"Disaster? What are you talking about!? We're drinking cider out of a bottle with a mechanical apple on top of it."

I basically live in a dead zone for restaurants. There is the Basque place that I love not too far away but aside from that one place, which isn't exactly cheap and has strange hours, a decent bocadillo or adequate pizza is about as good as it gets. Which is basically fine, but I have this friend visiting and I really wanted us to be able to eat good things in the neighborhood and it's not really working. Tonight I tried to take us to a (different) nearby Basque restaurant that has good reviews on a few different websites, only to find it replaced with some kind of Catalan/Chinese fusion-y place that was trying too hard to be fancy, especially in my neighborhood. Dammit.

We probably would have wandered back out of the cider place we wandered into when we realized it was a bar that serves cider and not an actual Asturian restaurant (Asturias is in the north of Spain and they make cider and good cheese there), but by then the owner (?) was talking up all the food and telling us we must stay, and it wasn't so much that we believed him but at that point leaving would have been awkward. So we had cider and adequate Asturian-ish tapas and tortilla that Sr. Asturias insisted passionately would be the best we'd ever had. I like Spanish tortilla, but his talking it up so much was almost as silly as someone talking up toast. Anyway, he was enthusiastic and fun and the food was ok and the cider was good. And we had chupitos of some brown liquor that he allegedly made -- homemade liquor is almost never very good, but I usually like it anyway. And they can't all be good modern Catalan meals, I guess. Especially in this neighborhood.

Don't bother with this one

The subway strike didn't happen, by the way. I guess that's for the best.

Anyway, class today was mostly uneventful, which we've well established is as good as it gets. And now only two more lectures left! Plus three seminars on Thursday, where I'm going to have to explain statistical power in Spanish (if you don't know what that means, good for you), but I'm not thinking about that just yet.

Watching a Spanish-subtitled German film about architecture in Berlin after the wall came down seemed like a good weird Barcelona thing to do. It turned out to be dour and boring, which in retrospect I guess was pretty predictable, but there was free beer. And it was even pretty good beer.

That's all I've got.

Cloud and chair

Antoni Tàpies was a younger contemporary of Catalan artists like Miró and Dalí. I like to imagine him tagging along like a little brother, although he's actually a pretty big deal in the Catalan art world. Anyway, the plan today was to go to the Picasso Museum but for some reason (probably the 65,000 people the Mobil World Congress brought to town) the line was about 400 people long. My friend likes weird modern art so we went instead to the Antoni Tàpies foundation, where the art is very modern and very weird. Some of Tàpies' stuff has nice colors or interesting textures and would look nice on the wall of the kind of apartment I might like to live in someday. And, some of his stuff looks unfortunately like things you can find in the apartment where I currently live, like dirty laundry piled up on a chair.

Anyway, Tàpies died recently, at the ripe old age of 88. In fact, he died on the day I went to the Barcelona soccer game. I know that because they had a moment of silence for him before the game. Well, they tried to have a moment of silence; people were mostly not silent. It doesn't really help, but when the students won't shut up I remind myself that people here don't shut up for Antoni Tàpies, either.

Linen and sequins and silk

Spain has a royal family; this is Europe, after all. You might have read about the King Juan Carlos saying "Why don't you shut up?" to Hugo Chavez a few years ago, or their less-publicized make-up a while later when the king gave Hugo a t-shirt with ¿Por qué no te callas? written on it, but mostly you don't hear too much about these Bourbons outside of Spain. Here in the estado español, the royal news coverage is mostly gossipy magazines showing glossy photos of pretty people doing things like being on vacation. But they've been in the news a lot lately, because one Iñaki Urdangarín, Duque de Palma and husband of the Infanta Cristina (doesn't infanta sound so much more dramatic than princess?), is in all kinds of trouble. He's accused of doing a bunch of sleazy stuff like laundering money through this foundation that he used to run.

...really? You're a goddamn duke and you still think you need more money? Joder. I guess it's possible that he didn't do it, innocent until proven guilty and all, but that seems unlikely.

