Posts Tagged ‘Barcelona’
• Argentina
Hello from the United States! I made it back home all in one piece in spite of a volcanic ash cloud threatening to delay my flight. After spending the last couple of weeks in sweltering Argentine summer heat, I am now sitting bundled up in my house, watching snow drifting down outside, and wondering if the last six months were real.
It is absolutely true what they say about study abroad: it is wonderful and challenging and will change your life unlike anything else. To date, studying abroad in two extremely different cultures has been one of the most jolting and eye-opening decisions I have ever made. And like what most other study abroad students might be facing now at the end of the term, I find myself caught in a state of transition between two worlds.
In so many ways I am overjoyed, relieved, and wonderfully excited to be home. As someone who is extremely close to her family, six months away from the people I love has felt like a lifetime. No matter how many orientations you go through or stories you hear about going abroad, there is nothing in the world that can prepare you for the challenge of taking off alone with a suitcase and trying to fit in with a new culture. It has not only tested my mind, but also my body, my emotions, my creativity, my courage, my self-awareness, my tolerance, my faith, and my understanding of the world.
There were definitely days when I nearly fell apart and felt like quitting. That is part of the process and I have learned to embrace those moments. Before coming, I heard other friends rave about their time abroad and talk only about all the incredible things they experienced. I will probably do the same when people ask me about Spain and Argentina during the coming months, but for right now I won’t sugar-coat it as much. It is not so simple living every single day surrounded by a foreign language, new customs, an unfamiliar setting, and none of the comforts of home to offset these new changes. It is really hard.
But at the same time, I wouldn’t trade a single day of my experience abroad for anything else. I know that it was both the ups and the downs that helped me grow and realize new things about my own limits that I would never have discovered without pushing the boundaries. I am definitely not the same person I was six months ago, but I am grateful to have a wider perspective now.
With that all said, I can’t emphasize enough how wonderful the past six months have been as well. It is hard to believe that my journey started on the beaches of Barcelona in June. I have to keep reminding myself of all the beautiful things I encountered in Spain, between the laid-back coastal lifestyle, to the late night tapas, to the trips to southern France, Costa Brava, Madrid and everywhere in-between, to being surrounded by fierce Catalan pride and summer festivities that took over the city every single night. Those days may be getting further away from me, but I will never forget them or the people who I shared them with.
It is also hard for me to believe that I managed to jump from that chapter of my life into the completely different experience of four months in Argentina. I have never felt so much anticipation, excitement, and straight-up fear as I did the first day when touching down, my face pressed up against the airplane window, telling myself over and over again, “I am in South America, I am in South America.” There was no one there to hold my hand as I got in the taxi at the airport and had to go introduce myself to an unknown host family that I would live with for the next several months.
I don’t think I have ever been so scared in my life, or had so many questions and doubts racing through my mind all at once. Luckily, just like the majority of study abroad students find, it all somehow miraculously works out in the end. And even though I have been pushed so far out of my comfort zone for so many consecutive days that I don’t even recognize what my “comfort zone” looks like, every single second of awe and amazement and frustration and anxiety was worth it.
Now I am back to my “normal” life, but I don’t quite feel the normalcy setting in yet. It is hard for me to wrap my mind around all of the changes I have undergone since June, and to be back in a setting where everything is business as usual, yet no one on the street knows where I just came from or what I have just gone through. It is hard for me to believe that just a couple days ago I was saying goodbye to the most incredible host mom and host dad, exchanging hugs and kisses and loving words on the street corner without knowing when or if I will see them again. They are what I will miss the most, and now I know how hard it is to leave one family behind, even when heading back to be with my other family.
It is strange to think that I was walking and talking and living the porteño lifestyle of Buenos Aires, and now I feel like I don’t quite fit in with the other Americans I pass on the street. In a way it even feels weird to talk with my friends and family here just like I did before leaving, because I have undergone so many personal changes that most people don’t know about or pick up on. I know it is just a matter of time before it will all feel comfortable again, but as for right now I am feeling a little unsettled. I can also tell it will be a challenge to tap back into the news and events happening in the US after half a year of being removed from all of that. But overall, the most startling thing to deal with is discovering aspects of myself that I didn’t know existed before, and seeing my own culture through the lens of another.
