Martha in Sevilla

After dinner on Tuesday night Martha and I watched a DVD of old home videos showing Martha learning how to ride a bike. I was about 10 in the video and had only one front tooth. Wow, I had forgotten about that. The next morning we had breakfast and got an early start. We walked around the Cathedral and Giralda and went to a convent to buy some pasteles but it wasn’t open yet. Not many stores were open (at 9 am) so we went to Starbucks to get lattes. It was Martha’s first cup of Starbucks in over six months. We got some shortbread cookies when the convent pastry place opened. We then walked towards the University and went to a couple bookstores. Inside the University we ran into my brother Pedro. We got to my class ten minutes early and waited around for a few minutes until we found out that it was canceled.

So with the extra free time we walked to Parque María Luisa and saw just a little part of it (it’s huge). We also saw the Plaza de España. Martha was floored by the size of the place. The Plaza de España in Santa Cruz de la Palma is 1/100 the size of Sevilla’s. And the one in Sevilla has an enormous building, it’s more than just a plaza. We walked through the centro, got some churros con chocolate and I showed her some of the narrowest streets in the city (four or five feet in width). We walked through the main shopping and pedestrian area. Martha was excited to see more stores than she has seen all year (since Madrid in September and Venice in January). We got three montaditos (mini toasted subs) for a snack and ice cream at McDonald’s and then caught a bus to the hotel where I teach English.

We ran into one of my students, an Italian woman in her mid-20s, when we got off the bus. Martha met some of the people in the office and then we taught my two regular students for an hour and a half. We had a hard time explaining the in, on, and at prepositions. It’s hard! With just four people we were able to talk a lot and play pictionary. We took the bus back to the centro and got patatas ali oli at a tapas bar and went shopping again. I went to my literature class while Martha shopped and we met up later to walk home. That day we counted how many Americans we saw. We saw lots of students, most of them I didn’t know, a few large tour groups of old American tourists and some American families on spring break. In a single day we saw over 250 Americans. Martha has hardly seen any Americans at all in six months in La Palma.

That night we had vegetable soup and hamburgers for dinner at home and then went out. We went to Plaza Alfalfa for a drink (in the street) and Martha was surprised so see so many people out. We then went to the Carbonería bar where we saw the end of a free flamenco show and hung out with a group of Americans I know and some Spaniards that I sort of know. We then went to a little bar near my house where we ran into more friends and two Spanish guys that I knew well last semester but hadn’t seen them at all this spring. It was a really fun night and Martha got to see a little bit of everything.

On Thursday morning we went to an art museum with my Spanish art history class and saw some Gothic and Renaissance paintings but focused on the Baroque section. There was a large group of little kids (7 or 8 years old) who were really loud and my professor had to shout over them whenever they were nearby. It was my first time there and I was surprised at how big it was. I think I’ll go back because we didn’t see everything.

After the museum we went to the Corte Inglés grocery store and bought a jar of peanut butter (it’s the only grocery store in the city that has peanut butter). We then wandered into a random café looking for a drink and a snack. The place we went into turned out to be really cool, it had steep and colorful tile steps in the back that serve as benches. We took a spot in the corner and had a tuna empanada and juice. Before heading home for lunch, we stopped at a train ticket office and Martha got her AVE ticket to Madrid. Alicia prepared a huge seafood paella, enough to serve 14 people. We hung out for a bit after lunch and watched TV and then went back to the centro and Martha went shopping while I went to a class. Martha finally bought a few things after hours and hours shopping. We went home as it got dark and relaxed, we were both kind of tired after two days of walking all around Sevilla.

For dinner we had bocadillos serranitos (grilled pork, smoked ham, and fried green peppers) and then went out again. Martha met a few more of my friends, including some Wisconsin students, and we went to bar that had free sangría for ladies and then walked to a bar called the Texas Lone Star Saloon that was showing the NCAA tournament games. When we walked there it was rainy very lightly. We didn’t stay long because the place was hot and humid and packed with people. When we walked home it was raining harder so we ran most of the way and got pretty wet. We slept well through the rainstorm and the next morning Martha packed away her wet jeans and we walked to a bus stop so that she could catch a bus to the train station.