People are understandably a little pissed off. They're also mad about most everything related to money right now. Iñaki spent something like 16 hours before something like a grand jury the other day and people gathered outside the courthouse to be mad at him together. (Protest doesn't seem like quite the right word, but they were definitely mad.) They were chanting "Urdangarín, trabaja en Burger King," which I imagine doesn't need translation.

In this economy, I bet Burger King already has about all the overqualified employees it can handle.

Talking to some rich folks that you know

The Mobil World Congress is next week and it's bringing something like 65,000 people to Barcelona. It's the place to be for everyone who does anything with cell phones, I guess. Barcelona really isn't equipped to deal with with that kind of influx of humanity. Hotels are charging 500 euros a night and they're still all full. (My roommates and I maybe could have made some extra money renting out our little heroin den of a spare room, but it's more fun to have my conference-going friend stay there.) Starting Monday, along with the conference, might be a subway strike. (The subway workers are mad. Everyone is mad. Same story.) And, I'm kind of pulling for it. I know it makes me an ass and I feel a little bad for that, but what a fantastic shit show it would be. Probably no one would get hurt, and I love a good disaster. Plus, I can walk to work.

A mullet and a moustache

The students in Valencia are mad. They're mad for the same reason everyone here is mad lately -- recortes -- and they've been protesting for a few days now. The police in Valencia are mad at the students for being mad at the recortes, and it's all playing out about how extended protests usually do: Some of the students maybe got violent and some of the police definitely got violent and both sides are pointing fingers all over the place and the news has it all on extended repeat. The cafe where I had coffee and jamon for breakfast today had two TV's worth of repetitive coverage. The other cafe-goers were pretty animated, but in Catalan; they were talking about fascists in general and Franco in particular and I couldn't understand much beyond that.

I assume the Valencian drama explains the police who have been hanging around the university where I work lately. Yesterday there was a knock on my office door and two dudes came in. One was in a police uniform and the other had a mullet and a moustache. "We're the police," said the one in the cop suit, "can we take a look around?" "Okaaaaay....," I said. It's not even my office, really. "Is anything wrong?" I asked them. "In principal, no." They took a look around, which meant standing in the middle of the office and shifting their eyes a little, and then they thanked me and left. That's gotta be the most "cop-mullet-moustache-can we have a look around" story ever.

Continuing with the food theme

...salads here suck. It's sort of a stupid complaint, since one of the things I like about estado-Spanish food is that they mostly don't fuck around with vegetables. But every once in a while I think about how much cured meat and cheese and pan con tomate and tortilla I eat here, and I'll decide that maybe one salad will balance out all that fat and starch and lack of vitamins. And then the salad comes and it's a plate of wilty lettuce and some sad tomatoes and maybe some olives if you're lucky, and I kick myself a little for not having ordered any other first course. If you're thinking that I shouldn't be complaining about the tomatoes in February, trust me: If the tomatoes are in an ensalada mixta, they're not much better in June. And I'm barely even complaining, really, even though I know it sounds like I am. In the land of jamon and pan con tomate, I mostly don't care that the salads suck. I just have to remember to stop ordering them.

Hopeless yesterday

Oops, my blog kind of fell off the planet. I'm still around. Will catch up.

A week late, I finally made it to beer and tacos. Mexico City taco truck tacos they were not, but they were also not bad. Don't get me wrong: I'm not sick of Spanish food. I still love jamon and Spanish cheese and pan con tomate and cortados. But I'm eating so many bocadillos that sometimes when I think about getting a bocadillo, I wonder what I could eat instead. I'm still mostly content to eat (Spanish) tortilla (as in potato omlette) several times a week, but corn tortillas tasted really good. Yikes, that didn't take long.

It makes me sigh

The countdown continues. And starting now, this should get a little easier -- starting this week I only have to give one lecture per week instead of two. I dunno whose idea this schedule was. (Ridiculousness in estado-Spanish higher education usually gets blamed on either Bologna, which is the EU's attempt at unifying European university education, or the estado-Spanish lack of any money whatsoever -- I'm not sure which of them, if either, is responsible for this particular weirdness.) But I do like working less, so I'm not complaining. And now I only have three lectures left.

