robbed!

Oops So all of this actually happened like a month ago, but i never posted it. I'll post something new soon, I promise.

Ah so much has happened since I wrote that last post (I didn't publish it right away). Following the ratings-grab method of the evening news I will start with the crime reports and then move on to human interest.

I was robbed for what I'm pretty sure is the first time ever Friday night. Sometime in between buying my third beer and reaching into my pocket to buy my fourth my wallet disappeared. Hmm could the nature of these purchases have contributed to the crime? Luckily I only brought as much cash as I wanted to spend that night. But they got my health insurance card and my monthly metro pass. Being the sentimental sap that I am for me the biggest losses are the wallet itself, my favorite wallet ever made out of an old tie, and the fortune cookie message I mentioned in my first blog entry: "Your dreams will bring you into a profitable venture." Yeah a profit that will be promptly swiped.

The weird thing is Thursday night I had a dream that people were trying to pick pocket me. This group of three guys came up to me and pretended to hit on me as they groped for my pockets. In the dream, however I was aware of what was going on and stopped it. In reality, I was so unaware that I was being robbed that it came as a shock when I found out. That was the worst part I think, how completely unaware I was. I mean I guess that's the way pickpocketing works and all, but it's so unnerving.

The night wasn't a total loss. I might this Chilean guy, a friend of a friend of a friend, who went to the same school I went to when I was in Chile. That was fun.

Friday afternoon I went to Casa de Campo, a park west of Madrid so named because it used to be the king and queen's country home. One thing monarchy's got going for it is that the lavish habits of the royals generate lots of old beautiful buildings and properties. It seems like just about every neighborhood of Madrid has an old palace, many of which are now museums or community centers or parks. It was one of those moments where I let myself switch into full on tourist mode. Nose in a map of the park. Camera out to snap pictures of what to everyone else seems inane. Like the parakeets for example. I must have spent a half an hour trying to get a picture of the docile flock of escaped parakeets. Some nature photographer I am.

Second impressions at school

Remember back when I said, "I just waltz in there 16 hours a week, who am I to judge?" Well, I should have followed my own advice. After another couple of weeks I'm beginning to have better idea why the teachers act like they do. Much as in most urban school districts in the US, public schools in Madrid are underfunded and understaffed. Anyone who can afford to sends their kids to private school. The conservative madrileño government is steadily cutting back on education funding. If Eva seemed pessimistic and impatient, then it was only because she's had her patience tested to the limit. If it didn't seem like Cristina was putting very much energy in to class, it was because she's overworked.

The cultural differences still get to me sometimes, though. The school system these teachers grew up in was infamously strict. Many things have changed. Teachers are called by their first names, for example. However, the environment is still really different from the elementary school I remember where promoting self-esteem and creativity were top priorities. As Halloween approaches we're doing lot's of bats and ghosts and pumpkins. Bats are black. Ghosts are white. Pumpkins are orange. Any divergence from this may be tolerated but it won't be encouraged. In one class a boy had made a really cool brown and purple bat, but he was sent to his table to recolor the whole thing plane black. This was just a time filler coloring page, too. It's not like the directions said, "Color the bat black." I could understand that. It's just that bats are black. Period.

the catalan question, or what not to say in Madrid

As you may know I am a hardcore babelist, which is a term I just coined for someone who stubbornly supports the preservation of the world's tenuous linguistic diversity. On the eastern coast of Spain they speak another language Catalan, which the relatively autonomous regional government recognizes as its official language but the federal government does not recognize as a n official language of Spain. I tend to sympathize with the catalinistas, even though the language preservation I support gets tangled in with some closed-minded nationalist bullshit. Okay, thanks for bearing with the abstract intellectual intro, now we can move onto the anecdote...

Last night I was hanging out with Jose, Ismael from school, and some of their friends, and they started digging into Catalunya. If I have been a little too hung up on stereotypes lately, maybe it is because many of the Spaniards I have met like to go on and on about how a certain group is. Los chinos son así. Los marroquís son así. If one of my friends from the US starting going on about, "The Chinese are like this." I would feel compelled to stop him or her and say, "ummm actually Chinese people are a collection of diverse individuals." Here though I'm more inclined to take it with a grain of salt, though it always makes me squirm. But anyway they got going on the Catalans. The Catalans are much more cold and distant than other Spaniards. The Catalans are so closed minded. The Catalans just shoot themselves in the foot by requiring all of the university professors to speak Catalan. Albert Einstein couldn't teach at a Catalan university. I sat on my hands and listened like a good little foreigner trying to learn the lay of the land before he threw himself into a sensitive, controversial topic.

But when me and Jose got home, I couldn't hold myself back. This one of my core beliefs after all, granted one of my most impractical and idealistic core beliefs. Always hedging with "well, I may not really understand the situation but as a linguist," I told him that it might not make sense to him, but given the long term repression of the Catalan language, I can see why they would take radical steps to bolster it now that they have more regional autonomy. There was of course no way I was going to change his mind. He's right there is a lot of political posturing involved and it does mean more qualified professors who only speak Spanish will be turned away. But in my mind it's a kind of linguistic affirmative action, and it's worth the costs.

In other news I officially have lived in Madrid for more than a month. There are still a lot of ups an downs as I continue to adjust. Hell I could stay here ten years and still be adjusting, but it's safe to say it's the end of the beginning and that feels pretty good.

