Hasta la vista, you little fuckers

At the university where I work, after you assign final grades you have to schedule a day (well, a few hours at least) when the students can come look at their exams and argue about their grades. It's hard to argue with a multiple choice exam, but they came anyway. Some wanted to talk me into a better final grade, but mostly they just wanted to look at their multiple choice exams and calculate for themselves that their posted scores were correct. It was cute, if mostly a waste of time. Better than arguing with them, anyway. And now it's done done. Whew. I did it. I may not have done a great job and I still don't speak fluent Spanish, but I must speak better than I did before even if I mostly don't feel that way. And I didn't die. And the students, well, they definitely grew on me. I'm not saying I'm gonna miss them or anything, the little fuckers, but, well, maybe I might miss one or two of them. At least the Christmas-story-bully-look-alike who was always smiling, even when trying to type with his arm in a cast up to his shoulder. I think I'm allowed to miss him.

Walked the 40 blocks to the middle

Spain is on strike. It's the sixth general strike since Franco died. The whole country, the two big labor unions, most of the smaller ones, plus lots of non-union students and bar owners and others who are mad about budget cuts. Plus the anarchists and hooligans who will take any excuse to fuck shit up. One of my roommates hung a "We are the 99%, fuck you banks"-type sign, painted on a sheet, from our terrace. It makes me feel like I live here, even if I'm not really 99% de acuerdo with the sentiment.

I had some work that I felt like I needed to do, and it took a lot longer than I wanted it to, so I missed the big protest rally. I sort of hate huge crowds of people anyway. In the evening I took a long walk around the city to check out the aftermath. The main streets were still mostly closed off to traffic and there were little parades of protesters all over the place. Closer to the center, the police presence got more and more intimidating. A several block radius around Plaza Catalunya was blocked by a wall of police in riot gear. Just outside that wall trash bins burned and protesters waved union flags and hipster types took photos with huge cameras. The police shot plastic bullets off seemingly at random from huge guns, eliciting some "¡Hijos de puta!" in return and scaring some dogs. (If you take your dog to a protest and the super loud plastic bullet shots scare him, take him home for fuck's sake.) Across the street a raised middle finger sometimes rose up from behind a big trash can. It was all kind of novel and more dramatic than I'm used to, but after not long I started to get bored. When I realized that the situation's getting more exciting would almost definitely not be a good thing, I left.

Anyway, it was a big huge deal and some people got hurt and lots got arrested, etc. But as far as I can tell, the one thing most people really agree on is that the strike won't have any effect on anything. Joder.

Jacking off to Mozart

This blog is not supposed to be about my dating life. My parents read it, after all. But I had no cultural experiences or adventures or disasters today, so it's either waxing melancholy about my terrible taste or more hand-wringing about how I don't speak Spanish very well.

Talking art in Spanish with an Italian filmmaker/photographer over wine and jamón sounds really nice. It sounds so nice that it takes me at least ten times longer than it should to notice if the broody arty type in question is incredibly boring, or not particularly intelligent, or not remotely funny, or super pretentious or all of the above. Those of you who know me already know this. Unfortunately, recognizing bad taste doesn't make it magically get better. So, I spent tonight listening to someone who's spent a total of one month in New York go on about gentrification in New York, and how it's all the fault of the banks, wishing like hell that I was in the other room smoking pot and watching soccer with his roommate. Who happens to be a fifty-ish year old woman. Maybe I need behavioral counseling, or shock therapy.

At least the jamón was good.

Filling the whine void

Sometimes I have bad Spanish days. Every once in a while I have good Spanish days or, at least, not-bad Spanish days. Today was specifically a bad accent day. My accent is not usually good, but it's usually adequate enough that people understand what words I'm trying to say. Not today. At lunch I wanted tortilla as a first course. It was one of only about five options, and the only one that started with t. It's a common word here, and I say it a lot. But my waitress was having none of it. I had to repeat myself three times and still she acted like she really had to concentrate to understand. (It's true that I'm still not very good with r's in Spanish; it's also true that some people are assholes.) At dinner I epically failed at saying the word three, as in "make it three beers" after my two friends had each ordered one. Damn internal r's. Damn gringo tongue.