The students continue to inexplicably grow on me. They do a lot of things that bug me (well, really just one thing I guess, which is talk, but they do it a lot), but they really never make me feel like I speak horrible Spanish or like I can't do my job. (I do a pretty good job of that myself, but that's not their fault.) They ask me if they can come to my office hours, as if I might say no, and I swear today when I got a little triumphant about saying estadísticamente significativamente correctly, they were laughing with me and not at me. And, here's the part where I sound really self-loathingly ridiculous, I know, but they talk the most when I'm being boring and incoherent. They should still be quiet and respectful, but how can I really blame them? I would probably be doing the same thing if I were them; probably at a lower decibel, but everything here happens at a louder decibel than what I'm used to. "Everyone shut up and listen while I fuck up this explanation of a boring concept." I just can't bring myself to demand that. And I'm mostly ok with that. I just can't own up to it in front of any authority figures.

Note to self

So you were working until almost 10pm on a Sunday night. And that blows. And you didn't even finish preparing the stupid class for tomorrow, which means you'll have to wake up at a reasonable hour and keep plugging away, and you'll probably be even more awkward and flustered than usual during class since you won't be very well-prepared. Yup, that also blows. But remember Friday, when you didn't feel like working and so you left at 1pm for beer and burgers and never made it back? Yeah, so stop whining.

Oh fuck it, you win

The sun came back, and joy spread throughout the land.

...except that it's my blog, dammit, and I'll whine if I want to. I've had two bad Spanish days in a row. Sometimes it just doesn't work when I try to talk and sometimes when other people talk it just sounds like garbled noise (some of those times they're speaking Catalan so then it's not really my fault, but only some of the times) and sometimes both of those things happen in the same conversation and I wonder why I didn't admit defeat long ago. Whine.

A lot of people here talk a lot. I usually don't talk all that much even in English, so sometimes I end up listening to monologues. It's almost never as boring as it would be in English. But sometimes I'll be listening to a monologue, understanding it, nodding along genuinely, and then the monologuer asks me some question that I don't understand. I hate it when that happens. "But I understood everything else you said!" I want to yell. "I wasn't just nodding along not understanding; I wasn't." And fuck you, brain, for picking now to flake on me. It's like the conversation just turned pass/fail and I failed and I really think I deserve some partial credit.

I know I overthink this shit, but it's really hard not to. And it's also sort of interesting, if confusing and maddening. How come sometimes I can have actual conversations about Catalan politics or religion or the joys of Basque cider and other times I have to ask What? three times before I realize I'm being asked whether I studied here in Barcelona or somewhere else? (The inconsistency is partially explained by the attractiveness of the other member of the conversation, but that only explains a little of it.) Even within a single conversation with the same person, the things I don't understand are not necessarily more complicated than the things I do understand. It's all such a crapshoot that it's hard not to think that I'll never learn.

Sometimes I really want to try and explain to people that I'm smart and funny, just not in Spanish, but I bet it would sound a little too much like a loud slurring person trying to convince you she's not drunk. Which I'm not, by the way.

Go upstairs right now and try on that present

"Clown was not that kid's first choice of costume," said my friend. And there on the sidewalk was the grumpiest-looking 8ish-year-old kid you've ever seen, wearing a colorful wig and a huge nose and some stupid clown outfit, and I felt bad for laughing at him but I'm still cracking up every time I remember it. Maybe his mom really likes clowns or maybe the costume store was out of cool costumes or maybe it was a gift from some ridiculous relative. I hope he at least got some ice cream or something for being paraded around in that stupid costume.

Anyway, it's Carnaval, which isn't a super big deal here but it does mean that there are lots of kids in costumes. The happier ones are dressed as things like butterflies or cows or medieval-looking soldiers with swords. You also see the occasional adult dressed up. Like just now, when I looked up from my little notebook to see, standing at the walk-up window at the cafe where I'm sitting, an adult clown, bored and smoking, who looks almost as unhappy as the kid clown did. I don't think she noticed me burst out laughing -- I bit my tongue and pulled myself together pretty quickly.

