...I would have laughed

Today's mission: Do whatever it takes to make the students be quiet so I don't end up with a colleague/bouncer in my class to witness what a disaster I am. I thought about leading with the Spanish equivalent of "We have to talk," but I didn't know if that would be awkward-funny or just a lot more awkward than necessary, so I let it go. It was awkward anyway, but I told them to shut up (for real this time) and they kind of did. Of course I had to keep telling them, and glaring at people, and I did tell one guy to shut up or get out. The room wasn't silent, but the roar was much duller. They're definitely not afraid of me, and I'm still not really willing/able to be as mean and nasty as I would have to be to make them afraid of me. Because let's be honest, I'm still afraid of them. Less than I was a month ago, but still, I'm a little afraid of them. I'm sort of afraid to actually kick anyone out of class, for example. That makes me sound like such a wimp and I don't want to be such a wimp, but what if I told someone to leave and they said no or started arguing, what would I do then? Hit them? (Maybe a little less socially unacceptable here than in the US, but still not a viable solution.) It's not that long until this class is over, so hopefully I can keep up the mostly empty threats without their entirely seeing through me. The important thing is that they were quieter. For today, anyway, I'm declaring victory.

Brrrrrr!

For better or worse, Sundays in Barcelona are for foreigners. The streets sound like everything but Spanish or Catalan and the locals mostly stay home. Or, out of my path, anyway. Especially on a Sunday like today, which was freezing. My memory from when I lived here before was that January and February were freezing, so I was really glad to find the weather mostly glorious this time around. But I was also a little confused. Had I just invented all those freezing days in early 2006? Today I knew for sure that I wasn't making it up. How the hell does 50°F feel so damn cold? But it does.

La policía y el himno

My roommate got stopped by the police today for what sounded like jaywalking. Then they didn't like what he said, or the way he talked or something like that, so they cuffed him and took him downtown, so to speak. Then they let him go. He said it's happened three times in the past few months and he likens it to yet another way the state shakes down people for money, and then he started ranting about budget cuts and Spanair and unemployment.

It got me thinking. I jaywalk a lot. It's impossible not to here, if you ever have anywhere to go. The intersections are all weird and angled and often you have to walk waaaaaay out of your way if you want to stay in crosswalks. I don't care if I'm not technically in a hurry; even if it's nothing, I always have something better to do than walk large circles out of my way. And, I like to have experiences that expose me to some new corner of life and give me a story to tell. Do I want to get arrested for jaywalking? Kind of; I bet it would be sort of interesting, at least in retrospect, and it seems unlikely that the consequences would be very dire. It would at least give me something more entertaining to write about than how much I suck at my job.

My main concern with getting arrested for jaywalking is the same reason I'm always doing it in the first place: When I'm walking I'm in a hurry, even if I'm not. Even if it seems like a good adventure in general, in practice I usually feel like I have something better to do, even if I mostly don't. Maybe if I really run out of things to write about, I'll block off some time and see what kind of trouble I can get into. Although, by the rules of my own stupid unchosen inherent belief system, I've just doomed myself to arrest as soon as I'm in an actual hurry.

Heaping fail

I told you about how some of my students want me to do more to make some of the other students shut up in class. We haven't had class since that girl came to talk to me, so there's no news on whether it's working or not. Anyway, today I had lunch in the University cafeteria for the first time in six years and I fucked it all up and misunderstood how many different plates you're supposed to take and got yelled at by the cashier and ended up with enough food to feed a small family for several days. But I was just eating with one other person and we're sort of pals and who really cares if I fucked up the cafeteria system. But then when I sat down with my overflowing tray, a woman I sort of know but am nothing like friends with showed up and wanted to talk to me and apparently she's some kind of student coordinator or something and it turns out my students had been to her, too, so I had to have another awkward conversation about how I need to shut the students up, only this time it was with a more senior colleague, not a student, in front of the director of my course, and in the middle of everything, like a monument to my incompetence and dereliction, was my tray of gluttony and ineptitude. Joder. And I hadn't even had a chance to do anything because I haven't had class since I found out it was a problem. (I knew the loud students annoyed me; I didn't realize the noise was a problem for anyone else. Honest. I wear a microphone, so I assumed people could hear.) Whine.

Moving on to national-level suckage, Spanair has cancelled all of its flights indefinitely because the Catalan government can't afford to finance it, and the Spanish unemployment rate is currently 23%. Joder.

