“Medusa, 1597!”

Location: Madrid, Spain

Wednesday May 26, 2010

First day of class. My Spanish teacher is quite cute. She’s a ‘tweener, not that young to party with but not old enough to be middle-aged. Our class of about twelve people started with Spanish icebreakers. We learned had to guess/learn five things about our compañero and then present them to the class. A good use of the second-person and third-person conjugation, I guess. After coming here, I’ve also been getting a lot of vosotros practice. I never took vosotros seriously, because all my past Spanish teachers were from Latin America. So now it’s surprising just how much I use the second-person plural in conversation.

Other than the lispy accent, Spaniards also use the word “vale” a lot. It’s their equivalent “okay.” But they use it much more than we use okay. Spaniards say “vale” as much as novice Spanish-learners say “sí” in Spanish class. And that ‘s a whole hell of a lot. Carmen taught me what vale meant. When I used it later that day, Miguel was very entertained and said that I was starting to assimilate into the Spanish culture. I bet my broken Spanish with the Latin American accent sounds incredibly harsh to my host family.

My second (and only other class) is Arte en el Prado. For the first day of class, we met in an IES classroom rather than in the Prado, which is what we would be doing on Tuesdays and Wednesday. The professor seems pretty chill and wants us to appreciate and understand art. I think I’m going to have a hard time expressing myself during discussions, because so much of art appreciation and sharing requires fluffy, descriptive, emotional, and art-specific words: vocabulary that I do not know. Could you imagine Nemerov giving his fantastical musings in a language he wasn’t fluent in? However would he say, “The artist is but instead ruminating on his dark apartness from that culture” (March 24, 2009) or “The orgiastic brushing of the wheat field… creating a quivering aura…” (April 2, 2009)?

After doing research online, I decided to buy a temporary cheap-ass phone from Movistar for this month and a half to make it easier to communicate with my host family and other IES students. The sales lady, who only spoke Spanish, tried to rip me off by charging me 20€ for a phone and a SIM card containing a credit of 12€. I argued with her, because another Movistar location was offering a phone and a card with some credit for 14€. Once she knew that I wasn’t going to pay that much for the ghetto flip-phone, she lowered her price to 15€. So essentially, I got the phone for 3€. It’s a prepaid plan, so every time I use the phone, it takes money off the pre-bought credit. It feels so weird not texting people, like, throwing it back old school when I used to have only 200 texts a month, even that would cost me 30 €, i.e.: $37. Yikes. But I think the sales lady probably did rip me off, because I just received a text last night (May 29) about how I had less than 2€ on my credit, even though I’ve barely used my phone: made short phone calls only during evenings, super-minimized on texting, and avoided U.S. numbers (why do students insist on using their U.S. numbers when international roaming is so expensive?). Bitches.

That evening, Celia showed me her family on Los Sims 3. She only has one family comprised of her best friend and herself. But apparently the new Sims comes with many premade people for you to be friends with. Kids are mad lazy nowadays. We used to make our own characters in order for them to make friends to get promoted/be cool. I told her about the Bears and how I used to play all the time back in the day. Oh, and the Spanish Sims still speak the same Sims language. There’s no special Spanish accent or anything, jsyk.