These grumpy clowns are way funnier than any happy clowns I've ever seen.

"You have a very strange system of sympathies" --my boss

I'm not saying that Catalans or Spaniards are nice -- they're not mean, I just wouldn't describe them collectively as nice, the way I might with Mexicans or Portuguese or Canadians -- but when they're being nice, they sound really nice. Like when I buy something and say think you and they say A tí, guapa, it makes the person saying it sound like the nicest person in the world, even if I was just mad at them for ignoring me for minutes (minutes!) before getting me a bocadillo or the check or whatever. A heartfelt-sounding A tí, guapa makes the bad service almost not matter, that's now nice it sounds, even if it is really just the Spanish-language equivalent of no prob.

The students are never that nice, but the situation is similar; sometimes I get such an inexplicable kick out of them that it cancels out how much I usually hate them. They had this test today and it was a multiple choice test and when they take multiple choice tests here they have separate answer sheets that they write on but I fucked up and forgot to pick up the answer sheets. I was going to grade them by hand anyway, so it actually seemed easier to not screw around with answer sheets. But they were all so concerned about whether or not they had marked their answers right. Who doesn't know how to take a multiple choice test? One guy, a burlyish fraternity-looking guy, circled his answers and put little dots next to them and then showed me what he did to make sure it was ok. Am I the only one who finds that hilarious and adorable? (Is that maybe the very definition of charm -- the ability to make people forget that they actually hate you?)

Ok, fine, so I have terrible taste. We knew that. I'm not going to change those little fuckers, so I might as well settle for any little shreds of entertainment I can get from them, right?

Not waiting on a lady

Yesterday was Valentine's Day, and I even had plans. It wasn't a date; it was beer and tacos with a friend. But beer and tacos and friends are like the best things in the world (ok, tacos in Barcelona may not be the best things in the world, actually, but let's not get picky) -- I was feeling pretty fortunate. Except that I guess I ate something bad and then my stomach tried to kill me in retaliation and I ended up watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on YouTube alone in the dark. And it started pouring rain right after I hung a load of laundry out to dry. So, fuck you St. Valentine.

On the bright side, I mostly feel better today. On the even brighter side, I don't live in Poblenou. Poblenou is where I lived when I lived here before and where I wanted to live again this time around but it didn't work out that way. (It's closeish to work and closeish to the beach without being touristy and it has good abandoned warehouses, etc.) If it had worked out, I might be one of many people without hot water for the fifth day in a row, because some kind of gas line got cut and everyone associated with that gas line is blaming someone else for cutting it and it's not getting fixed and holy crap I would be grumpy if I were hot water-less for five days. I'll take a night of intestinal distress over that any day.

Those kids have no idea whatsoever of what went on at Stalingrad

If it's a class taught by me, it's almost certain that at some point I will end up standing there in front of everyone, my head in my hands, saying something like "What the hell am I doing?" It happens in English, so it was bound to happen in Spanish. I was trying to say that something was statistically significantly different from something else, which in Spanish is estadísticamente significativamente diferente. They're not hard words, really. I know them and they don't have hard sounds like rolled r's or anything. They're cognates, for fuck's sake. But significativamente is just so fucking long that I kept getting lost in it. I said joder and a few of them laughed and I started over but then I still kept fucking it up. So I put my head in my hands and had a little millisecond-long nervous breakdown and then I started saying important instead of significant and the kid who looks like the bully from A Christmas Story except that he's always smiling gave me a big "Way to go, champ"-type smile and we all moved on.

The End.

Hey, I lack self-esteem in English, too

Whew. The first hypothesis testing lecture is over, and no one (i.e, not me) died or cried. I'm not at all sure that anyone learned anything. But, if we were to remake Maslow's hierarchy of needs as it relates to teaching a hardish boring class in a language you don't speak very well, the students actually learning anything would be somewhere in the middle I think, maybe even up towards self-esteem and respect by others. The food and excretion equivalents are not pulling the fire alarm, or quitting, or having an actual nervous breakdown. There are still five lectures left, and the material is getting more complicated and harder to explain, but it's starting to look like I might actually pull this off. There's still the very-real-feeling possibility that my students will all fail the final exam because I've failed to teach them anything. But even if they do, by that point I will be so ecstatic to have survived the semester I probably won't care. And, in the grand scheme of this particular misadventure, the foreign-language-teaching equivalent of lacking self-esteem is probably a good problem to have.