I guess now is the time to let it all marinate a little bit as I try to process everything that I have just been a part of. The traditions, politics, societies, cultures and passions of Spain and Argentina have now become a part of my own personal history that I will continue to carry with me. And I will say that after every single experience that I have blogged about, and the thousands that I have not blogged about, the months I spent abroad will undoubtedly continue to influence the rest of my life in ways I can’t even begin to describe.
Thank you to everyone who has taken the time to read about my journeys and I hope you find your own journeys that will open your eyes the way mine have for me. Nos vemos pronto, we’ll be seeing each other soon.
I’ll let you in on a secret. As a bright-eyed and bushy-tailed high school graduate, I told myself I was going to study abroad in Spain my junior year. This premature decision was the sole reason for my seemingly inexplicable, one-year stint in beginners’ Spanish freshman year after eight years of inching toward French fluency. Fast forward to the dawn of my The 195 career. As you may have noticed, I decided on Edinburgh, Scotland as my junior fall destination. And I had a super clever idea for my first blog post: it was going to be titled “The differences between Spain and Scotland.” (While brainstorming for said post, I gchatted my friend and asked her what was different about Spain and Scotland. She replied, “Are you kidding me…?”). Well, joke’s on you, Lails!!! Visiting Spain for a weekend, I experienced the most magnificent similarity between two polar opposite cultures. If the aim of study abroad is cultural immersion, appreciating the differences, makin’ connections and whatnot, I achieved this goal in one split second of dance and laughter in Barcelona.
I will start at the end, and move backward. One evening in Barcelona, a few friends and I followed a vague recommendation (the best kind) and found ourselves in a nondescript square, the first few notes of traditional Catalonian music floating through the air. To our delight, upon a few hollered phrases of Catalan gibberish, people of all ages flooded forward and began a very organized and beautiful sort of line dance. As we had just finished our “Wok to Walk” (very Spanish), I grabbed my friends and dragged them toward the mayhem (since it is irrelevant to my cultural anecdote, I will skip the part where I had to whine and yell at them for 10 minutes before they agreed to come dance with me). After staring at hundreds of feet for a few minutes and prematurely deciding we could catch on, we broke into the circle of hands.
The steps were simpler than simple, yet I managed to decidedly not pick up the pattern. A grinning man gripping my left hand yelled Spanish instructions in my ear, which would have been helpful had I remembered a single word from my aforementioned Spanish career. As I laughed uncontrollably, stumbled over myself, kicked my left foot instead of right, twirled with a complete stranger and watched my friends doing the same thing, I suddenly paused (mentally. I paused mentally). I delightedly realized that exactly a week earlier I had been doing the same thing. Literally the same exact thing.
Seven days before, I had been at a Scottish céilidh (mysteriously pronounced CAY-LEE) while visiting northern Scotland. Céilidhs are traditional Scottish gatherings involving Scottish folk music and dance. The sound of bagpipes and fiddle filled the bright, warm room. A fully kilted man attempted to teach us dance steps before we all just clumsily dove in, laughing the whole time.
First of all, I like the fact that every culture has their own form of traditional line dance (how many times have I participated in Israeli dance at Bar Mitzvahs, contra dance every summer at camp…). But what amazed me was how similar the dances were when you really paid attention.
In Barcelona, I was distracted by the drastically different setting; the different language; the slower, simpler music; the slightly different grip you used to spin your partner. But when I paused in that square, it was because I realized I was doing the exact same dance I had learned at the céilidh a week earlier. Males into the middle. Females into the middle. Walk clockwise with your partner. Then backward. Boy spins the girl. Clutch arms and spin quickly, quickly. Left kick, right kick. Switch partners and start again.
Did Scottish people teach this dance to some traveling Spaniards? Vice versa? Is medieval crossbreeding to blame? Whatever the reason that I found myself doing the same traditional dance one week apart in two different countries, I liked it. Mostly because it was the only dance I finally got the hang of.
I’ve recently returned from a whirlwind week of trips and I’m ready to catch up on all that’s been happening. Recently we had two straight weeks of midterms and then last week we launched straight into fall break. So I guess I’ll start there.
Last Friday afternoon three friends and I set off for Barcelona for the weekend. Upon arrival we settled into our rented apartment and proceeded to get ready to go out for the night. All of us were a little thrown off by Spanish mealtimes, so by the time we got to dinner at 10:30, we were all starving. However, we adjusted to the Spanish lifestyle as best we could and ended up at a club on the beach where an electric violin player accompanied the techno hits all night long. Strolling through the city that night, among the palm trees and small squares, was incredibly refreshing and contrasted sharply to the bleak solemness of Prague at this time of year. From the people crowding the streets to the fresh ocean breezes that flow through the city, Barcelona evokes a sense of liveliness that’s entirely infectious.