Now that I have less work-related stuff to whine about, I think I'm getting whinier about my bad Spanish.

Chaos is a Greek word

Final grades are calculated. One step closer to having survived this course in its entirety. Unfortunately it's not that simple, though, because in order to actually post the grades I have to first combine them with the grades from the probability course that they all took last semester. Which seems odd and silly to me but shouldn't really be a big deal, except that it kind of is because those probability grades from last semester still aren't finalized. Joder. Last semester ended three months ago. I'll keep the rant about southern European inefficiency mostly to myself, but know that I'm thinking it.

Anyway, there is also one exam score missing which I bet could easily turn into my having to give an oral exam, because some people here seem to think that giving oral exams to students who fuck up is an acceptable way to expect a professor (aka me) to spend his or her (aka my) time. And, I'm going to have to fail some people, which is never fun. And whenever I finally am able to post the damn grades, I'll have to have annoying painful conversations in Spanish with everyone who doesn't like their grades. Whine whine bitch bitch.

Having the stress of the past few months replaced with low- to medium-grade irritation and expasperation is a definite improvement. But this is starting to feel like it might never end.

Mother tongue

Accents are funny. An Italian accent in English sounds really nice. An Italian accent in Spanish sounds weird and not very nice at all. There's probably a distinction there between your native and non-native languages. American English doesn't sound nice to me, it's just what I'm used to and lots of other accents in English sound much nicer. Castilian Spanish is something I aspire to. It sounds nice to me, and almost no other accents in Spanish sound nice. Spanish people apparently think that Argentinian accents sound nice, but to me they just sound like gibberish.

Gringo accents are particularly painful to me, along the lines of hearing a recording of your own voice. But the worst of all, regardless of the origin of the accent, is other foreigners who speak Spanish much better than I do. The close Romance languages, like Portuguese and the Italian that started this rant, don't count. If you speak a close Romance language you can learn Spanish easily and that's an advantage I don't have and I don't make myself feel bad about it. But if your native language is not a Romance language, and especially if it's English, and you speak good Spanish, well, fuck you. (Except for my actual American friends who speak good Spanish... unfuck you guys.) It's not like it's a rare event; Barcelona is full of foreigners who speak Spanish way better than I do. And it's not like it's surprising; I know my Spanish isn't that good. But oh man does it bother me when I hear another gringo speaking much better Spanish than me. I think part of it is that there's a part of me that wants to believe that all my current problems with Spanish are just my being a nonnative speaker and therefore insurmountable. And gringos speaking good Spanish kill that stupid idea.

Bent-back tulips

Calçots are sort of like green onions, except that they're Catalan and they're a much bigger deal here than green onions have ever been anywhere (I'm pretty sure). You can order them in restaurants, but what you're really supposed to do is get yourself invited to a calçotada (or, if you're not me, have your own calçotada). That's what I did today. It was good. The only slight catch is that because it's impossible to make friends with Catalans if you don't speak Catalan*, there were no actual Catalans there (there were a bunch of Spanish people, for the record) and so it took a few rounds to get the calçots made right. All you have to do for a calçotada is grill calçots on a barbecue (well, plus drink wine but that is easy), but you have to figure out about how long to grill them if you want them to be good (maybe that goes without saying). Once you get the timing down and grill them, you sort of slide the skins off and dip what's left in romesco sauce and eat it. Romesco sauce is red pepper-based and flavorful and definitely a sauce, not a condiment. I like calçots about as much as I could imagine myself liking a food that's part of the onion family, and the skins get all charcoal-y from the grill so you get messy which is kind of fun. Apart from that I sort of don't see what the big deal is, but I guess they're as good a reason as any to have a barbecue.

*That's a fact, not a value statement. It's also basically impossible to make friends with Spanish people in Spain if you don't speak Spanish, or French people in France if you don't speak French, or Americans in the US if you don't speak English, etc.