Now I think I'll go try and survive the free afternoon at the Prado. Wish me luck.

okay, now I can relax

I was reading an article in the magazine section of El País about los frikis, a blanket term for anyone who dresses outside the box, and I find out I´m a gafapasta. "The gafapasta are a friki subtribe known for their intellectual tendencies, their interest in the arts, in addition to using, naturally, their distinctive plastic glasses (gafas de pasta)." Phew, I was starting to get worried, now I can just go around Madrid asking, "Are you a gafapasta?" and in no time I will have found my pretentious thick-glasses brethren.

There is even a wiki-style website devoted to cataloging all the urban tribes:

http://www.frikipedia.es/friki/Gafapasta

estoy malito

One week working with kids and I´m already sick. Not too sick or anything just a sore throat wanna sleep all day kind of sick. Luckily I have Fridays off work, so I got to sleep all day. I´ve watched the better part of a season of Dos Metros Abajo, i.e. Six Feet Under, and now as promised I´ll do the school spiel.

I work at a small public school in Pozuelo de Alarcón a town just west of Madrid. It used to be a sleepy little pueblo, but has grown a sprawling halo of really rich gated communities, corporate headquarters, and big box stores. I work in the part that used to be the sleepy little pueblo. The student body is probably about half immigrants from Morroco, Romania, Bulgaria and Latin America. There´s this one guy whose parents work for the UN in Sudan, "But for some reason I had to leave, I don´t really understand why." That just about broke my heart.

They are phasing in a bilingual program. Grades 1-4 have English and Science in theory entirely in English. I work mainly with the 1st and 4th grades, plus a couple of classes with the 5th and 6th. The 1st grade teacher, Eva, is a little intense. This is her first year working in the public schools, and with such young kids, and the discipline problems are driving her crazy (me too actually). She´s pretty pesimistic about it all, which makes it a little tough for me, but she´s a good teacher and we get along fine. Cristina teaches 4th grade and she´s maybe a little too laid back. For example, she´ll take five minutes to have a conversation with me about nothing too important while the kids run around the room. But who am I to critcize either of them, I just waltz in there 16 hours a week and after one week I´m sick. It´s challenging but rewarding.

I started giving some private lessons for a a neighborhood association run by a bunch of overbearing mother types. Right now it´s kind of a hassle. I thought we had agreed on the prices, but some of the parents want to bargain more. It´s not strictly about the money, at this point, I just feel like they´re trying to push me around and I don´t like that. I think I´m gonna tell them to take it leave it, if only I knew how to say that.

the metro

So after meeting up with fellow Macalester alumna Charlotte, I found myself in the metro listening to a musician play the score of Amelie on an acordeon thinking, "How delightfully continental!" (Of course he probably was only playing this because he knew that the foreigners would think "Oh how delightfully continental!" and give him money.) But as I turned the corner on to the platform I found my expat reverie interrupted by a pair of frat boys turned corporate tools. I immediately judged them. The easiest way out of an identity crisis, is to define yourself in opposition to someone else after all. But I checked myself. Had I not just been talking to Charlotte about how I felt judged by madrileños for being a foreigner? How could I be such a hypocrite? So I decided to eavesdrop on them, which was not hard to do. And what were they talking about? One of them was recounting how he had seen a Mexican in a Home Depot back in the states using a funny gesture to ask for a plunger. And the other responded, "that´s weird cuz everyone who works at Home Depot is a Mexican. They shoulda just spoke Spanish." They went on to an enlightening discourse concerning which US celebrities would like to live at each metro stop on a nearby map. Chueca of course would be home to Boy George. So I said fuck it and went back to judging them.

Of course, one of the stereotypes of Gringos that José insists I uphold is a stubborn unwillingness to adapt. Considering that anti-immigrant sentiment is a strong current in Spanish politics I suppose those dudes were doing a better job at assimilation than me. Even things like bike-commuting or making out with boys that I proudly think of as setting me apart from the red-blooded cowboy types, become stereotypically American when I refuse to budge to fit in with Madrid. For example, I keep on talking about buying a bike to get around, and José insists that this would be not only dangerous but worse still culturally inappropriate. No one in Madrid rides bikes, according to him. I mean it´s dangerous and culturally inapporiate back in Crystal Lake, too. But I wonder, when in Rome is it okay to ignore what theRomans do as long as you´re doing out of a desire to promote positive change (oh god, that word just isn´t the same anymore)? How does one assimilate when his fragile little postadolescent identity is so deeply rooted in deliberate defiance of cultural norms? At any rate as long as the metro keeps running and providing interesting anecdotes, I doubt I will buy that bike, but once I get that first pay check of euros burning a whole in my pocket who knows....

(p.s. I have you noticed that my favorite punctuation mark is the ellipsis, although I´m sure any good editor would hate the way I use it.)

(p.p.s. In more mundane news I started working at my school last Wednesday, and I started some private lessons today. Some day I´ll do the rundown of the school and such, but right now I have no desire to do that.)

a travel parable

I burnt myself today trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich. It seems like it should be simple, but using a baguette instead of a gringo style loaf bread, and a kind of cheese I´m not used to, and olive oil instead of butter, and a stove I´m still not entirely used to, it quickly got complicated. If on the other hand I had tried to make a bocadillo de jamón serrano...