My family was really sad to see her go, it was such a short time. It was great to see her, we talked a lot about home, school and our host families. Martha finally got a chance to indulge in some American culture for the first time in months – peanut butter, Starbucks, soft-serve ice cream, college basketball and meeting American students. We ate a lot too, sampling a little bit of everything and we took pictures of almost everything we ate. We were able to compare our experiences and Martha is clearly in a better situation to learn Spanish. Without a doubt, she speaks better Spanish than all of the American college students in Sevilla, including me. And everyone she met was shocked that she is away from home for a year, goes to a Spanish high school and never uses English.

It’s Sunday today and daylight savings was last night. Martha told me she meeting up with Sandra Toran in Madrid today before flying back to La Palma. I am going to spend most of my day study for my midterms this week. Yesterday I did a volunteer activity with my program. We went to the poorest part of Sevilla, a place where taxis won’t go at night and the dumpsters and streets are ignored by the city so there are piles of trash and potholes everywhere. We saw 12-year-old kids riding mopeds and broken down cars converted into living spaces. We went to a Salesiano church that provides recreational activities for kids. One of the ministers showed us around and we played foosball and soccer with a big group of kids. We plan on going back another weekend and teaching them kickball or just helping out. Last weekend I saw Pedro Almódovar’s latest movie “Volver.” It came out last Friday in Spain. It’s really good and I understood everything except for a few jokes. It should be in theatres in the US in a few months and I highly recommend it. I also saw another movie at a huge old movie theatre in Sevilla. It’s called “La fiesta del chivo” and is about the Dominican Republic’s former dictator, Rafael Trujillo. The wireless internet is out so I can’t post pictures from my computer but I have three albums that I’ll put online when I can.

Martha is here!

Her flight was delayed a little and the luggage took a while to come out, but she got here. We took a bus from the airport back to the center of the city and walked home. She meet the whole family, we ate hot dog and ham and cheese sandwiches and then surprised her with two ice cream cakes. A few gifts were exchanged and we talked with the family in the dining room for a bit. Today we are going to get tapas, go to my history class at the University, go to the hotel to teach my English class, and shop. More updates tonight or tomorrow...

Language

I was looking at French and Portuguese tutorials online, trying to learn a little about each language and figure out which one I would like to study next. I want to study both, but I think I’ll have to choose Portuguese over French next year. I won’t be able to take both at the same time. Anyways, I found this information on language fluency:

“Survivor”
(Intermediate)
A survivor converses using basic vocabulary (time, date, weather, family, clothes); uses the present, past, and future tenses more or less correctly; and is aware of difficult grammar topics (e.g., subjunctive, relative pronouns), but either uses them incorrectly or awkwardly rearranges sentences in order to avoid them. Still needs to tote a dictionary and/or phrase book around, but can survive in an immersion situation: order food, give and receive directions, take a taxi, etc.

“Conversationalist”
(Advanced)
A conversationalist has the ability to converse about fairly abstract ideas, state opinions, read newspapers, understand the language when spoken normally (on TV, radio, film, etc.) with slight-to-moderate difficulty. Still has some trouble with specialized vocabulary and complicated grammar, but can reorganize sentences in order to communicate and figure out the majority of new vocabulary within the context.

“Debater”
(Fluent)
A fluent speaker can participate in extended conversations, understand the language when spoken normally (on TV, radio, film, etc.), figure out meaning of words within context, debate, and use/understand complicated grammatical structures with little or no difficulty. Has good accent and understands dialects with slight-to-moderate difficulty.

I was definitely somewhere in between “Survivor” and “Conversationalist” when I arrived in Spain about seven months ago. I was only at an intermediate-advanced level after studying Spanish for eight years. I am now definitely at the level of fluency. My listening skills became really sharp after just a few weeks in Spain. It’s a passive skill that you pick up quickly just by hearing Spanish all the time. My vocabulary and writing skills slowly expanded and developed over several months. Taking a phonetics and syntax class last semester was really worthwhile, it cleared up a lot of mistakes and doubts I had on accents, pronunciation, dialects and advanced grammar. Speaking Spanish with fluency and accuracy is the hardest part and takes the most work. I’m still working on improving my speaking and will never reach the level of “native speaker” (which requires learning a language at a very young age). It was only about a month ago when I felt like I had reached another level of speaking and now it is almost effortless and so much more fun to speak Spanish. It’s a great feeling to meet people in another country and talk with them, but it’s even better when you can meet them by speaking their language and they compliment you on your language skills. And I’ve learned a lot about English through learning Spanish words and teaching English. I’ve always been able to speak English well, but trying to explain why English is the way it is and teach grammar to other people requires you to relearn your own language.