Worse in black and white

I fired Vodafone. They blow. Their stores are always closed and then when they're open they're too crowded and the people who work there are never helpful and their website blows and their operators blow and I hate them. I wasn't that invested in my old phone number -- I never even really learned it -- and I was out of credit anyway. Take that, Vodafone. So I went to the Movistar store and asked for a prepaid SIM card and the woman told me they're having a promotion now where you get two little phones and two prepay SIM cards for 19 euros.

Me: "But I only want one SIM card, and I already have a phone."

Her: "It's a promotion, this is how we're selling them now."

Me: "Why would I want two cards and two phones?"

Her: "Well, you can use one until the credit runs out and then use the other one."

Me: "Is it the same at all the Movistar stores?"

Her: "Yes, I think so. It's a promotion. It's a very good price."

Whatever, I thought, this is still better than Vodafone.

Me: "Ok, I'll take it."

And at that point, after I had gotten through all that confusing absurd ridiculous stuff in Spanish, the woman behind the counter started saying things like "This is yours" and "Sign here, please" in English. That's cheating! You're not allowed to change the language when the conversation gets easy! I earned the easy part of that conversation in Spanish.

I realize it's not the woman behind the Movistar counter's job to practice Spanish with me, and I try not to get all bent out of shape if someone who speaks better English than I speak Spanish switches to English on me. Or even if they don't speak better English than I speak Spanish, whatever. Maybe they just want to practice English or maybe they think they're being helpful, maybe they're not trying to tell me that I speak Spanish horribly and that I sound like a blithering idiot and that I'll never be anything more than a tourist here. But when you think you're rolling along smoothly enough through a conversation and then suddenly you hit the English wall, it's hard not to take it a little personally.

Bona nit, Barcelona!

I'm kind of mailing this one in, but, here goes. When I grow up and become a musician who plays concerts in other countries, I will learn how to say "Hello " and something like "How's everyone doing tonight?" and "Thank you, goodnight" in whatever the right language happens to be. Why is that hard? These are people who learn words and then vocalize them for a living. And I imagine they're mostly people who really get off on applause. Do American performers really not know how much more applause they would get by saying anything in the right language? Stupid rock stars.

¡Silencio!

Spanish students talk. They talk and talk and talk and talk, all throughout class, and they don't really mean to be rude, it's just how they operate, but it's incredibly annoying and I'm not good at making them shut up and sometimes I want to strangle them. I'm not a disciplinarian -- this job is supposed to be hard because it's in the wrong language, not because I suck at babysitting. But I actually thought they were getting a little better; I had basically resigned myself to talking loudly over a dull roar and shushing them when the roar got louder, and I was almost ok with that.

But then today someone came to my office hours to ask if I could please do more to make people shut up because it's really hard to hear. She was super nice and kept apologizing and saying things like "I guess you just got here" and "It's probably different in the United States" and it was actually sort of cute. Except that now I have to make them shut up and I don't know how to make them shut up. The room is so full of people that it's hard to know who exactly is being the loudest, and even if I did know I don't want to have to call people out or kick them out. I don't exactly even know how to kick someone out of class in Spanish. How the hell am I supposed to be a mean scary badass in a language I don't even speak properly?

Sueños

I dreamed in Spanish last night. I've done it before, but last night was the first time for this particular stint in el estado español. It's kind of a big deal to dream in a language you don't speak fluently. But in this particular dream, although I don't remember the details very well, I know I was the one doing most of the talking, and doing it in my usual slow stuttery gringo-y way. I do that all the time when I'm awake, and it's definitely not a big deal. I woke up feeling all inadequate.

Speaking of feeling inadequate, my class today was largely uneventful, which is about as good as it's going to get I think. At least the expectations of the students seem to be similarly low.

Viva el dragón

When you live in the wrong place, you end up in ridiculous situations; sometimes they're hilarious, but other times they're just unfortunate. When this guy I barely know and who I'm not dating and am not going to start dating invited me to have dinner with some friends of his at a Chinese place way across town, I was definitely tempted to say no. In my real life I would have said no. But this isn't my real life and Barcelona is still kind of the wrong place, hopefully not for long but for now anyway, and maybe I would meet interesting people and at least I'd be speaking some Spanish, so I went.

