Bad at Tea, Good at Tirso
the eye abroad
PrintThe other night I put a mug of water in the microwave for two minutes, went to pull it out, and promptly burned my hand, which resulted in two still healing blisters. This demonstration of absentmindedness or sheer stupidity aside, however, my experiences in the past few weeks have left me feeling incredibly competent. Living in a residencia with hundreds of Spanish students, a cafeteria, a spiteful microwave, and a mini-fridge didn’t immediately impart to me a feeling of grown-up-ness. Travel, however, did.
One of the perks of Europe is that it is a relatively small continent and easy to traipse across. After a month of intensive language classes, our program took us on a trip to Segovia, Toledo, and Madrid. From Madrid, we scattered—I, with two friends, in the direction of Rome for a four-night stay in the cheapest hostel we could find.
And then we walked. It rained every day we were traveling, and so I walked holes into already soaking wet boots. I wore a scarf around my head in lieu of an umbrella so I could see every possible detail of the breathtaking city. Being an uninformed traveler, I was shocked to find that the church housing Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa was 10 minutes from our hostel. Being bad with maps, I took one day to wander on my own and get completely lost after my trip to the Vatican.
I ended up in a residential neighborhood, walking with purpose—so much so that several Italians stopped me for directions and then watched as I stuttered out apologies in Spanish/Italian—until I reached what I thought should be the river but was instead a highway and a mountain. Slightly daunted, I found a hotel and showed the concierge my map. “Dove? En el mapa?” He responded that it was not on the map (always a promising sign) and gave me a larger one. After he pointed me in the direction of the center of the city, I made a wrong turn out of the hotel, and walked around the block, I was finally successfully on my way.
Spain is abroad, but on the surface, it is not terribly foreign in all the foreboding senses of the word—siesta alone is not enough to make culture shock set in, or make me feel like I’m 12. Italy too is sufficiently familiar and comforting. That being said, I am in a place that is distinct in many ways from what I am accustomed to, and the differences emerge bit by bit every day. Luckily, my trip taught me more than the Spanish word for shoe insert (plantilla); I am, despite what my finger blisters might say, capable enough to function alone. With my two very wet feet and a cursory grasp of the language, despite being cell phone-less and alone, I will be just fine.
With this realization, I returned home to Spain to start classes at the University of Granada. It is not a place where I expected small class sizes. I was half hoping, in fact, to sit in a vast lecture hall unnoticed. But since comparative literature is not a wildly popular field here, I am consigned to the ugliest building on campus (Orthodontia, on the other hand, is beautiful) and sitting in classes with under five people.
One of my professors has assured the four of us that we will become like a family. She speaks quickly with a strong Andaluz accent, but has encouraged me to stop her if I ever get lost, and explains jokes she thinks I won’t understand. Another professor seemed frankly surprised to see me back on the second (and third, and fourth) day of class. Little does she know that, compared to walking across Rome or even navigating the complex system of picking up photocopies for class, sorting out essentialism from formalism is relatively straightforward. Here, at least, I am fully adult.
This competence is reassuring and allows me to obsess a little less, though I will always arrive 10 minutes early to events that will always begin 15 minutes late. I usually spend the interim time walking around the surrounding streets in circling, snake-like paths. And with my walking skills honed, I know that I will not only still get where I am going five minutes before anyone else, but enjoy the meandering trip I took to get there.
5 March 2009
vol. 6, issue 6
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