The Riverlands

So, some of you may or may not know that the week before I left town I bought this really cool book called “Cool Crocheted Hats,” which has patterns for like some 20-odd different hats you can make with crochet.  And when I went to Madrid last Thursday I bought some yarn with which to make three or four said hats.  Starting with the easiest, I am proud to say I have already completed one (and I’m almost done with the second!)  So here (albeit in response to my mother’s repeated requests) I post a picture to show off my great skill (heheh) at hat-making.  No, I am not taking orders at this time.  Buy the book for yourself.  And trust me, they get lots cooler than this.

Wow, so I’ve been really bad about posting stuff lately.  But I’m going to make up for it today because I have MORE PICTURES!!!!!  (Everybody cheer, please.)

So, as a general summary, let me just say that fall here is beautiful.  It’s still not actually full-on, which is really weird for me as it’s already the end of October, but only half the leaves have even turned color; the rest are still green.  The temperature has been dropping rapidly, though.  I don’t usually go out without two shirts, a sweater, and a coat on, with gloves and a scarf tied over my head to protect my ears.  Even the Polish students have admitted it’s a bit chilly, so that’s how serious it is.  It’s…well, think winter at its very worst in Tucson.  And it’s only going to plummet from here.  No snow yet, though.

I’ve found, however, that if you bundle up well enough against the cold, it’s actually not that bad being out in it.  It helps that it’s extremely refreshing–the crisp air and all–like jumping into a pool of snowmelt up in the mountains.  Man, I do miss our mountains…but anyways.  And as I said, the views can be spectacular.

For instance, this one is actually a few weeks old, but I forgot to put it up last time I put up pictures.  I woke up one morning and looked out my window–I think I mentioned it looks right over the town to the castle–and this is what I saw:

The fog was absolutely breathtaking, hovering over the rooftops and caressing the towers of the keep and shrouding the hills beyond so that you found yourself wondering what was hiding under that blanket where it grew too opaque to see, even though you knew perfectly well from all the clear days that there was nothing at all.  I love it.

A few nights later I got this spectacular view:

Some of you already I know, I think, that I’ve been trying to find out if it’s possible for me to move out of the dorms.  It’s just too isolating here.  There’s so many people it’s hard to make friends, and I feel like I get lost in the shuffle.  My Spanish isn’t good enough to understand people when they’re all in groups talking to each other–and they’re always in groups here.  So I can’t really sit down and talk to anyone.  Add that to the fact that not having a kitchen or even a common room that’s really decent for human beings to live in, I don’t really have anywhere to invite anyone over, which also makes it hard to socialize, and then there’s the fact that, based on what I’ve subsequently discovered about the price of a much nicer, newer, larger apartment here–even counting in utilities and food costs–the rent here basically amounts to armed robbery.  However, I have a contract through February, so the only way I’ll get out of here is if I can find someone else to take it and transfer it to them.  This needs to happen quickly, before November hits, so…something to be praying about.  The director of the international students program is helping out, but there’s only so much he can do, so…we’ll see.

So I really haven’t made many friends outside of the other internationals here, which is hard since they mostly have and so we’re not all hanging out as much, although we still do some.  I guess the other problem is just finding people you can actually talk to.  The dorm being something of a party place, just about the only thing people here do is go out dancing until four in the morning every night.  It’s not just that I physically cannot keep those kinds of hours; the places they go are so loud that they’re not good for anything but dancing, which gets really boring after an hour or so.  Certainly you can’t talk to anyone there.  I need to find people with interests.  I’m going to try signing up for a flamenco class this Wednesday, so hopefully I’ll be able to meet a few people there.

I don’t mean to make it sound like I’m utterly miserable here, because I’m not.  But there have been a few rough spots.  The good news is, my Spanish is getting better.  Slowly–painfully slowly–and I don’t know how fluent I’ll be by the time the semester ends–but then, although it feels a lot longer, it’s only been about five weeks and I’ve improved a lot in that time, so when you consider that we’ve got almost another two months until Christmas and then another month after that, maybe it’s premature to be panicking.  Oh, and one or two of you will be interested to note that I (finally) finished The Flanders Panel the other day.  It was definitely a very, very good mystery.  Creepy–touches of the gothic and touches of just general psychological thriller–but very well-done.  I’ve also finished I’m a Stranger Here Myself, which is a book by the same author as Notes from a Small Island, on readjusting to American culture after living in England twenty years.  It’s very sarcastic–it’s actually a collection of newspaper columns he published in a British newspaper after moving back to the U.S.–but I’ve rarely read anything that could make me laugh so hard.  Mostly because it’s so true; he has a gift for observing the best of the absurd and insane wherever he is, and faithfully pointing it out in the most perspective-giving language possible.  Sometimes a little too much perspective.  At any rate, I loved it and I’m going to try to loan it to Maciek, since I think it would match his sense of humor well.  (He can be a little…cynical…so the sarcasm might go over well, I think.)