Brought the sun and the flowers

The weather was perfect today (lately the weather here is usually perfect, but it did rain for one and a half days straight earlier this week -- the horror) so I thought I would go for a long walk by the beach. But then I decided that what I really felt like doing was looking at weird modern art. So that's what I did. Some aspects of un/der employment rock. I'm not really sure why I felt like seeing weird modern art -- the super modern two-piles-of-dirt-type stuff usually sort of irritates me and I remember not loving Barcelona's contemporary art museum the last time I was there. Maybe I've gotten more weird, or the museum has gotten less weird, but this time it was perfect. They had a big exhibition of old Barcelona photographs -- boxers and brothels and street scenes and drag queens -- and some video stuff that I genuinely liked, including some stuff by Aleksandr Sokurov, the guy who did Russian Ark. Seriously, old gritty underbelly photos and dark artsy Russian film with readable Spanish subtitles is about the best a contemporary art museum could possibly do for me. I should probably never go to another one again.

Anyway, they kicked me out of the museum (it was closing) at exactly that point of the evening where, if it's been a clear day, the sky starts to glow bright blue. I got myself a little lost -- I don't stay lost for long, but I kind of like that I can still sometimes get lost here -- and as I wandered through the palm trees and soccer balls and hash, being here felt like travel. Travel in the good exhilirating everything-is-an-exciting-adventure way, not the I-am-so-clearly-a- tourist-please-no-one-rob-me way. It's amazing what a difference not having a painful job (or the flu) makes.

Paradise by the Port Vell lights

I almost never buy beer from the usually south Asian guys who often sell it in cans here after hours on the street. But sometimes life calls for cheap lukewarm beer late at night. That's how my life works, anyway. Sometimes, drinking a can of lukewarm bad beer while looking at the boats in Port Vell and the night lights shining on the water is its own little paradise. Paradise brought to you (well, to me) by a south Asian angel on a bike.

Proctor!!

The hard part of teaching -- the lecturing -- is over. But the course will drag on for a little longer. But today I'm another step closer to being done, because now the exam is over. It wasn't a huge disaster, but it was two hours of trying to be in four different exam rooms at once to answer questions and the rooms, as usual, were hot. I wonder if the students think I have some kind of sweating disease.

The university provided a proctor for each room, but the proctors didn't necessarily even speak Spanish and were basically just there to (in theory) prevent cheating. Fifteen minutes after the exam was supposed to have ended, one of the proctors hadn't even made the students turn in the exams yet. "They're being slow," she said hand-wringingly. Christ. I understand being afraid of the students, but that's just negligent.

But anyway, nothing exploded and no one died and the exams are multiple choice and will be graded by machine and this is all moving along and now it's one step closer to done. Score.

You probably want hardboiled eggs

I have this friend who hates bocadillos. Everything that I love about them, the way they don't fuck around with condiments or vegetables or overdo it with the meat, he hates. Somehow we remain friends. We had plans to have lunch today but didn't get around to meeting up until around 5pm. If it's 5pm in Barcelona and one member of your party vetoes bocadillos and the other vetoes fast food, your lunch options are extremely limited. The only people who reliably eat meals at times like 5pm are tourists, so after blocks and blocks and blocks and blocks of closed restaurants, we eventually ended up at a Lebanese place near the Sagrada Familia. No bocadillos, and the service was dead slow, so we both kind of got what we wanted, within constraints. And lentil soup and beer is good for the flu, right?

Imperial stout

I don't feel like imperial Russian royalty. But I was thinking about imperial Russian royalty as I convalesced in the little mountain town, hoping the clean air and good tap water and extra sleep would help me finally kick this flu or whatever the hell virus I have that doesn't want to go away. When imperial Russian royalty got sick they would take the reeeeaaallllly long trip from St. Petersburg to the Crimea to convalesce. The Barcelona-Viladrau trip on Cercanías plus bus clearly doesn't compare, but getting home today was a little bit of an adventure. The bus, which is the only public transit way out of the little town, wasn't running because the road was closed for some kind of bike race. Luckily I wasn't the only one waiting on the bus, and when the other two figured out what was going on one of them decided to go by car on a different road. "You coming?" (or something like that) the driver asked me in Catalan. So I saved the bus fare and got a little tour of some Pyrenees back roads. They are super twisty. I sat in the back and tried not to get nauseous and really tried to understand the conversation in the front but I'm pretty terrible with Catalan. At one point they were definitely talking about Chinese-owned bars and the price of beer, but I couldn't even tell if they were complaining or praising.