¡Oye!

Waitstaff here almost never ask you if you need anything. Especially if you're at a crowded bar or a brunch place that serves unlimited mimosas (I had an expat-tastic day today but, note to self, if you order a bloody Mary in a place where people mostly don't like spicy food and don't drink bloody Marys, you should probably expect to be disappointed), but basically if you're anywhere: If you want something you have to get the waiter/bartender's attention. Eye contact never works, and a little raised finger or nod or something like that almost never works. You have to wave at them, or yell at them, or grab their arm, or trip them or something. And I'm terrible at that. I get all awkward and shy and quiet and weird, even more so than usual, when faced with waitstaff, especially in the wrong language. And plus it just feels so rude to yell at them. So I spend a lot more time waiting for drinks than I probably should. Partly it's just how things are here, and also tipping is mostly not done or expected, so there's not much incentive for anyone to get me my next beer more quickly. The waitrons of the estado español aren't likely to change, so I need to get used to being more assertive. I'll work on it. Right after I get my students to shut up and my roommates to clean the kitchen.

Another Saturday night

Another Saturday, another slightly tipsy long lunch at another Baque restaurant with another super nice waitron and another shot of patxaran. (Only the Basques could make me like anything anise-y.) And then good coffee, and then a long walk in the sun, and drinks with work people, and it was fun.

I should complain less.

Black, white, green, or purple

I don't think it's racist to have noticed that there are a lot more Chinese people here in Barcelona than there were when I lived here six years ago. But now that I've made a point to write it down, I feel like I should be apologizing or something. To make myself feel less racist, I'm going to tell you about how racist some estado Spanish people are. There's this. And this. It's not that uncommon to see people in blackface (like the street musician I saw in Santiago, blackfaced and surrounded by people who thought he was funny or cool or otherwise unoffensive). Soccer fans sometimes throw bananas at black players (although that's not unique to Spain -- WTF, Europe?). After getting beaten up here one night (oops, I mean, after fending off a street gang one night), a friend of mine went to the police and the first thing they asked was if the guys were South American or Pakistani. You get the idea.

Anyway, there are a lot of stores here that are owned by Chinese of Pakistani people that sell things like food or hardware or housewares or electronics and they're usually fairly cheap and often open at convenient times that most stores operated by estado Spanish people aren't, like Sundays. Whatever particular kinds of goods they sell, said stores are referred to as chinos or pakis. Joder. It just sounds wrong, even if it is ethnically accurate (not necessarily, since here the word chino is used to refer to basically anyone Asian) and even if everyone here had chino and paki friends (unlikely).

So anyway, a lightbulb burned out in the bathroom and I was thinking about where to buy a new one and instead of thinking about hardware stores or something like that, I caught myself thinking that the chino down the street probably has them.

At least I felt bad about it.

A word I can't remember

I like to tell pretty much anyone who will listen how hard it is to teach in a language you don't quite speak. And people are sympathetic and then I feel a little better. I'm almost never looking for help or advice when I bitch about my problems, but lots of people don't realize that. And soooo many people here have offered the advice that if something gets complicated I should just switch to speaking in English.

In what world would that be OK? You can't just change the language on people, even if the people in question are the little fuckers also known as my students, especially during the complicated parts. I may be incompetent, but I'm not negligent. Switching to English would be negligent. And it would take the Spanish practice out of the job, which is the only reason I even took the job.

Anyway, speaking of my students, on Thursdays I teach seminars. Three different ones, with 20ish students in each, and they present homework problems on the board. (Nothing about the structure of this course was my idea.) The first one is always a disaster (those students are particularly unruly and I'm tired and something usually goes wrong that I'm not prepared for, etc.) and the second and third ones are usually relatively much better. Well today the stars aligned or something and the second seminar was actually kind of enjoyable; I think it actually went well. The students were quiet and they paid attention and someone made a little joke about colas gordas while solving a problem and it was funny without leading to chaos. They were actually even volunteering to present stuff. I mean, basically they just acted about how college students in the US act all the time without having to be yelled at, but still it felt like Christmas or something. Bon Nadal, you little fuckers.