What my sort-of friend didn't tell me was that what we were really going to was a Chinese New Year's dinner organized on Facebook by a friend of a friend of his friend and attended by 30ish motley strangers. A better man than I would have made friends with everyone, etc., but crowds like that either intimidate or annoy the hell out of me even in the right language, and even my sort-of friend who invited me wasn't being very social, and the people on my left were speaking Catalan. And then it all got very loud and very stereotypically Spanish and sometimes I don't want to eat dinner until midnight, especially on a Sunday night when I'm only barely even with friends and the metro is about to stop running and I'm way the fuck over on the wrong side of town. And I definitely didn't want to be held hostage waiting to find out how much I owed while everyone ordered coffee and everything moved at a pace several times slower than necessary. Who the hell were these people, and why didn't they care about getting home before the metro stopped running? The motley group of some-random-girl's Facebook friends couldn't all live within walking distance of the Plaza stupid España, could they? Joder.

In the end, the food was solidly ok and not that expensive and I did make it home on the metro, if later and tired-er and grumpier than planned. And if some motley Facebook friends of a friend of a friend of my sort-of friend think I'm a lame uptight American, I'm mostly ok with that. They all thought my name was Amanda, so I've still got some anonymity.

What I got

I barely have any friends and I'm earning very little money and my bedroom is so cold that I often sleep in a hat. But, sitting on the terrace in the sun reading the newspaper with no coat and wishing I had sunglasses in January makes all of that not much matter.

Hell yeah.

Too many tickets is the problem, man

Hung over is not the way to deal with bureaucracy. Especially when you live in a place that doesn't really know about Bloody Marys. (It is at least mostly socially acceptable here to order coffee with cognac in the morning, but it's not the same.) Anyway, I dragged myself to the Office of Extranjeros to pick up my NIE, which I need in order to open a bank account, which I need in order to get paid. I got my ticket and I waited in line and they gave me a form and told me to take it to any bank and pay a tax of nine euros and 18 euro cents and bring the receipt back. Annoying, but doable. Except that it wasn't, because of the five banks I went to, three of them would only take my money if I had an account with them (see my reason above for needing the damn NIE in the first place) and the other two only accept these tax payments before 10.30am, which it wasn't. So, I gave up for the day and had a beer which, as the cause of and solution to all of life's problems, is sort of its own little Catch-22. At least I didn't have to go to the bank to get it.

Vroom vroom

I swore in front of my students for the first time today. Not at them, I just failed at saying 'open it' (the it in question was a file they needed to open for a computer demo, and I know of no other way to say 'open it' than abrirlo, and those two r's are too close together for my gringo tongue) so many times that there was nothing left to say but joder. A few of them sort of laughed and the file got opened and no one died, but today was otherwise a complete fucking disaster. Whiiiine. A computer demo should have been easy enough, but I couldn't figure out how to log into said computer and then I couldn't find the program I was supposed to be demo-ing and then I fucked up the data and then I forgot how to say a lot of words like quotation marks and parenthesis and if I were teaching at this level of incompetence in the United States there would probably be consequences. Expectations are much lower here, so I've got that going for me. And, whenever I try to own up to what a disaster I am, the professor in charge of my course starts going on about how bad the students here are and blames everything on them. It's sort of reassuring, I guess, although it's really not the students' fault that I don't properly speak their language (their second language, really, since they're mostly Catalans). At least I know how to properly say beer.

Hijo de puta means son of a whore

"¡Hijo de puta!" growled my roommate to the TV.

"¿Que pasa?" I asked, although I already knew.

"This," he muttered, gesturing at the news on TV, and stormed upstairs.

Recortes. (Cuts.)

The Spanish (federal) government did its damage a few weeks ago; today was the Catalan government's turn. They're cutting public sector salaries, some by as much as a third. Ouch. Tonight there are protests all over the city. Tonight there is also a soccer game between Barcelona and Madrid but it's not on regular TV, only pay. My roommate was grumbling something about the government's cutting the right to watch soccer along with cutting salaries and I think he wasn't being serious, but I didn't ask. He's a public sector employee, so tonight I'm staying out of his way.