And now I'm back. I didn't even fuck up Cercanías this time. Still not 100% convalesced, but I bet the Crimea would not have done any better.

Beginning to see the light

It finally dawned on me why being surrounded entirely by Catalan feels so weird to me. I didn't expect it to be weird because I've been to non-Barcelona parts of Catalunya before -- this wasn't really supposed to be all that new. But what I just realized is that all my other adventures in Catalunya happened in my first few months of moving here the first time I lived here, when I spoke so little Spanish that I could barely distinguish between it and Catalan. Non-Barcelona Catalunya didn't seem that different then because I was used to not understanding much of anything ever; I probably didn't even realize I'd gone from hearing mostly Spanish to hearing mostly all Catalan.

So, there was a time when I couldn't distinguish between Spanish and Catalan and now I can. It doesn't say a whole lot, but my little world makes a tiny bit more sense to me, anyway.

Also, the little mountain town is full of nice dogs. That is all.

A street in a strange world

"It's weird, a lot of foreigners are actually quite hostile to Catalan," someone here told me once. I don't think I'm hostile to it, but I don't speak it and, unless I end up marrying a Catalan and staying here forever (which I probably won't), I probably never will. I recognize that it's an integral part of Catalan culture and I respect that it's what they speak here and all that. But as a foreigner who can get by in Spanish, learning Catalan would buy me some Catalan respect and a slightly increased chance of getting a public sector job in Catalunya. As a foreigner who's not very good at learning languages, that's just not enough, especially since I may not be here long term (and they're recort-ing the hell out of all the public sector jobs anyway). If I'm going to invest the time, etc., to learn another language, I want that language to buy me a huge body of great literature (Russian); or the better part of a continent (French/Africa); or at least one huge diverse country that might be the best place in the world, plus Portugal and Mozambique (Portuguese).

The Catalan issue is usually not much of an issue: Barcelona is so full of foreigners (both from the rest of Spain and the rest of the world) who don't speak Catalan that Spanish often feels like the predominant language. (Especially if you want Spanish to feel like the predominant language...) Here in the little mountain village, it's all Catalan. I can mostly read a Catalan menu, and I can order coffee in Catalan, and everyone here speaks Spanish, even if they'd prefer not to. (Maybe they don't all speak it perfectly, but it would be hard to find a Catalan who doesn't speak Spanish.) So it's not like communication is really a problem. (No more of a problem than usual, anyway.)

But it's weird. I feel like soooo much more of a foreigner here than I do in Barcelona. And it's not because I don't know anyone here -- I go to places in Barcelona where I don't know anyone all the time. But here if I want to do anything besides order coffee, I'm suddenly the only one speaking Spanish in a room full of Catalan and I feel like there's a huge spotlight on me. I've come to terms with the thick accent/bad Spanish spotlight, but the wrong language spotlight feels a lot bigger. I don't really mean to be as whiny as this last paragraph makes me sound, it's mostly just sort of surprising (although it shouldn't be) to be here and not hear Spanish AT ALL unless it's a conversation that I'm a part of. It will make me more appreciative of the language situation when I get back to Barcelona, anyway.

I can't complain but sometimes I still do

The trains in Spain are either longish distance, which feel like the "normal" trains, or Cercanías, which are more like commuter trains and feel like mad chaos. If you can find a schedule at all it's usually about a mile long and a mile wide and inevitably on the wrong side of the turnstile, and it's almost never clear what track your train leaves from, even if you've managed to figure out when it leaves, and if it turns out there's a transfer you're even more screwed because your ticket won't tell you and there's almost never anyone to ask.

