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.