You're positively unemployed

When I left work today I was too tired to stay at work or to go to the grocery store and buy food and then cook it, but it was too early for any self-respecting person who tries to fit in here to go for dinner. So I took a really long walk and checked in on my old neighborhood and tried not to dwell on what a wreck my class was today. (What the hell was I thinking yesterday? This isn't fun! It's hard and I blow at it.) My old apartment has an elevator now (I built a lot of character climbing up five very tall flights of stairs every day), and what used to be the vacant lot across the street is now modern mirror-y buildings that I'm pretty sure are entirely empty.

It doesn't feel like the third world here or anything, but the restaurants aren't very full. The few non-university-affiliated locals that I know are either unemployed or underemployed or stand a good chance of being laid off tomorrow. I know of at least three construction-boom airports that are entirely non-operational, and everyone is mad about this big new expensive 112 building (112 is Spanish for 911) that is mostly empty. It's not like I've moved to some kind of wasteland, but if you pay any attention you see the crisis everywhere.

The new government that was supposed to fix things promptly raised taxes (income tax here is over 50% for the richest people -- higher than in some Scandinavian countries) and froze (freezed?) salaries and hiring. I don't know people rich enough to hear much complaining about the tax increase, but people are super mad about the metro fare's increase. (A single ride costs 2 euros, which does seem like a lot, but if you buy ten at a time (which everyone does, except for tourists) it's less than a euro per trip.) The unemployment rate for young people (under 25) is almost 50%. It's not like moving to Egypt in 2010, but I'm very interested to see how this plays out.

I'm still still alive

The survival updates are not really necessary, I know. But, since I already brought it up, I did make it through another class without dying of incompetence or incoherence. This is actually sort of almost fun. Although tomorrow I'm supposed to cover some stuff that I would have a hard time explaining well even in English. We'll see if my Spanish is hand-waving-grade.

It rained a little today, and I realized it was the first crap weather day we've had since I got here. People are whining a little because it's supposed to get colder soon, but as far as I can tell that just means a high of 55F, not 60F. 55F in Barcelona does feel much colder than 55F in New York has ever felt, and I do often sleep in a hat, but still, this is basically paradise. I can run by the sea any time I want and the sun shines almost every day. I'm going to have to start looking for new things to complain about.

Bicycle bicycle bicycle

Barcelona has one of those public bike systems where you get a card and then you can take a bike from one of the many bike stations around the city and then you return it to any other station you want. Bicing, they call it. I like it, but I would have been perfectly happy to like it in theory while continuing to walk everywhere. But then a colleague offered to loan me his card and I immediately felt a bunch of imagined social obligation to actually use the card. Sunday seemed like my best bet to try it out without a ton of traffic to complicate things, so I checked out a bike to ride my lame ass to work for a while. The first problem was that I couldn't lock the seat in place. My being incredibly short means that having the seat as low as it could possibly go wasn't a huge problem, but having it want to turn sideways every time I moved my legs or ass was not ideal. The second problem was that the back brake on the bike barely worked at all. (As far as I can tell, it's somewhere between a huge pain in the ass and impossible to exchange a bike for a different one once you've checked it out.) The third problem was that I don't really know which streets have bike lanes, or which traffic rules you need to follow on a bike, or which particular direction is most likely to be the source of the next motorcycle that comes screaming by out of nowhere. I managed not to crash into anything, and I only almost fell over once. I'm not sure that twenty minutes of Bicing made up for the fact that I spent hours at work on this particular Sunday, but it was a little adventure in any case.

Just right

My apartment technically has six bedrooms. One is kind of an office, one is supposed to be some kind of guest room, three are taken, and there's been a steady stream of people coming through to look at the free one. We'd all kind of rather have two girls and two guys than three girls and one guy, but no one wanted the English guy who speaks no Spanish and came wrapped in his Catalan girlfriend who technically lives with her parents, or the Belgian guy who pretended to be American and then interrogated us at length about the exact speed of our internet. We also didn't want the hot pierced unemployed green-haired girl who wanted to keep a dog on the terrace. (I would love a pet, but there was no reason to think that this particular hot green-haired girl would take good care of one.) One roommate summed her up with "She's cool... but maybe too cool." So, the search continues. In the meantime, I'm learning new ways to say in Spanish that people are cool or that they suck, and trying not to wonder too much about how I made the cut.

Joder

Guy behind desk: "If you want to get a job, first you have to get a visa."

Me: "I have a job and a visa. I'm here for an NIE."

Guy behind desk: "But this is a tourist visa."

Me: "No it's not. Look at it. It says 'work visa.'"