So anyway, this is the first weekend since classes ended and I've been telling myself since January that this weekend I would go to some little town in the mountains and look at the stars and decompress, and that meant Cercanías (plus a bus). And I fucked it all up. Half an hour out of Barcelona in the wrong direction, with a bus to catch and not a lot of extra time for fuck-ups, I decided that someone was going to help me, god dammit. So I waited in the ticket line instead of using the machines and held up the line to ask exactly when and from what track my train would be leaving. He shuffled some pages of hand-written numbers and his microphone started fading out, and the volume came back just in time for me to hear him say that I just had to listen for the announcements. Joder. I managed to get myself on the right train, sort of, except that it was running express and not stopping at the place where I wanted to go. Did I mention that I'm only about 70% over whatever virus has been ailing me? Whine.

But then it all came together. I got off the train in the wrong place and on the way to try my luck at what looked like some kind of bus station, there was a bus showing the name of my little mountain pueblo and the driver let me on even though I wasn't at a bus stop or anything. And here I am, in a little town with snow-capped Pyrenees in the distance. And they have surprisingly good beer in this little town and I made friends with a dog. And I'm done teaching. Life is pretty good.

Out to dry

Sometimes, when it's warm and sunny and there's just a little bit of a breeze and you're not in a hurry to do something else, hanging laundry out to dry has a certain old-world charm. When those conditions aren't met, hanging laundry out to dry mostly blows. If it's cold, your hands freeze. If it's not sunny, you worry that it might rain, which would obviously fuck everything. If it's windy, the clothes hit you in the face. It takes for fucking ever, and that's on top of the for fucking ever it already took to get the clothes washed because washing machines outside the United States and probably Canada take for fucking ever. And a load's worth of clothes pins doesn't fit in the pockets of your jeans, so you need more pockets or a bag or something to put them in. And if all of your roommates decided do laundry in the last 36 hours or so, leaving no room on the clothesline, well, that's a whole other complication.

I know this is all good for the environment and I know I'm being super whiny about something quite minor. But oh god do I miss dryers.

W(h)ine

I stand by the wine a drank on Monday. It was the last day of class and I maintain it was well-deserved and I didn't even finish the bottle. It's not like I went on any kind of actual bender or anything. But apparently what my body (apart from the pleasure-seeking part of my brain) wanted me to do on Monday was eat soup or something like it and get a lot of sleep. And, in protest, it's let the flu back in.

This is supposed to be the fun part. I have some free time now; I'm supposed to be spending it on adventures, not naps and trips to the pharmacy. God dammit.

Office hours

"I wasn't sure how to do this question."

The question was about the probability of making a Type I error under some circumstances.

"Ok, do you remember what a Type I error is?" I asked.

"No."

So I told him, and then he understood the problem, and was all thankful and grateful. So, he had taken the time to study the problem set, and had taken the time to come to my office to ask about something he didn't understand, but had not taken the time to look up a simple definition that's easy to find in the textbook or in the class notes that are posted online. And he's one of the better students.

They are just not adults.

Woohoooo!!!

When I first got to the cafe where I'm writing this, at the table next to me was a swarthy-ish French dude (I know) with whom I imagined myself exchanging looks, even if it's more likely that he had a stiff neck or a mild form of Tourette's syndrome or something. But then he left and Monsieur Swarth has been replaced by a guy in a bad suit who won't stop hiccuping. Loudly. Sigh. In the grand scheme of today, though, Monsieur Swarth and Mr. Hiccup don't much matter at all. Because...

Whew. Joder. R-O-L-A-I-D-S. And any other words of relief you can think of. It's done. Terminado. I did it. Holy crap.

The course isn't really over. Tomorrow I have to listen to some presentations and there's the final exam plus some office hours and after all of that plus grading there will be a day when the students get to come and complain about their grades. So I'm not done with the little fuckers, but I am done with lecturing them and holy fucking christ does that feel good.