¡Visca Barça!

Sometimes things that are supposed to be super fun aren't as fun as they're supposed to be. Tonight wasn't one of those times. I went to the Barça game! (That means soccer.) I dunno how I pulled off knowing someone whose cousin has season tickets and sometimes shares them, but I'll take it.

My roommate said the game might be boring because it's mostly uptight rich people who go to the stadium. I've been to games like that, and they are boring. But this was a great crowd. They were singing and chanting and yelling. There was a group of Valencia (the other team) fans waving Spanish flags sitting not too far away, and our section chanted ¡Puta Valencia! and ¡Puta España! and flicked off (some people say flip off; I say flick off) their general direction whenever they waved the flag, and there was a tenish year old kid in front of me who kept throwing his hands in the air what-the-fuck style every time there was a call against Barcelona. And there was a Puyol chant going for a while. And Barça won! Very exciting.

Camp Nou, the stadium, is huge; it holds almost 100,000 people. It's pretty easy to get to on the metro, and even taking the metro home with 99,999 other people wasn't so bad. There is a major, major problem with the stadium, though, and that is that they don't serve beer. Not beer with alcohol, anyway. And that blows, especially because it was pretty cold out. (Does drinking beer in the cold really make you feel warmer? Maybe not, now that I think about it. Whatever.) Spain in general or Catalunya in particular is not a place full of drunks. But it is socially acceptable here to have a beer with breakfast in the morning, if that's what you want. Alcohol here is more beverage than vice, so basically everywhere that sells beverages also sells alcoholic ones. Except the football stadium. Joder. Maybe it's a hooligan thing? Whatever the reason, it's unfortunate. At least the crowd was able to pull off being loud and obnoxious and hilarious and entertaining while mostly sober.

No wonder people hate statistics

Ok, so you have some theory about something and you have some data and you want to test your theory with your data? Start by assuming the opposite of what you want to prove. Then, test whether the data you saw were unlikely to have occurred if the oposite if the thing you're trying to prove were true. If so, then either you've observed something unlikely or you were wrong when you assumed the opposite of the thing you wanted to prove. Since unlikely things don't happen very often, you then conclude you were wrong back when you assumed that the thing you wanted to prove was wrong, thus proving your theory. Well, not really proving it. Providing evidence for it in the form of a probabilistic statement about how unlikely the data you saw would be if your theory were wrong.

That's the basic logic of a large area of the field to which I've dedicated the last 15ish years of my working life (joder), and that is what I need to start explaining to 200 loud young Catalans in Spanish next week, and it makes me want to cry. Do you know how many different verb tenses there are in that convoluted logic? I should have started explaining it today, in fact, but I didn't have my act together so I punted and dragged out a review of less confusing shit and ended class a little early.

If someone who isn't me could explain p-values in Spanish to a room full of teenagers and then tried to tell me they didn't really speak Spanish, I would think they were full of shit. Still, I think there's a pretty good chance that I actually can't explain p-values in Spanish to teenagers (hence the chickening out and wanting to cry).

I bet the students who cried during exams the last time I taught a statistics class would love to see me now. And I'm really glad they can't.

I don't even like my hair

Fuck you, apartment. Fuck you for not having a radiator in my room; and fuck you for being inhabited by otherwise nice people who never, ever properly clean up after themselves in the kitchen; and fuck you extra hard, in an uncomfortable place, for not having any goddamn hot water today. I had to teach today, and the best I could do was dump cold water on my hair and put on more deodorant. Ew.

