Feliz Entroido!

Carnaval decorations, Málaga, 2012

One of the many things that Spain has that America lacks is Carnaval (Entroido in Galician). This is basically what Americans think of Mardi Gras, or the last few days before Lent. Depending on where you are, the celebrations can kick off up to a few weeks in advance, with drinking, eating, parades, and costumes. 

In Vigo, things are fairly low-key (for Spain), and the only real way I celebrated was by spending an evening with a group of people all dressed up in this getup:

Can you figure out what it is? If you're not from Vigo, the answer is probably no. I'm dressed as a Vitrasa bus (the local bus system) transformer. More specifically, the number 11 bus, which I take 3 days a week to get to private lessons. So there I am as a human, and when we all "transformed" into buses, they looked like this, with us inside:

It was a lot of work making the costumes, but when we all "transformed" together, it looked pretty cool. If you're my friend on facebook, check it out there! It was quite fun to go out and see all the different costumes (mostly people like us, in groups with a theme). Like a second (better) Halloween!

So Happy Carnaval, everyone! Eat lots of orejas, dress up, and be merry!

Hello from Galicia

So you know that part in Pride and Prejudice (if the answer to this question is no, we cannot be friends) where Elizabeth and Darcy are dancing for the first time and she's trying to make him have a conversation with her and she says "We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the éclat of a proverb." ?

Well, that there is exactly the reason I never publish anything on this blog. I have tons of ideas and I write them down, but they never seem perfect enough to show to the public. And so they waste away until too much time has passed and they no longer have any context or meaning.

So here I am writing an entry with little to no content, in order to not nitpick it to pieces and never actually publish it. Here's what I have to say: this past weekend was nice, with beautiful weather (for once) and plenty to do. I got to hang out with couchsurfing people, be productive, go to a Galician festival where people were drinking wine from bowls which were tied around their necks (also known as San Blas) and watch the Super Bowl until 5am with my roomies and cook and eat an American feast of hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken wings, chili, and brownies. And it was good.

Until next time, try not to be too hard on yourself (and I'll attempt to do the same).

Bagpipers entertaining us at the festival

Pulpoooooo

Immediate Reverse Culture Shock Observations: 15 Hours In

I've only been in America 15 hours and...yep, culture shocked already. This is a bizarre place. And, since it's 6am and I'm jet-lagged and can't sleep, I'm going to detail for you why exactly that is. Here are some of my immediate thoughts since getting off the plane yesterday, direct from my brain to you:

1. Hmm, going through customs and border protection in your own country is easy. I only feel slightly like a criminal!
2. Jesus Christ so much English everywhere!!! I feel really bad for these foreigners who obviously don't speak it very well, because it's obvious that none of the airport employees speak anything else.
3. Wow, Midwesterners are so friendly. My mom and dad made some BFFs while waiting for me to get off the plane.
4. Lord, it's hot. Why are the insides of buildings kept at the temperature of a sauna? I'm sweating!
5. American license plates are small and funny-looking.
6. Yay, snow! Blizzard! WTF DRIVING IN A BLIZZARD.
7. How is my parents' house so big and so small at the same time? We have so much STUFF. Look at all these things in my bedroom that I put there when I was 8 years old and haven't moved since. Bizarre.
8. What is with this toilet paper? I feel like I'm blowing my nose on a pillow! What am I, a princess?
9. Ha, American eggs are tiny and look like quail eggs.
10. Light switches and toilet flushers--where are they? Oh, there they are. Strange shape. I feel like I'm in a foreign country. Oh, wait, no I'm not, this is the house I grew up in. Weird.
11. (Reading a sign on a bank) Hmm, the temperature gauge must be broken, it's definitely not 32 degrees out there, because man is that hot. Oh, wait, Fahrenheit.
12. Holy crap, Tex-Mex food. Chicken chimichanga with refried beans, rice, sour cream and guacamole, you have materialized directly from my dreams. Margarita, I'd have loved to have ordered you, except I forgot about liquor laws in the US and neglected to bring my drivers license to the restaurant with me and was thus unable to prove that I'm over 21. Oops.
13. Netflix, you are a god. So many movies and tv shows at my disposal, 24/7. I may do nothing else over this entire vacation except get caught up on my entertainment.
14. Hello, jet lag. You're right, 9pm DOES seem like a good time to go to bed.
15. (And then...) Ah, good morning, 6am. Oh, look, I can see the sun beginning to rise. Weird.


...and this brings me up to the present. So much culture shock and I haven't even done anything yet. I'm sure this entry will have some follow-up ones in the next few days continuing my bizarre thoughts confronting my own culture, so look forward to that.

Oh, and as a disclaimer in case any of the thoughts above appear ridiculously stupid--I slept basically nothing for around 40 hours due to a wonderful "test" of a security alarm at Paris Charles de Gaulle that ran from 12:30-3am and left me with a lovely ringing in my ears and an inability to sleep for the rest of the night. Thus, my brain is running a little more slowly than normal. You'll have to excuse me.