They were really loud today. Sort of understandable -- I was crazy excited about it being the last day of class, too -- but still I wanted to strangle them. But then they saved me from having to do any sort of review by having no questions whatsoever, and then when it was all over the little fuckers clapped. It's what they do here, so it doesn't necessarily mean that they actually like or respect me or anything like that, but still I got a kick out of it. I also got all awkward and didn't know where to look or what to do with my hands and would have definitely turned bright red except that I was already all red because it was about 400 degrees in our classroom. While they were clapping I remembered an announcement I forgot to make so I started yelling "Wait, wait, I forgot something," and one of the guys in the front turned around and really exaggerated the clapping, as in "Hey, if we all keep clapping loudly maybe she'll stop talking." It was cute. They really are endearing little assholes. Endearing little assholes that I never have to try and make shut up ever again. Whew.

24 and there's so much more

Liking Leo Messi is like liking Picasso, or the Beatles, or puppies: It doesn't really set you apart. Especially not here. If you don't know him, Leo Messi plays soccer for Barcelona and he's really really really really really good. He scored five goals in one game the other day, and lately people have decided he's probably the best ever, or at least up there with the greats that even people who don't care about soccer have heard of, like Pelé and Maradona. He has a big nose and messy hair and a growth disorder and a girlfriend from his hometown in Argentina even though he's lived in Barcelona since the team snatched him up at the age of something like 13. He doesn't talk trash or step on people, and he attributes all of Barcelona's success and most of his own to their coach. He's a UNICEF goodwill ambassador. (Of course if I met him in real life I'd never date him -- he seems to actually be a decent human being, after all -- but I can love him from afar, anyway). And he's only 24.

Barça beat Santander 2-0 last night , with both goals from Messi. I watched the game at an old man bar; there are a lot of them here. I'm not sure I'm entirely welcome in them, but old men are usually nice enough to me. And old men watching soccer say ¡Hostia! (fuck) a lot, even when their team is winning. I like it when old men say ¡Hostia!. At this particular old man bar, by the end of the game one of the old men was singing love songs loudly to no one in particular. And the bartender called me guapa and the old men wished me Buen Proveche, even the ones who were noticeably confused by my presence.

Adoring Leo Messi may not mean that much around here, but I bet I like old man bars a lot more than most people. More than most people who aren't old men, anyway.

Whiiiiiiiine

The grocery store is never really where I want to be. But today I wanted soup or something like it and restaurants don't reliably serve soup here and I felt too crappy to really go to a restaurant anyway. I've been feeling lousy for a few days now so I already knew that the smallish manageable grocery store across the street doesn't really sell soup. So I went to Mercadona, which is the closest biggish grocery store. I fucking HATE Mercadona. I can never find anything and the workers are usually mean and the other shoppers, of whom there are usually about 6,000, are usually angry. The exit from the main checkouts doesn't go to the street it goes to the parking garage, and that scares me. What if you can't walk out of the parking garage, what if you can only drive out of it? What if I got stuck in there?? So I always end up waiting forever in one of the super long lines at one of the two checkout counters that has an exit to the street. And seriously, I can never find anything I need there, even though it's big and appears to sell lots of stuff. It's like some kind of ironic breadline, with all the pushing and shoving and waiting and ill will, plus tons of actual products, just none that I want. Shampoo, check; conditioner, no. Giant boxes of weird-brand cookies, check; normal-sized boxes of good cookies, no. Broth, bullion, cream of pumpkin, every ingredient one might use to make soup (probably, not like I make soup), check; soup, no.

I get that normal people cook more than I do, especially outside of the United States in general and New York in particular. But is there really no market here for premade soup that comes in a can or microwaveable container? Other people must get sick and want soup and not necessarily have anyone around to make it for them out of raw ingredients. I'm sure I bought soup when I lived here before, and I definitely used to buy microwave lentils and garbonzos that would have served the same purpose. Fucking Mercadona. Fucking flu. Whine.

Illin'

My body waited to get sick until the first possible time that being sick wouldn't be a giant huge borderline-tragic problem work-wise. So, it could have been a lot worse. But it could also be a lot better. Whine.