For my next reading projects, I’m still finished Notes from a Small Island, and I’ve started Washington Irving’s Tales from the Alhambra.  Irving was, apparently, the American ambassador to Spain for some years back in the early 1800s–I want to say 1830s-ish–and was so taken with the Alhambra he wrote a bunch of stories about it, based on bits of folklore he picked up.  So far, his prose is a little over-convoluted, I’d say, but the actually subject matter is interesting enough to overcome that.  Even better, I’ve started reading The Shadow of the Wind, which is quite possibly the most popular book in Spain right now, and internationally as well, as the first person to recommend it to me was actually a Dutch woman I met in Scotland last year.  It’s a gothic mystery set in 1940s and 50s Barcelona, and the writing is absolutely beautiful.  It also moves well, and the voice is very strong.  I’ll give you a taste: it starts out with the narrator–a ten year old boy–’s father taking him, early one morning, to visit a mysterious place concealed in the heart of the city called “the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.”  Yeah.  Even the name sends shivers up your spine.  And it just gets better from there.  I highly recommend it even not being very far in yet, and I know it’s been published in English–so you should all read it.

Anyways, on to more pictures.  Thursday was a holiday, the day of Segovia’s patron saint, San Frutas (yeah, I’m not sure where exactly the name comes from,) so we had the day off.  Naturally that meant that Wednesday night everyone went out and partied, and even though I didn’t stay that late (and got soundly berated for it later, too, I can tell you…some people just don’t understand the necessity of sleep!) I did get the chance to meet a guy who apparently goes hiking in the mountains around here every weekend, and he offered to show me a trail or two, next time he goes.  So I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it’ll go through.  He seems like an interesting person, and I would really like to get out and see some of the trails around here.

Also that night, being completely unsure of what to do with myself the next day and really not wanting to spend it in the dorm alone studying, I bit the bullet and actually asked to come along with someone on something, without being invited.  I really hate doing that.  But sometimes, you know, you get a little desperate.  At any rate, they didn’t seem to mind, so the next morning I got to go, along with Maciek, Justyna, and a girl from my dorm named Ana, to San Ildefonso de la Granja.  In case you don’t remember my raving about it from last summer, La Granja is a beautiful old royal palace about forty minutes’ down the road from here, with what must be a good square mile or two or gardens around it, all interspersed with fountains and ponds and Greco-Roman statuary.  If it was beautiful in summer when everything was almost wilting with heat, it was five times as much so now, with the roses still in bloom but the trees all tinged with gold and even red in places.  The fountains weren’t on, for the most part, but it somehow seemed appropriate.  There is something so nostalgic about a garden in the fall–it can be sad sometimes, but as the best of times it’s more a kind of mystic wonder, like the world is becoming a little older and little more magical as it sinks down into a dreamy sleep.  At any rate, we spent like three hours there, just wandering around taking pictures.  There were about a hundred little school-age kids out in groups on some kind of field-trip, and I couldn’t help but remember all those imaginary countries I had when I was their age.  I can’t imagine being able to go play someplace like La Granja.  It would have been better than paradise.

I wish I had time to show you all every single picture I took, but here’s just a taste:

The last picture shows Maciek, Justyna, and Ana, left to right, for those of you who’ve been complaining I need to get some pictures of people.  I finally found the website where all the Erasmus people are supposed to be posting their pictures, so I’ll get more soon.

So, that was Thursday.  We got back in late afternoon, and then Maciek and I went up to Madrid for the evening, where among other things, I finally got some yarn for some more crochet projects.  I’m working on a really cool purple-and gold hat.  I’m going to need a lot of hats, you see, with the weather the way it’s getting…

And then Saturday I went to Salamanca.  Unfortunately, I’m getting tired of blogging, so those’ll have to wait until tomorrow.  Sorry!