Guy behind desk: "Oh."

The Office of Extranjeros (Foreigners) was a little maddening, but no one was mean to me and I didn't come close to crying. On another note, for a city of a million-plus people, Barcelona is ridiculously small. I basically don't know anyone here, and I ran into two people who I kind of know at the Office of Extranjeros. (Both Spanish people, which doesn't make a lot of sense.) Anyway, after two hours at the Foreigners' office, I've now applied for an NIE (numero de identidad de extranjero, a.k.a. national ID number for foreigners), which they say I can pick up in a week and which I need to open a bank account, and I need to open a bank account in order to ever get paid. I guess that's progress. When I finally got to work, I could suddenly no longer connect to the internet. Half an hour with the IT guys later, I hunkered down in my borrowed office to maybe get some work done, but the lights wouldn't come on. So I started fucking with the switches, which I guess tripped some kind of alarm, and then the lights started flashing disco-style and an alarm screamed for about an hour before I could get anyone to come fix it. Joder. But, then I went for a run on the beach and life was not so bad. The End.

Huh?

My roommates had basically the most typical conversation ever the other day. I'm not complaining; I was mostly amused. (Incidentally, the Spanish word típico kind of means typical, but without the sarcastic connotation that it usually has in English. I still smile at restaurants that advertise "comida típica": typical food.) Anyway, the conversation went more or less like this:

La Burgoseña: I went to the store today and they kept talking to me in Catalan!

El Catalan: You're in Catalunya -- people speak Catalan here.

La Burgoseña: But they speak Spanish too, right? And I started talking in Spanish! Why would they answer in Catalan?

El Catalan: It's normal here to have conversations where one person speaks Spanish and the other person speaks Catalan. Most people understand both, so people speak whichever one they feel more comfortable with.

La Burgoseña (who has family in Bilbao): But not everyone speaks Catalan, and I started the conversation in Spanish. In Bilbao no one would ever answer in Basque if you started speaking to them in Spanish.

El Catalan: But most people here speak Catalan, and most people in Bilbao don't speak Basque. If you don't speak Basque you can't understand it at all. But if you speak Spanish you can understand some Catalan if you pay attention.

La Burgoseña: But I started talking in Spanish and I don't speak Catalan -- they could have just answered me in Spanish!

(Another round or two of the same basic points.)

Me: Practice your gringo accent -- no one ever assumes I speak Catalan.

Both roommates: Huh?

Joder. I always forget that no one says gringo here (guiri is the slang term for foreigner), but I think the bigger issue is they just don't think I'm funny. Well, whatever. I'm here to learn Spanish, not to make people laugh.

She cooks a meal or two

My roommates are a Catalan guy and a girl from Burgos. (We're still looking for a fourth). The girl is 23 and just moved here (to study) last week. Once she gets her bearings she'll be a lot more at home here than I am, being Spanish and all*, but for now she's kind of intimidated by a city that's a lot bigger than anywhere she's ever lived and she asks me tons of questions. It's cute, and about as motherly as I get. The Catalan guy sings along with Manu Chao and painted "La Vigorosita" on his bike.

Having roommates blows in all the usual ways, but this is about learning Spanish, not about having my own space. And sometimes when they cook they share. I'm doing my usual part by supplying the beer.

* Catalunya and the rest of Spain are nowhere near as different as Catalunya and, say, the United States are, no matter what anyone who moves here from some other part of Spain might try to tell you. Trust me.

How your head feels under something like that

I couldn't get a straight answer from anyone here about how to say theta hat (the Greek letter theta with a caret on top -- it looks like this and it's a statistics thing that you either already understand or don't want me to explain). When I threw out theta sombrero as a possible translation, I was just going for a cheap laugh. (People here mostly don't think I'm as hilarious as I usually think I am). I definitely wasn't expecting to hear "Yeah, say that. It's funny." So, today I talked about theta sombrero. And some people did laugh. Wow. (Full disclosure: It's also possible that they were laughing because theta sounds sort of like teta which means tit in Spanish, but whatever. I'll take whatever laughs I can get.)

Anyway, today was better, I think. Class, I mean. I made a few digressions from reading the slides, and the students were a little quieter, and I even answered a few questions. I'm not complaining, but I definitely expected this job to give better disaster stories than it has so far.