Smells aside, class wasn't a total disaster, I don't think; no more than usual, anyway. The only super embarrassing part of today was when someone asked me if I could do something with the lights because there was a glare on the board or something and I got all spastic and confused and in the end the students decided they didn't care so much about seeing the board if it meant having to help me figure out the lights in the lecture room. That particular situation probably would have been almost identical in English -- I'm just a spaz about shit like that, when there are a bunch of knobs and buttons and a bunch of people trying to tell me what to do with them -- but that's not very face-saving.

Measly piddling puny

I guess I probably am one of those people who's always complaining about my job, no matter what I might claim to the contrary lately to anyone who will listen. Regardless, whiiiiine my job is hard and whiiiiine the students are a pain and whiiiiine I blow at it and whiiiiine it's too much work.

I pretty much knew what I was getting myself into, so if nothing else none of this should come as a surprise. And it mostly doesn't. Except that somewhere, buried deep down under all my language insecurities and inadequacies, is this little counter-current that believes, or wants to believe, that all these years of Spanish communication failures and blank stares and stutters and saying things like "Will the shrimp be wearing their jackets?" because I don't know how to say shells, that all of that was just kind of one big long extended bad hair day and I really do speak fluent Spanish, that I just need to relax or focus or drink more or drink less or something like that, and then good Spanish will flow effortlessly from me and I'll understand everything and, while I'm at it, there will probably be puppies. And when those thoughts raise their dumb stupid head, it feels a little surprising that it takes hours and hours and hours to prepare for classes that my colleagues have basically already planned out. So anyway, I spent Sunday at the office, which in the grand scheme of things is not so pathetic, but my particular office isn't heated on the weekends. And even though our little cold spell here isn't all that cold, Barcelona isn't all that insulated. So I spent Sunday at the office hunched over the scariest space heater ever, the kind with wires that turn bright red, feeling very lucky to even have that scary space heater, hoping my shoes didn't start to melt, and that felt legitimately pathetic. Whiiiiiine.

I still love the Basques

People like to complain about Catalans. The stereotype of their being cold and closed and cheap and obsessed with shit didn't come from nowhere, and the Catalan language can definitely be a complication if you don't speak it. But I don't mind them; I know some wonderful Catalans, and I'm a little cold and closed myself. That said, in case you were wondering, my heart still belongs to the Basques.

I'm eating lunch by myself at this restaurant and the two alternating waiters are great. They're asking me where I'm from (in the "you seem interesting" way, not the "what the fuck are you doing in my country?" way) and what I'm writing about and if I like the food and saying that I speak good Spanish. Then I heard someone refer to one of them as Iñaki and then I remembered the sign outside saying Catalan and Basque food and then I had the giant huge red, white, and green striped lightbulb over my head. I love this restaurant, the food, and all the waitstaff because it's Basque.

I have this colleague who has a wife who plays hockey (as in ice hockey, as in badass) in a mixed gender league (as in super badass if you're a woman), and she's Basque. So many good things turn out to be Basque. Of my few friends here,the one who gets me the most is already sick of hearing me go out on about all things Basque. I just love them.

I love you I hate you

There is another problem with the students. They're loud and rude and annoying and speak much better Spanish than I do; we've been over that. And they stay loud and rude and annoying because I suck at discipline in general and am intimidated by the thought of enforcing it in Spanish; we've been over that, too. But do you know what else? I also sort of like them. Not all of them. And it does me no good, because they don't like me back and liking them just makes it harder to tell them to shut the fuck up or get out of my class. But some of them are nice and some of them are adorable and some of them are hilarious. There's this one kid who looks just like the yellow-eyed bully from A Christmas Story (the movie with Ralphie), except that his eyes aren't yellow and he's always smiling. Except for the time he got frustrated trying to do some computer thing and said joder and then turned red and apologized profusely. It was super cute. We have these seminars where the students have to present homework problems and one girl actually used my made-up terminology of theta-sombrero. They kept asking me if solutions to the problems would be posted online (it's not really my decision) and when I told them half-exasperated that they'd asked me four times already and the answer was still "I don't know," someone said "But you're the professor! Why don't you know!?" A certain other professor who's in charge of the course and these types of decisions would have killed the kid, but it made me laugh. And then, while someone was presenting his problem, someone else came to ask me a question and I started answering it and then he had another question and I was sort of enjoying being able to sort of answer his questions and then I realized I was barely even whispering. Why didn't I tell him to ask me after class? Sigh. At my best I'm just as bad as they are.

