of sending the contract here to Málaga, the price of postage being so expensive, they opted to send him there, pay for the trip and the day of work. Raúl in an enterprising manner I did not expect of the typical Spaniard, took the opportunity to go to Madrid to schedule an interview for another job.
Examples three and four are both weather related. My personal favorite would have to be this. On Sunday, Málaga was hit with a furious rainstorm. I understand it included a bit of a twister, which took off the roof of the bus station and sent it flying around the city. This little tidbit of information made it into the local paper yesterday, Tuesday.
My last example nearly landed me in a hotel room with one of my students overnight. A few weeks ago, a couple of my students decided to invite some Americans they knew to Granada for the day. They showed us the city, and during our drive back, it began to snow. Albeit that this is a rare occurrence in these parts, but the roadway practically came to a stand still. Alberto wanted to stay in a hotel for the night because practically everyone was pulling off the road, I was marveling at the way the flakes rushed at the car as we drove forward, and Chris, from Chicago, was coming up with some pretty colorful language to describe the stupidity and ridiculousness of people that refused to drive in one inch of snow. In the end, we got off to check into a hotel, and when the girl before us got the last room, we were told to drive back 3km to another hotel nearby. As we sat in traffic going back in the direction of Granada, Alberto finally decided to call the road service (I say road service here, but there is no road service department in Spain. He basically called the national guard), and discovered that although they had decided to wait a few hours before starting, they said they would clear the road and we would be able to drive home. Now, we just had to wait for an exit that actually allowed us to get back on the highway going the other direction. So, 40 minutes of traffic and two exits later, we turned back towards Málaga, our two-hour drive now totaling five hours. All I have to say is that if the Pilgrims had been Spanish, those fuckers never would’ve made it.

In Between

Confessionals for a new year.
Twenty-two seems to me a far more tender age then I’ll remember when looking back on the best years of my life. I’ve just finished college, the ultimate preparation for the future. Everything until very nearly the date of graduation seemed focused on doing my best in an academic sense. You take a test and get good grades so you can pay thousands of dollars to go to the best possible prep school. You do well there so you can get to the best possible college. All these things give you the best possible prospects for your future, for your life. But, all of a sudden you graduate, and you’re caught between the before that was college and the after that is the rest of your life, the bit you’ve been preparing for, the part that now stretches before you like a vast web of unmarked paths. C’mon, with all that potential, that quickness of mind, that willingness of spirit, that $160,000 degree from that wonderfully fancy school, all you’ve got to do is choose, put your mind to it, and you can achieve anything. But, what do you want to achieve? And perhaps now, the question is becoming a little less, what if you fail, but what if you never try? What if you never make a decision, nothing ever grabs you or you never let it?
Rather than being crushed by the weight of my own amorphous expectations, I have to just begin. Take it a step at a time, as my mother says, almost on repeat, for nearly every situation. So, I’m here, in Spain, letting life teach me, trying to learn how to drink a new knowledge from life, one whose responses aren’t multiple-choice or the difference between this small liberal arts college in Rhode Island and that one in New York. I’m here to quit looking the gift horse in the mouth, and just get on the damn thing.
So, as I look for my passions and “answers,” which have decided to not ceremoniously present themselves immediately upon the completion of school or my arrival in a foreign land, I share with you a song that I feel best encompasses some of the feelings of this time of life.
Jamie Cullum, "Twentysomething"

Third-World Lite

I left myself a whopping twenty hours between my return from travel and the arrival of my parents. Their arrival came with much jetlag and another trip, to Morocco.
I explained to my father that Morocco is Third-World Lite. The fact that he was going at all was a vast change from when three years ago, he nearly forbade me from going because the locals might see my Jew horns and cast me into the farthest deathly reaches of the medina where I’d never be found again. But, as it turns out, the Moroccans are pretty down with the Jews and the reason that all but 3,000 left in 1948 was for economic reasons above all else.
Our trip was beautiful, but more of a smorgasbord, a tasting of several different sites and cities. Our first day was in Casablanca, a mostly industrial city that now has the third largest mosque in the world. Inside it can house 25,000 people, and during Ramadan, the whole complex hosts about 105,000. We went to Meknes, where we didn’t see much, Volubilis, which is an enormous Roman ruins, and Rabat, the capital since the French came and has remained so even now that they’re gone, all in the same afternoon and probably ate a tajine every two hours. We stayed in a beautiful hotel, a converted French villa with peacocks and free Internet. The following day we raced to Fez, where we shopped until the boys dropped.
The beauty of Morocco is truly in the details. It’s dirty, it’s crowded, people are constantly yelling at each other in a very unfamiliar language that contains occasional spikes of the more familiar French. But, the architecture is beautiful, detailed carved plasterwork and unending mosaics. The people are kind, even if they’re trying to swindle you. My father and I met a man on the street that invited us into his house for tea. It turned out later that he had given us a fake name and was just trying to take us to a certain place to shop so he could get a commission, but the gesture was also kind and we enjoyed it. Apparently, if “Mohammed” does this again though, he could get fired from his real job, teaching math at a local school.
Our last night, we saw the world’s most touristy show. We started as the only people in the restaurant, but it filled fast when several tour buses arrived. But, “what’s one more tajine, when I know there’s a belly dancer on the way?” Wrong. The tajine was good; the belly dancer was definitely past childbearing age and was wearing a lime-green polyester getup that hugged her hams in a most uncomfortable way to watch. Not the kind of half naked Muslim girl you want shaking her groove thing while you’re eating dinner. I never had so much fun being an ugly American as at that dinner.