Saturday morning we set off to explore the city and visited the packed Mercat de La Boqueria, where rows upon rows of stands offered everything from freshly squeezed juices to rabbits ready for roasting. Later we wandered down to the beach and the small Barceloneta neighborhood. Thankfully, the weather was warm so everyone’s spirits were high as we serpentined our way through the narrow shaded streets. For dinner we enjoyed a variety of traditional Spanish tapas such as croquetas (similar to mozzarella sticks filled with ham and potatoes) and patatas bravas (potatoes with spicy sauce). The rest of our weekend was spent exploring the various Gaudi creations all over the city. We saw some of his famous apartment buildings, the Sagrada Familia church (which was entirely overwhelming in size), and the longest bench in the world at Park Guell. I didn’t realize that Park Guell was up on the top of a hill but our long hike up was rewarded with fantastic panoramic views of the city and ocean. The presence of cactii all over the hill was also thrilling for me personally because it reminded me nicely of the rugged Texas landscape I so often miss.
After running almost nonstop through the streets of Barcelona we hopped on a short flight over to Ibiza. The small Spanish island of Ibiza is one of the most famous clubbing destinations in the world. However, Ibiza’s high season is from June to the end of September so by the time we got there on October 25th, it was all but deserted. Fortunately, this is exactly what we were looking for because the weather was still amazing and the beaches almost empty. So to those of you looking for stories of long crazy nights in Ibiza, I apologize. My island tales consist almost entirely of many hours of tanning, exploring beaches, and consuming a large pizza from a wonderfully-placed Pizza Hut in the center of Ibiza town (sometimes you’ve just got to do it).
Overall my Spanish experience offered me exposure to a fantastic new culture in addition to a much-needed taste of home. The liveliness of the cities, upbeat attitude of the people, beautiful weather, Texas landscapes, and slice (or 6) of America made for an amazing start to fall break. Though as I will detail in my next post, that was really only the beginning.
As a blogger, I work hard to keep my readers around. Teasing for future posts is one of the many ways I recruit and maintain my number of clicks. Another way is by subverting expectations. No post about catalá or football for you.
All in all, I’m still abroad having pretty solid study abroad experience. There is much to rave about. There’s also much to crawl into a corner and cringe about. Many an embarrassing moment has happened but I’ve compiled a top five for your enjoyment. I take them all as a learning experience. Barcelona takes it as that many more reasons to hate Americans. Don’t worry none of them beat the bus story.
In which I get stood up by elderly gentlefolk
So we as a program took a group trip to Valencia. Nice city but not as nice as Barcelona. However, keeping in line with stereotypes, the paella in Valencia is a lot better.
We were accompanied by two of my Human Geography professors at Universitat Pompeu Fabra who are both great. So we’re all touring Valencia and then we have some free time to bum around Valencia at which point one of the professors asks me and my friends when we were going to dinner together. As in he invited us to dinner with him and his professor crew. I didn’t want to rely on my imperfect Spanish so I did some self-conscious asking around to confirm whether or not I had heard him correctly. I had. Flush off the excitement of getting asked out on a group hang, my friends and I had a nice little chit chat about how nice of him it was of him to invite us to dinner. There were many scenarios thrown around but we pretty much unanimously agreed that this would rank high on the list of greatest dinners during which professors provide us with worldly insight into all that is Barcelona while becoming our new best friends.
We head to the hotel for a post-walking around nap. Then somehow I become the world’s biggest creep find out afore-mentioned professor’s door and am knocking on his door. I have a friend with me because I’m not that shifty. We knock. There’s a long pause. A long period of shuffling. A long period of being mortified. And then he opens the door incredibly disheveled and my suddenly mute friend does nothing to help me while I mutter something along the lines of so when’s dinner. He then chuckles and says ‘mujer, era broma’ as in, it was a joke. My mute friend continued to be utterly useless as I whispered something and slowly backed away from the door until we were out of eyeshot at which point we sprinted away hoping to neither see him or any of his ilk ever again. Alas, we saw him in class a couple days later in which he burst out laughing at the sight of us. To which I just cried inside and wondered what I had done wrong in life to deserve this.