Hello, snow. Good of you to arrive directly AFTER my plane touched down. Cheers!

Home for the Holidays

American Christmas at its finest

This time next week, I'll be back on US soil, officially Home for the Holidays. And I'm so excited, but also a little nervous. It's been a full year since I've been in the USA, and I've gotten more acclimated to Spanish culture than I ever could have possibly imagined. Now so many things that are normal at home seem really bizarre to me. (Yes, I know this sounds like me bragging "oh my god I'm soooooo European.") I'm kind of worried that it's going to be a huge reverse culture shock. I already had some small doses of this when my parents came to visit and when I hung out with one of my best high school friends over here and they talked about things in the US that I had honestly forgotten about.

So I'm wondering if going home is going to be a totally bizarre experience. Will everyone seem crass? Will listening to so much English make my brain explode? Will eating so much greasy food make me want to puke? Will I be able to get used to eating lunch at noon and dinner at six again?

And worst of all, will everyone think I'm snobby because I can't stop telling stories about my glamorous life in Europe?

Is my now-perfect Spanish tortilla a subconscious representation of my rejection of my home culture? (Hello, English major who liked reading Freud a little too much)

I guess the plan is to keep on keeping on for now with my acquired Spanish attitude. "No pasa nada, no te procupes." (It's nothing, don't worry.) No matter what, I'll be beyond excited to see my family and friends and vice versa, which is all that really matters. Well, that and Christmas cookies. 

Happy Holidays, everyone! 

Folga

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that there has been a lot of unrest in Iberia (that's Spain and Portugal) lately. High unemployment plus rising taxes and cuts in social services do not happy bedfellows make. Recently, hardly a week has gone by in which I haven't seen some kind of protest marching down the street, be it here in Vigo or nearby in Portugal. 

Protest march in Lisbon

The Portuguese people want jobs ("more and better employment" as the sign says)

A march for public healthcare and its employees here in Vigo

But yesterday was an official general strike day, like the one that we had in March--except this time, it was in ALL of Iberia, plus some protests in France, Italy and Greece. The strike meant that when the clock struck midnight on Tuesday night going into yesterday, all businesses (including bars and restaurants, gas stations, buses, banks, grocery stores, you name it) shut down for fear of having their windows broken by angry trashcan-dumping, firework-wielding hooligans starting to strike immediately. And almost all of these businesses stayed shut all day, because those same hooligans were going around town and screaming about breaking the strike at the workers in the cafes and stores that were open, then vandalizing them with spraypaint.

Sign advertising the strike day (folga xeral means general strike in Galician)

The goal of the strike was to stop the economy for the day and get the attention of European leaders, so in theory no one was supposed to spend any money or support "the system" in any way, and the hooligans were doing their best to enforce that.

Protesters

Not everybody was out vandalizing the scabs, though; what most people were doing (all across Spain, from what I heard) was participating in a march, which (in Vigo) began in a plaza at the top of the city and ended at another a ways downhill. I attended, not because I was on strike but because I was told it wouldn't be worth it for me to come to work when almost no students would be there anyway (although about half my coworkers went, but only 19 kids in the whole school showed up).

Massive march in Vigo

There were so many people at the march that you couldn't move, but it was interesting to me that everyone was just walking calmly. It felt more like a mass Sunday stroll than a protest march, minus the giant balloons with political propaganda on them. Only a few people were chanting or seemed really angry. But there were so many people that apparently by the time we made it to the second plaza, the speeches were over and lots of people were heading home for lunch, which is exactly what we ended up doing. It all felt really anticlimactic, especially when lots of businesses opened up again in the afternoon and all the hooligans seemed to have dissipated.

Everyone with their Galician-flag-colored balloons

Most of the buzz I heard from Vigueses about the strike was how useless a one-day strike was, how it wouldn't accomplish anything, and how it was stupid to complain when Galicia just had elections and most people didn't even vote, so the conservative party won again. And honestly, I tend to agree. Quite apart from the stupidity of the violent hooligans, I really don't think one day of missing work is going to do much, particularly considering all the money the corporations and government saved by not having to pay those people yesterday. 

I guess I'm just contrasting this one-day strike with pickets and marches and strikes I've seen and heard about in the US, like in my freshman year of high school when all the teachers went on strike for a month or the protests I went to in Madison, WI against Governor Walker. And from what I saw, this strike day (día de huelga in Spanish, or folga in Galician) seems like it didn't work as well as those ones did. I'm not sure if it accomplished much or even got that much attention worldwide. Reading US newspapers, it seems like the answer is no (although judging by the usual quality of US newspapers, that could just be normal American ignorance to anything happening outside its borders). But it is interesting to see how people in different countries try to express their feelings about political agendas. 