Stare into the vacuum of his eyes

On the way to the bakery around the corner from my apartment this morning, three of the four corners of an intersection had panhandlers. To be fair, or something, one was a gypsy who might have been there regardless of the estado-Spanish economic situation. (Europeans can get really racist about gypsies. It is true that they panhandle, but it's not true that you'll get attacked and robbed blind if you ever go near them.) But the others looked like locals, and I see people like them a lot. They're usually not that young -- 50ish, say -- and don't typically have the grimy look that people who've been on the street for a while get. They may not actually be homeless, but the looks on their faces suggest that they're in actual bad shape and are not just people who lost bets or are doing research for a screenplay or something. Outside of my neighborhood, I usually see them in neighborhoods like mine: not posh but not poor, and not touristy. Maybe those are the places they live(d)? I dunno. I don't think that would be my strategy if it came down to the kindness of strangers, but thankfully that's a pretty big if.

I wrote this one a while ago

...but it's still basically accurate.

This is really hard. Writing, I mean. I whined about it in Bilbao last summer and I feel even whinier about it here. I spend so much of my time trying to force Spanish, but I'm such a simple tool in Spanish that I don't have anything to show for it writing-wise. I could tell you about how briefly excited I was today at lunch when I said No, es la suya (No, it's his (card)) in real time. It was a little high, but it's not a good story. I could tell you about how sometimes when I'm teaching I have these "Holy crap, I'm doing this" moments and it's almost like I'm floating. Or about how painfully, shamefully stupid I feel when I don't know how to say something and rambling nonsense comes out instead, or how I sometimes feel like no matter how hard I try I'll never speak this stupid language at any level above being able to reliably buy bus tickets. It's a lot of ups and downs and for me that's exciting and entertaining and exhilarating and a pretty good adventure. Even if it doesn't seem that way to anyone who's reading.

The kids are all right

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying my job has gotten easy. It's still hard and stressful and I'm still not very good at it. (Speaking of don't get me wrong, insert usual disclaimer about how I'm not looking for sympathy, I just like to complain, etc.) But it is getting a little easier, and in particular it's getting easier to make the students laugh. I just have to give up on trying to be remotely clever ever and focus on things that are silly or goofy or accidentally sound like I'm talking about fat asses.

The other day I had two consecutive slides with graphs of two slightly differently shaped bell curves, so that if I clicked back and forth between them it kind of looked like the plot was pulsating. They cracked up. Today I had this example of how the number of shark attacks per day and daily ice cream sales are correlated (as in correlation is not causation) and that cracked them up a lot more than it seemed like it should have. Later I told them I was going to skip a proof because I didn't feel like doing it (I didn't) and that cracked them up, too.

There is a problem with these cheap laughs, though, and that is that once they start laughing about something it's hard to get them to stop. And they laugh loudly. They really are like little kids. Is 20ish still in the age range where the brain hasn't fully finished developing? I think it might be.

Holy crap. As much as I sometimes hate them, I do also kind of like the students. And if they are basically children, which they kind of are, that means that I like some children. A lot of them, actually. Yikes.

Playing games with the faces

On the way home tonight I walked past the bus station. Well, one of them. I like bus stations more than anyone I know, especially estado-Spanish ones. They feel like travel, and they're usually not that gross or sketchy, and you can usually find something decent enough to eat at the cafeteria, especially if you want something breakfast-y like toast with olive oil and salt, and even if not they will at least have decent coffee and beer.

Anyway, I walked past the bus station and man did I want to go in and buy a ticket to anywhere and be looking out the window on a bus pulling out of town. Not that I want to escape from Barcelona exactly -- I like it here quite a lot and I'm not in a hurry to move away -- I just want to go on an adventure, different from the adventure that the last two months of teaching have been.

I don't know why I'm telling anyone this, but I felt so drawn to the bus station that I ate dinner in a big empy mediocre Chinese restaurant so I could watch the buses come and go. Probably a very good thing my course is almost over; I'm not actually going insane or anything, but I do feel like I'm getting pretty weird.