Frío Siberiano

Everyone here is freaking out because it got cold. I guess we do the same thing in the US (I guess they do the same thing everywhere); where I come from it just has to get a lot colder for people to start freaking out. Anyway, I was walking down the sidewalk today, surrounded on all sides by Spanish conversations going on about how cold it is, when loud and clear from the middle of all of it came an American voice saying "You know, it's really not that cold." You probably had to be there, but it made me smile a lot.

And it really is silly how much they are freaking out. In other parts of Europe this cold spell is actually serious and terrible. Here the temperatures are barely below freezing. It snowed a little in some parts of Catalunya and it snowed a little more in the mountains. It didn't snow at all in Barcelona. Ok, maybe a few of the raindrops from this morning were more like snowflakes (more like sleet, really, but close enough), but there's no snow on the ground in the city. My roommate goes to school very slightly outside of Barcelona where, if it snowed at all, it barely snowed, and they cancelled all classes for today. Anyone who had plans to go anywhere this weekend has cancelled those plans: Three different people have told me that it's sort of a third world country here and so you have to be careful when it snows because you could get hurt or stranded or something. La Vanguardia's (the Barcelona paper) website has no fewer than ten links to snow-related stories, plus a snow photo gallery (with a photo of some kids making snow angels in approximately a centimeter of snow). Hilariously, there's also an article about Punxsutawney Phil (la marmota Phil, they call him); I wonder if they always cover Groundhog's Day here or only when they're obsessing about winter.

I realize that by this point it sounds like I'm the one obsessing -- I'm just really amused by it. At 10pm on a Thursday night, there's basically no one out, and the foreigner to Spanish/Catalan ratio is even higher than on a cold rainy Sunday. I feel like kind of a badass for still walking everywhere. No one from here thinks I'm a badass; they just think I'm weird. But in my current state of spending way too much time being a little bit afraid of a bunch of 19-year-olds, I'll take any little bit of (imagined) bad-assery I can get.

Just a girl in the world

Today some kind of director or head or coordinator or something of my department came to my office. (There are at least three people so far who have been introduced to me as something like the department head; I can't keep them straight.) To talk about the noise in my class, of course, although it was more of a follow-up than a "Houston, we have a problem" type talk, and I could honestly say that this week the students have been much quieter. (The colas gordas incident happened at the very end of class, so it was barely even disruptive.) Still, whenever someone tells me something about how the department is behind me, it just makes me feel like they think I can't do my job (not that they'd be entirely wrong) and gets me worried that someone will end up in my class as enforcer and that would be humiliating. But anyway, he was super nice and we were having a pleasant conversation (in English, because he started the conversation in English), and then the following happened.

Him: Well, you're a girl and you're young so they probably don't respect you. You're teaching in English?

Me: No, in Spanish.

Him, after a pause: Do you speak Spanish?

Me: Not very well.

Him: Well, then, there's that, too.

Even if my Spanish doesn't get better (some days it feels like it isn't getting better), this must be building a lot of character or something.

Gorditas

I get the distinct impression a lot of the time that a lot of the students are laughing at me. They're laughing at something anyway, and looking in my general direction. If I asked themwhat was so funny they wouldn't tell me, and I guess I probably don't want to know. Today, at least, I kind of knew why they were laughing. There is something in statistics called the t distribution, and compared to the normal distribution (the bell curve) we say it has fatter tails. My translation of fat tails to colas gordas got through two Spanish-speaking proofreaders, so I figured I was ok. I think it is the right translation, but I found out later that if you are Spanish or Catalan and have the maturity of a 14-year old, I guess colas gordas might maybe sound a little bit like fat dicks instead of fat tails. Anyway, when I first said it they all started laughing, and when I repeated "and what does it mean, colas gordas?" they really started laughing. And, since I basically have the maturity of a 14-year-old myself, then I started cracking up, even though at the time I barely even knew why.

Maybe this job isn't so terrible after all.