Yesterday I interviewed a Senegalese musician who has lived in Spain for 12 years and works with cultural issues. And right now I am writing an article about him. Some Spanish students help us out with the Spanish article and then they translate it into English and we help them perfect the English version. There is also an independent student publication (a guide to Sevilla for foreign students) that I am writing for. I will probably write about food and contribute to other general things. And then I’m also writing a little something about Sevilla for my program, CIEE, which is publishing stuff for the annual CIEE conference that will be held in Sevilla this fall. With homework on top of all that and this blog as a side project I feel like a freelance writer. The blog is the only thing I write in English.

So Martha is coming tomorrow night, I can’t say much about what we’re going to do because she might read this and I don’t want to give her any hints at what the family and I are going to do with her. The Spanish siblings are going to take over Sevilla.

Sierra del Norte

On Friday afternoon I left on a trip to a small town about two hours west of Sevilla. About 12 American students and 12 Spanish students went and it was all paid for by my program. We rented three houses for two nights and toured a local radio station on Saturday afternoon. It’s a communications group so we had to do something related to communications and the radio visit was our excuse for the trip. The person who runs the group, Esther, a 27 year-old Spanish woman who is a producer for a TV show, is really fun and hooks us up with cool things to do. So far this semester we’ve visited a big TV station in Sevilla and the University of Sevilla’s Communications school and she organized a get together with the Spanish students one night for tapas and drinks. In April we are going to Madrid to tour two of the national TV stations.

I stayed in a nice big room with three other guys in a bed and breakfast type place. We were on the second floor and had a little balcony and huge patio and garden in the back. There was a restaurant on the first floor where we ate all of our meals. The other people stayed in two houses nearby. Rural tourism is big in Spain so there are houses for rent all over. Throughout the whole weekend we spoke a lot of Spanish and all of the Spanish students were really friendly and fun. Every meal was multiple courses of typical rural Spanish food, some of which was new to me. We were served tons of food and pitcher after pitcher of beer and sangría. On Friday night we hung out at the other two houses and listened to music and talked all night long. It was a good group of people and we had a great time. We went to bed at 7 in the morning that night and did the same thing all over again the next night until 6 am.

So during the day Saturday and Sunday we slept a lot and relaxed and stuffed ourselves with huge lunches. Saturday afternoon we hiked up a hill to an old castle and walked through the countryside by farms full of sheep, goats and horses. On Sunday afternoon I went for a long run with a friend. It was about 80 degrees and the river and parks were filled with people out enjoyed the hot spring day. This week three students from last semester are visiting on their spring break. There are a lot of students visiting friends here and families on spring break. Its nice to be in a place where the weather is already warm and people are coming to you for spring break.

Salamanca

Last Friday I went to a workshop with a Spanish reporter who has spent a lot of time in North and West Africa writing about immigration. There are camps of immigrants all over North Africa where people wait around for the chance to cross borders. Some people spend years trying multiple times to cross the border from Morocco to the Spanish owned coastal enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla or crossing the Strait of Gibraltar by boat. Earlier this week a group of Africans drowned while trying to reach the Canary Islands in small boats. He talked about the history of immigration, his work and about journalism in general.

Later in the afternoon I left for Salamanca – my program had organized a trip for the yearlong students. About 30 of us went on a coach bus with a couple guides. We stopped in a small town in the middle of the Extremadura province, Torrejón del Rubio, on Friday night. The town was tiny and empty. It was nice to see a small Spanish town because I usually only go to big cities when I travel. We walked around the empty streets and stopped at a bar and then went back to our hostel for dinner. We went back out and visited pretty much every bar in town; there wasn’t more than five or six. The town is in the middle of a huge nature preserve. All there is to see there are birds. There happened to be a bird and ecological-tourism convention going on and we met lots of birdwatchers at a pub. They turned out to be a bunch of really fun young Spanish guys; they were the coolest birdwatchers that I’ve ever met.