And just for the record, I'm not saying Spain doesn't have the capacity for those kinds of more drastic measures as well--they did do the 15-M (masses of people occupying Puerta del Sol in Madrid) just over a year ago, which was what seems to have inspired the Occupy Wall Street movement. But as far as protests go, to me this one (dubbed 14-N, for the date) seemed a little less-than-effective. I know it's historical that much of Europe is banding together to fight cuts in public services, and that two general strikes in one year is a big deal, but I don't know that it's going to change anything, particularly when the crisis is this bad. 

Anyway, since Thanksgiving is coming up and I spent all day teaching lessons about it so I've got it on the brain, I'm going to wrap up by saying how thankful I am to be able to have a job in Spain at this particular moment in history, but also to know that no matter how bad things get in Europe, I always have an American passport waiting to whisk me away (should I choose to go) to a place where things are slightly more economically stable. Plus America gave me the gift of the English language, which is enormously valuable and one of the only things keeping me afloat in these uncertain times. Cheers, USA. 

Past Travels Tuesday: September 2012

In September, I took a short leave of absence from this blog, but not (completely) out of laziness. It was actually for a much more exciting reason--my parents came to visit! Yay! And then we went traveling for almost 3 weeks. Double yay!

But since our trip was so long, and since my parents are my primary readers anyway, I'm not going to go through every detail of it. Here were the highlights for me:

• Going to a restaurant in Porto, Portugal where the owner wanted to make sure we were learning about his culture and gave us free port wine with our meal
• Relaxing at a family friend's house in Utrecht, the Netherlands and eating lots of cheese and Indonesian food

OK, we may have popped by Amsterdam too...

• Hungarian goulash (especially the free one, right Mom?), which is nothing like what we know as "goulash" in America, but is just as (actually probably more) delicious
• A cruise past the parliament building in Budapest at sunset

So pretty!

• The opera toilet in Vienna--sometimes tourist traps are actually funny! 
• Our day trip to Bratislava, Slovakia--I was expecting everything there to be really run-down and ugly, but the old town was so cute! I wish we'd had more time to spend there.

Bright colors, cheap prices, and way less touristy than Vienna--what's not to love?

• The train adventure from Vienna to Prague--our train broke down in the middle of nowhere, Czech Republic, so we watched most of the other passengers run across the train tracks to the other side, then we helped some Mormon missionaries carry their 10 heavy suitcases down and back up the stairs (aka the legal way to get to the other side of the train tracks), then we ended up on a train that was way too full and had to sit in the hallway for the next few hours, and in so doing made friends with an Aussie couple and their baby. Weird day. 
• Going up an old secret police spy tower in Prague and feeling like we'd time traveled when we reached the top and there was a man in full police uniform rambling at us in half Czech/half English with all the old spy instruments around him and a calendar on the wall that said 1974
• Cheap Czech beer--less than a dollar for half a liter of good beer!
• Me telling my parents to stop making American Gothic faces in every picture and instead having them make the following face at me in every picture

These will be cherished memories one day...

• Going on a WWII tour in Normandy, France and seeing my dad geek out over the whole thing
• Going to Santiago de Compostela and not really seeing anything because it was raining so hard
• Introducing my mom to the wonders of tapas
• Being the leader of our three-person "tour group"

Quite a long vacation, but as my mom always says, "it was a good trip." Miss you guys already, and can't wait to see you again at Christmas!

As Of Late

It’s been a while, as usual. Why might that be? Because this year I’m crazy busy. It’s a good thing most of the time, but it does make certain things (like this blog) suffer. So here’s what’s been going on: school has started off well, and being back for a second year is really nice. I like already knowing everything and everyone, where I’m going and what to do.

I’m doing a ton of private lessons this year, which is a very helpful addition to my travel fund. Also, it’s really nice to get to see some kids every week and really feel like I’m getting to know them and help them. I’m hoping to see them all improve over the course of the year. They’re all great kids, and I’m really enjoying working with them so far.

I've been busy lately with English/Spanish conversational exchanges, trying to make new friends to replace all the ones who moved away at the end of last year (miss you guys!), and enjoying the lovely fall weather (this includes hiking, among other things). 

Also, I’ve been traveling! I’ve had two four-day weekends so far; the first one I spent in Lisbon with a new friend and the second in London with a very old one. Both great trips and a lot of fun, but I have barely had a moment’s rest! But I've decided I need a bit of a rest—this weekend (another 4-day weekend due to All Saints’ Day on Thursday and the puente aka bridge aka extra day off that links it with the weekend) there was Halloween, but I decided to turn down another possible trip in order to get healthy again (I picked up a cold in London) and do things around here that needed doing (cleaning, errands, etc. etc.) so that when things pick back up again next week, I won't be overwhelmed.

And now, without further ado, a bunch of pictures of my adventures. Enjoy.

Cute streetcar in Lisbon

A monastery that looked like Hogwarts in Lisbon

A muiño (mill) I saw on a hike here in Galicia

I get by with a little help from my friends (at Abbey Road in London)

London Eye and Big Ben

Classic red phone booth picture

Some people do the Camino de Santiago, I do the Camino de Jane Austen (my own personal saint)

American Halloween traditions in Spain