Barcelona is a pueblo

Don't get me wrong, I'm not being down on my social life. Given that I'm shy and antisocial and don't speak Spanish fluently or Catalan at all and have only been here two months and work longish hours, I'm pretty pleasantly surprised by the fact that I have made a few friends. But still, I don't know very many people here. So when I get home from a run to find an email from someone saying he saw me as he came out of the bank but that I must not have heard him calling my name because of my headphones, it feels a little weird. I like being anonymous, at least some of the time, and it's hard to do here.

Bon appétit

Aside from the super obvious things like "Where are you from?" and "How long have you been in Barcelona?," I think the question I get asked the most here is "How do you say Que aproveche (the Spanish version of Bon appétit) in English?" They're not asking for a translation, they're asking how we in the English-speaking world or in the United States in particular wish someone a good meal. It's a question that seems to genuinely interest not just Catalans or Spaniards, but Europeans of all stripes. Southern Europeans, anyway.

It's not just that the person serving a meal always says it; everyone here wishes you a good meal when you're eating. Strangers in restaurants say Que aproveche (or sometimes Buen provecho). I've seen people walking and talking on cell phones stop themselves and their conversations to say Que aproveche to someone. On one of the rare times that I was eating dinner at home (why do my roommates have to be so goddamn gross in the kitchen?) one of my roommates was halfway out the door when I guess she realized she had forgotten to say it, and she came all the way back to the dining room, wished me Buen provecho, and then left.

The answer is that there's not really an English equivalent, which I guess is why they ask. You might say something like "Enjoy your meal," or if you're being goofy or pretentious you might say "Bon Appétit," but stopping what you're doing to go out of your way to wish a stranger a good meal is not really part of our culture. I feel like I'm doing well if I stop what I'm doing when I'm the one who's eating.

I know I may look like a real person...

Holy crap, I did it. Well, kind of. I explained power three times in Spanish today, and at least one of the 50ish students that I explained it to even sort of understood, I think. And one is more than zero. (Incidentally, Europeans write the number one differently from how Americans write it. I try to copy them so the students will have one less thing to be confused about, but I only remember about half the time, which probably just confuses them more.) And, now no mores seminars! Just two more lectures and then the teaching part of this course will be over. And the administrative stuff can be done in the comfort of my office (i.e., not in front of 200 loud adolescents), so it barely even counts. And, in one of the seminars today, the students actually talked to me. They've talked to me before, of course, with questions here and there that they often ask at a time when they're supposed to be listening to someone else, but today they all had lots of questions (about boring stuff like grades and the final exam, but still), and then I realized that we were all sitting around talking and that I felt like a regular person instead of some kind of strange circus act. It was pretty cool.

Don't get me wrong, I'm mostly just ecstatic that the seminars are over. But ending them on a relatively-not-bad note is pretty nice, too.

Vaga!

The students are on strike. University faculty and staff are also in theory striking today, all over Catalunya, but at least where I work it seems to be mainly the students. Tuition at public universities is increasing by 7%, and some employees' salaries are being cut by 3%. Vaga! (Vaga means strike in Catalan.)

At first I was bummed that they are striking on a day that I don't teach, but apparently I would have been expected to teach anyway (or make up the class later, I guess, if I went on strike myself), and the striking students sometimes barge in on classes and are loud and disruptive and in the end it didn't sound like much fun at all. Although in the end, the students here aren't doing much, aside from maybe not being in class. Most of the action is happening at the University of Barcelona, which is more centrally located and a lot bigger than the university where I work. The students blocked a highway and made a huge traffic jam this morning and there was a rally at the Plaça Universitat this afternoon, and now some students are occupying the UB rector's office. (The rector of a university is like the president.)

On the one hand, university education is incredibly cheap here (less than a thousand euros a semester), and the country is broke. Cuts like this are inevitable, and 7%-higher-than-before tuition is still super cheap. On the other hand, no one likes having things taken away, and people are mostly broke and often unemployed to start with, so it's not surprising that they get mad about every cut.

Since I got here it's been a fairly regular pattern of cuts and strikes, and once the latest day or two of strikes and protests is over people go back to being mad but not on strike and talking off their roommates' ears at every opportunity about how bad the economy is and what shit the government is.

I wonder what comes next.