The next day we drove through the nature preserve and saw some birds and a few big tents where the convention was being held. It was a beautiful place, but really desolate and boring. I’m glad we were only there for one night. We drove through a heavy downpour so we didn’t have high hopes for great weather in Salamanca. We went by a snow-covered ski resort but since it was raining it probably wasn’t a good day to ski. We stayed at a youth hostel in a drab modern suburb of Salamanca, across the river and away from the hill that the old city is built on. When we took the 25-30 minute walk from our hostel to the city it was really windy and then it started to rain… and then hail. We decided to delay our tour of Salamanca for the time being and wait it out in a café. The rain stopped after a short while and then the sun came out. A few of us went souvenir shopping. I got postcards and a t-shirt, Martha happened to call me while I was looking at t-shirts so I got her one too. Everything in Salamanca is really cheap, way cheaper than Sevilla (the University clothing was half what it costs in Sevilla).

We got a quick tour of the city and then had free time to go back and visit whatever we were interested in seeing more of. Salamanca is a compact old city that is easily walkable. There are hardly any cars and every building is made of light colored sandstone. Most of the buildings are plain looking but beautiful. It definitely feels like a campus because it small and walkable and full of students and University buildings. It’s like any large US campus, except with lots of really old churches and Roman buildings. Salamanca was one of the biggest and most important Spanish cities centuries ago. It’s on the Ruta de Plata (Silver Route) – a Roman highway that runs through Sevilla and Salamanca all the way to the northern coast of Spain. The highway we took traces the path of the old Roman road.

We went into the Civil War Archives and saw a collection of original documents and propaganda from the Spanish Civil War. We also went into a convent and bought some cookies and muffins. There are a couple convents in Sevilla that also sell baked goods; I’ll try the places in Sevilla sometime too, those nuns know how to bake. As it got dark we went back to the hostel, buying wine on the way (a bottle of 2000 Rioja red wine is 2.59 euros in Salamanca!) We ended up hanging out, drinking and talking in the hostel and lost track of time. We finally headed out and got our first tapas around midnight. A ración (not a tapa but a huge plate) of potatoes was 2.20! Tapas in Sevilla cost 2-3 euros and raciones are 5-10. Salamanca has a reputation of having some of the best nightlife in Spain and we got a little taste of it. Everyone was young and from all over - Spain, Europe and the US. There were some Americans who where there on their spring break visiting friends and American students from Madrid who came for the weekend. In the early morning hours it started to snow. It was the first time I have seen snow falling in person in Spain.

We walked through streets full of people and every bar was packed. The drinks were of course, dirt-cheap. Because every place was so packed, the bathroom lines were long so some American students we had met took us to their apartment to use their bathroom. Their apartment was big and nice and their rent is lower than what a tiny old apartment would cost in Sevilla. It was interesting to hear about Salamanca from them, most of them were yearlong students and they all complained about the weather. We are spoiled in Sevilla with 70-degree days in February. It had stopped snowing and I walked home with a friend in the freezing cold.

On Sunday we had breakfast at the hostel and then went to see the two main cathedrals (one is a 11th century Roman cathedral and the other is a 15th century Baroque cathedral). Since it was Sunday there was mass going on in both. We also saw a cave in the city and learned about some of the history of the city and the university. The first universities in Europe were founded in the late 12th century. The first four European universities were, in order, Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Salamanca. On our tour we learned a lot about the school and all its old traditions. A lot of stuff is no longer practiced, like the tradition of students hosting a bullfight in Plaza Mayor to celebrate their graduation and then writing on the city’s walls with the bull’s blood. The sandstone façade of the main university building is covered in ornate carvings and there is a little frog carved into the wall. If you are able to find the frog with out any help you are supposed to get married within a year and if you find it with help it brings good luck. It’s almost impossible to spot; some people spend hours looking for it. I found it with some help, so thankfully I won’t be getting married any time soon.

On the way back to Sevilla, it was warm and sunny while we had a six-hour ride on a bus. We stopped in the afternoon and had a picnic lunch in the parking lot of a truck stop. Soon after eating our ham and cheese bocadillos, two semi-trucks hauling dozens of fat smelly pigs pulled up. They were crammed in little compartments in the trailer, probably off to the slaughterhouse.

I’m going to Sierra del Norte this weekend, about an hour northwest of Sevilla. It’s another free trip with my program. I am going to get some pictures from the Salamanca trip and carnaval weekend from other people so I’ll post pictures once I share pictures with other students and get theirs.