In which I bring Friendly Dino overseas
I decided to take an art course here in Barcelona and chose “Cissellát” from a list of names of art courses. Apparently it means small scale metal etching and tchotchke-making. So on my first day I get to Massana (the art school) which is in this beautiful courtyard in a pretty cool neighborhood made that much cooler by the high density of art students. I get to class too early, ask a bunch of students whether or not class was canceled to which they very coolly look up at the clock and tell me that I’m ‘too early’ even though class should have started TWO WHOLE MINUTES AGO. They then stare at me as I pace in circles and hyperventilate, losing with each breath any possibility of friendship.
The teacher finally shows up and is quite nice and says hi and asks me where I’m from and what I study and whether or not I’ve ever cisellated before. I tell her I study Communications and Political Science and that I’ve never cisellated before nor am have I drawn or made anything worthwhile ever. To which she kindly reassures me that it’s fine and that it’s an introductory course and not a lot of drawing is involved. She tells me the first project is draw something with lines that I want to etch.
And then I sit there for five minutes listing in my head everything I can draw, which pretty much maxes out at hills, televisions and Goldfish. Until a flash of brilliance comes my way and I realize I can draw my go-to doodle which is the silhouette of a dinosaur (Apatosaurus) that I once named “Friendly Dino” in my heyday of creativity. I draw some lines inside of him, gaze proudly at my creation and call over my teacher. She looks at it and asks me what it is. I tell her and then she stares for a while and then asks me why I felt drawn to a figure of a dinosaur. I had no response so she nodded and said sure that looks fine for your first project.
Meanwhile the rest of my class, which happens to be one other girl shuffles in having cool glasses with art supplies all over her and such. She too is quite nice to me until she decides to show me up by taking out her SKETCHBOOK and flipping through the MANY MANY PAGES of stuff she’s drawn. She stops at this lady figure with an elephant head and talks to my teacher about how it represents a distorted view of beauty and how she’s worked on this image through different mediums including ceramics and painting and photography and printmaking. She and the teacher have a solid twenty minute conversation discussing her project while I quite literally sit in the corner of the room thinking about what else I could possibly draw until I realize I can’t draw anything else and give in to my fate as the lesser of two students.
Again, I have come to the end of the endless internet space. If you’ve been following along, you will know that two anecdotes do not a top-five list make but I like this teasing trend so you’ll just have to wait.
I’d say I’m a good traveler. Apparently at some airports they separate you into different security lines depending on how capable they assess you as being of taking off your shoes in an orderly fashion. It’s a secret assessment, but I’m pretty sure I always get sorted into the ‘I’m really good at taking off my shoes line.’
Also there was a Times article about people that can sleep on planes and how they’re on a “higher plane.” Sometimes I tell people that the Times article was about me because like I’m that person: asleep before takeoff and awake when people are trying to step over me into the aisles. To my parents’ credit, I’m short. My pre-pubescent stature means that my shoes are smaller so less baggage and more leg room.
There are cons to all of this. Being short, aside from generally being a huge pain, means that every time I’m on a plane I worry because what if no one around me has the maternal instinct to help me put my bag in the overhead bin? Must I struggle with my bag while it may or may not fall on a fellow passenger’s head? MUST I ACTIVELY ASK THOSE AROUND ME FOR HELP? BUT MY PRIDE.
The sleeping thing means I get no “free” food or drink and I wake up dry mouthed and really needing to pee. Once, I woke up and my neighbor had saved me a glass of water and I’ve never met anyone more kind or generous or generally perfect.
So yes, I got on a plane last night. Slept through most of it. Layover in Frankfurt. Nice airport. Very very clean with nice looking sandwiches I didn’t buy. And then a full-fledged conversation with my cab driver who said I sounded vaguely Mexican. He also kept looking at me through the rear view mirror for long chunks of time which was nice because it was kind of like we were having a real conversation but not nice because he was driving. We didn’t crash and he gave me a handful of recommendations about little towns in the area to go to. I’m a fan of both him and this city. BEST TWO HOURS OF MY LIFE. But actually, I haven’t done anything yet except for get out of the cab and into a hotel but I am excited. I know I’m excited because I keep grinning and muttering to myself ‘I’m in Barcelona.’ When I do do something, you, my dear readers (sup family), will be the first to know. The takeaway here is that I’m glad The Times is giving their writers the freedom to write such relevant material.