I'm still alive

Ok, fine. So I didn't shrivel up and die and I didn't run out of the room in a mad fit of incoherence, and no one threw anything at me. I stand by little freak out.

My dear friend B, who invited me here, taught the same students last term and offered to introduce me and tell them not to talk too much. Very nice of him. He was speaking Catalan so I didn't understand him entirely, but he definitely said something about how I'm still learning Spanish and so people should translate for me if I forget a word. And then he told them that I got my PhD from Harvard and someone whistled. Joder. But, it didn't get any more absurd than that. I pretty much just read the slides, and I think everyone was bored (I know I was). But I knew I wasn't going to be particularly good at this job, and bored is better than shaking like a leaf or crying or something.

I ain't afraid of you motherfuckers

Ok, I'm full of shit. I'm totally afraid of those motherfuckers. The students, I mean. Tomorrow I have to stand in front of 200 of them and talk for an hour and a half in a language that they all speak approximately perfectly and I speak approximately like a fifth grader. Even teaching in English I sometimes end up with my head in my hands saying "What the hell am I doing" and making the students leave early because I've fucked something beyond repair. I don't even know how to say 'fucked beyond repair' in Spanish. I guess if it gets to the head-holding point a simple joder will get the point across, but that's not much consolation.

I realize that a transcript of my freaking out is not hilarious or very interesting. And I don't expect much sympathy for something I knowingly signed up for. I'm just obsessing a little too much right now to write about anything else.

Actually, by Spanish standards, maybe I am kind of a fascist

Let the hand-wringing about my Spanish skills begin. The occasional person who tells me I speak Spanish really well is not correct. They're either being unnecessarily polite or they have really low expectations of foreigners' ability to learn their language. Even if I speak a little better than I give myself credit for, I catch myself making huge mistakes all the time, and I must make tons more that I don't even realize. Anyway, I'm clearly a foreigner. I have an accent and I can't roll my r's very well. (Incidentally, I'm meeting more and more people who had to go to speech class as kids because they couldn't roll their r's right -- I wonder how the sound developed as part of the language if lots of people can't do it even as kids.) I can deal with the fact that I don't sound Spanish. But I really, really, really hope that the guy who told me I sound like a Nazi when I speak Spanish was full of scheiße. (Even if I do believe companies should be allowed to fire people.)

Tried to light a plastic cigar

Happy Three Kings Day! It's as big a deal as Christmas here. The kings bring the presents, although these days Santa Claus (aka El Gordo) brings some, too. On Three Kings Eve there are parades all over the city; aside from the three kings' being there, they're not much different from the typical US parade, with floats and little marching bands and people throwing candy. (They throw the candy much harder here though, so be careful.) One of the three kings is traditionally black and, if there's not an actual black man available, it's apparently considered socially acceptable for one of the kings to be in blackface. Joder.

Speaking of joder, I managed to not notice until I was entirely moved in that my bedroom does not have a heating unit. (Even when it's not very cold outside, Barcelona apartments get freezing in the winter. It's been like 60 degrees and sunny every day since I got here, but still I'm sleeping with a hat on.) And I don't know how to turn the hot water on. It's one of those scary gas on-the-wall contraptions that has to be lit or something, and it's Three Kings Day so no one is around to ask. And the washing machine leaves clothes soaking dripping wet. Joder. Maybe I'll just go ride the elevator up and down for a while.

PS. If you care, Three Kings Day is actually January 6, which is when I wrote this but not when I posted it.

I live on love street

I really live here now. I've got an apartment and everything; moved in today. I live in a neighborhood called Clot, which I haven't explored too much yet but which I assure you is much nicer than it sounds. And the ickiness of the name Clot is more than offset, for me anyway, by the fact that the name of my street is Enamorats, which means lovers in Catalan (enamorados in Spanish). On the ground floor of the building (the ground floor of the whole block, actually) is this weird sort of half-shopping-mall, half-souk labyrinth of stalls selling things like blankets and perfume and hardware. Galerias, they call them. And, Clot is near the Sagrada Familia, so I can just say I live near the Sagrada Familia instead of having to say the word Clot.