My mother’s a Francophile and generally Eurocentric. My father is great and knows how to drive a stick shift. The combination of the two made for an incredibly spoiled kid. By the time I was in high school, I had euro-tripped a couple of times over.
My mother went so far as to dedicate my brother and my education around making those trips more enjoyable; she enrolled my brother in French classes and I studied Spanish. Together, we had a solid chunk of European languages covered. My parents would lounge around in some rural area while my brother and I asked locals where the nearest market was. It was a way to simultaneously invest in our ‘education’ and get fresh produce.
Born and raised in Miami, Spanish was infinitely more useful than French and English. After ten-ish years of re-learning the colors in Spanish every year, high school rolled around and I went to a boarding school in New Hampshire. My parents started going to fun places without me and traveling for me was limited to weekend trips into Maine with the occasional excursions to Boston and New York. And now, I’m in the Midwest.
At Northwestern, I’m doing all I can so that my career path mirrors Rahm Emanuel’s. Studying abroad doesn’t necessarily fit in to that plan but it’s Barcelona and I’m an emerging adult so it’s fine. If nothing else, the mild childhood trauma of talking to foreign strangers is what makes me so incredibly excited to bum around/study while abroad for the next four months. Thanks ma.
Before coming to Spain, I remember hearing friends who had studied or traveled abroad talk about the rivalry between Barcelona and Madrid. As the two most internationally known cities in Spain, they are often compared to one another for their different atmosphere, culture, and lifestyle. They are each such dynamic cities: cosmopolitan but quaint, traditional but vanguard, international but unified. It is possibly similar to comparing Chicago to New York or the East Coast to the West Coast. Based on what I heard from friends, it is typical to prefer one strongly over the other, and after taking a casual poll, it seemed that most showed a preference for Barcelona.
Once I arrived in Barcelona, it became so much more apparent how polarized these two cities are. In particular, most of the people who live here relate so strongly to their Catalan identity that they do not consider themselves Spanish. To help us understand this better, our teacher described how students last year went to Madrid to watch and celebrate Spain’s victory in the World Cup, but the next day when they had returned to Barcelona, hardly anyone expressed excitement.
We all have observed this too throughout our time here. It is a frequent topic of conversation, both in the classroom and in informal settings. One of our assignments for our conversation class was to interview some of the other students about their opinions and stereotypes of people from both Barcelona and Madrid. Across the board we heard people describe locals as proud, liberal and international. On the other hand, they called the “Madrileños” somewhat arrogant and disrespectful. Another activity involved debating the tourism ads for both Barcelona and Madrid and seeing how they chose to represent each city. It gave us an interesting perspective of how people view themselves, as well as how they hope other people see them.
This past weekend, our group took a trip to Madrid and we had the chance to decide for ourselves how these two places match up. First thing I noticed, Madrid seemed more regal and classy. It also reminded me a lot of Paris and had a European feel to it that was more like my expectations before coming to Spain. In general, people dress nicer in Madrid than in Barcelona where the dress is more casual, simple and beach-ready. On that note, Barcelona’s geography is more diverse with mountains on one side and the Mediterranean on the other. Madrid, however, is landlocked with a more homogenous landscape.
In spite of that, Madrid is home to some of the best museums, such as the Prado and the Reina Sofía and in my opinion trumps Barcelona in terms of cuisine. There are tons of restaurants all over that offer larger portions at more reasonable prices than what I have seen in Barcelona (although I have to say that I was not that impressed with the churros and chocolate, the dessert that gets all the hype in Madrid). However, Barcelona wins for its climate considering we have had day after day of perfect, sunny, warm weather with a gentle sea breeze whereas the heat in Madrid was stifling and made walking around outside uncomfortable for extended periods of time.
After spending two days in Madrid, I have to say I was surprised to hear many of the people on the program say they preferred it to Barcelona. I also thought the experience was super positive, but I have a feeling that it was mostly due to the spectacle of being in a new place that was outside our now familiar neighborhood in Barceloneta. For me, there is still not a clear distinction between which of the two cities I prefer. I would absolutely love to return to Madrid for a longer visit, but I will also say that coming back to our dorm Sunday night was like returning home after a long weekend away, and for that reason Barcelona remains first in my heart when it comes to Spain.
Great article!