Sick of 23rd street

When I lived here before, I never had to find a place to live; it found me, before I even got here. This time around, I was at the mercy of the roommate market. Coming from New York, I expected it to be horrible and stressful (looking for a room in New York is even worse than dating in New York, which is terrible enough already), but the terrible Spanish economy was on my side here. Rooms that might otherwise be filled with youngish Catalans are empty because those people are unemployed and living with their parents. So there are lots of rooms. I started checking the Barcelona version of Craigslist a while before I got here, and the same places kept showing up for weeks. Anyway, I ended up deciding between two places, and today decided on the one that is in a less desirable location but is with native Spanish speakers. I came here to learn Spanish, not to form an unrequited crush on a cute tall Italian roommate. And in addition to daily Spanish practice, the place has a washing machine (everywhere here has a washing machine, but still it feels like a big huge deal to me) and an elevator. What luxury.

El Gordo

I bitch about Christmas quite a lot, but there are some things that I like about the Christmas season here in Catalunya. The lights on the front of buses spell Bon Nadal. (Nadal means Christmas in Catalan.) Merry Christmas written in lights on a bus in New York would not make me smile; even Feliz Navidad doesn't do it -- it just puts that stupid song in my head. (And, now I've got the stupid song in my head, dammit.) But Bon Nadal makes me think of Rafa Nadal, and that makes me smile. Also, they have this thing called a shit log (Tió de Nadal or Caga tió). It's a little log that they put stuff in (little treats like cookies or figs) starting a while before Christmas and then on Christmas Eve they beat it with a stick until the treat come out (i.e., they make it shit). And, every Catalan nativity scene has a little guy off in the corner pooping.

On the not-specifically-Catalan front, I was very disappointed today to learn that El Gordo de Navidad (gordo means fat) is not the way people here refer to Santa Claus. (I've spent years getting a kick out of calling him El Gordo de Navidad.) Turns out the Christmas fat man is actually a national lottery. I don't even know how they say Santa Claus here, and I don't care. I'm sticking with El Gordo.

Translate this

First day of work. I didn't go to work, because I don't even know where work is, exactly. I should figure that out before class starts. But I did do work, and when you're basically a lazy piece of crap like I am, working all day makes you super tired. Whine. And, holy crap this is hard. All I have to do is translate some already-made lecture slides (actually about 70 slides, which is part of the problem) from English to Spanish and, if I can't do that, I really shouldn't have this job in the first place. But I already knew I shouldn't have this job in the first place; I even tried to tell them so when I was first offered the job. Anyway, here I am. And it's not that I can't translate the slides, I just can't translate them quickly, or perfectly, or, apparently, without freaking out about how unprepared I am. On the bright side, once the slides are made I could probably just read them to the class word for word and refuse to answer any questions and I still wouldn't be the worst statistics professor ever. Although, this being their first stats class, they might not realize it.

Cauliflower is NOT traditional

I probably could have done better the second time around, but every time I move to Barcelona around New Year's I have New Year's Day dinner at this crappy restaurant between my old apartment and the beach. Six years ago it was all I could find, and then for some stupid reason I decided it was tradition so now that I've moved back, here I am. Actually, I'm not at all sure it's even the same crappy restaurant, but it is a crappy restaurant, and it's between my old apartment and the beach, and I'm pretty sure I'm on the right ("right") street, and I'm having wine and pork. Close enough.

The last time I moved to Barcelona and ate New Year's dinner at this or some other similarly crappy nearby restaurant I asked for a menu, not realizing that here in el estado español* menu means menu del día which means a three-course meal, so that's what I got. I don't make too many of those kinds of mistakes anymore, but I still feel like a huge disaster with the Spanish language most of the time. So, what better way to finally learn this damn language than by taking a job that requires me to speak publicly in it? It seemed like a good idea at the time, months ago, when it was months away from happening. Now it feels like one of my stupider ideas.

But fleeing New York in the winter can't be that stupid. I went for a run near the beach today, and in shorts and a long-sleeved t-shirt I was too hot. It wasn't really warm enough to justify the old naked dudes on the beach, but more power to their old naked asses. At the other end of the weather-inappropriate spectrum were the old ladies in fur (furry if not actual fur) coats and huge scarves walking small dogs in Christmas sweaters. Here's hoping there's a place for me somewhere in between. (Not literally in between. Ew.)

*In the parts of the country officially known as Spain where I've spent the most time, the word 'Spain' is generally to be avoided. The kind of Catalans who get upset about a lot of things prefer you to refer to it as 'the Spanish state.' It seems like kind of a pissy distinction to me, but I aim to please. Well, sometimes.