So, we’re all familiar with the weather in Tucson, of course, and how much we rejoice when we leave the house in the mornings and the sky is covered in clouds, because that means we’re going to have a few hours of temperate weather before the sun burns it off in the afternoon. Tucson + clouds = shade. Certainly we don’t associate clouds with rain. At least I don’t, never having lived anywhere else. Rain is associated with something entirely separate, a black mass looming suddenly over the horizon on a perfectly clear day, and running like mad for shelter before the wall of water hits.

This turned out to be a bit of a problem today. See, I bought this leather coat on Saturday in Madrid. (I was so happy about it! It’s beautiful dark brown, with a fur-trimmed hood, long and thick and warm, the sort of the thing that’ll last for years and actually, for leather, came at a really decent price. My joy has been marred only by discovering, running into Gaelle after class today, that I bought the exact same coat that she did at the mall in Segovia a couple weeks back. Only the color is different. Arg. But you know, it’s not like we’ll be living in the same area for more than a few months, so it’s not a huge deal…I just feel bad!! Hopefully she won’t mind. I haven’t told her yet; I was carrying it over my arm and I don’t think she got a good look at it.) But, as I said, I bought this leather coat. And even though it was leather, I thought, no prob, I brought a poncho I can wear over it when it rains, right?

So sticking my head out the window today, as I do every morning to get an idea how cold it’s going to be, a sort of unconscious surprise registered at how cold it was, exactly, since it was cloudy. Usually clouds in winter mean a warmer day, since all the warm air is trapped close to the earth, right? But I didn’t, as I said, think about it consciously; all I really thought was, wow, it’s really cold today. I’d better wear my new coat!

But there’s this funny thing about clouds in Europe, it seems…so I look out the window in Lit & Rock, and I’m like, wow, it’s drizzling. Shoot! I wore my leather coat! But then I thought, well, I’m not going home for hours, it’ll be gone by then. Right? Wrong. Not only do clouds apparently bring rain here, but rain that actually sticks around for long periods of time. Consequently I had to walk home in the rain, in my new leather coat.

The good news is that I had a shawl I’d also brought, which I wrapped over the coat, so actually the coat didn’t get very wet. It may rain here, but it doesn’t rain hard. Drizzle, as I said. So the coat should be fine. But in future, I feel it is important to take a lesson from this experience: when you wake up in the morning and it’s cloudy, that means it might actually rain later in the day, and you should be prepared for the experience.

I’m sorry I’ve been rather quiet on the blog lately. It’s really been rather quiet here. There’s not a lot to tell. I’m trying to find out if it’s possible to move out of the dorms, because the situation here is really…well, I’ll rant about it later. If you ever spend a semester in Europe, don’t do the dorms. Anyways, I’d appreciate y’all’s prayers on that one, they say I have a contract, then international program director said he’d try to arrange something, but I don’t know how much he’ll be able to do or not…

Other than that, like I said. Quiet. I’ve been reading Don Quijote a lot. I’ve also discovered a great rock band through this Lit & Rock class, a Spanish group called Saurom (and that’s the name of one of the founders; it’s not the Spanish version of “Sauron” or anything. Coincidentally.) They’re pretty heavy metal–Christopher will like them a lot, I think–but with just a little bit of Celtic influence mixed in, and even better, they’re take a lot of their inspiration from literary masterpieces such as…Lord of the Rings! Their entire second album was inspired by Tolkien. In general, their lyrics are very poetic. I love ‘em. Unfortunately no one in Segovia’s cd stores seems to have heard of them, so it’s off to Madrid again. I need to buy some yarn for a new hat so I’d be making the trip anyways.

Also, we had to pair up for end-of-semester projects for the rock class, and since Maciek just joined the class, we’re now partners. The problem is, for the project we have two choices: we can either analyze, from a literary point of view, a song or collection of songs, and explain their literary elements to the class…or we can write and perform a literary piece. Of course, Maciek, being rather outgoing, is all about writing a song. And I’m like…dude…we’d have to sing it for everyone. You’ve got to be kidding me.

The conflict remains to be decided. I suppose a lot of it will depend on how good a piece we can actually turn out. I also need to find out whether it needs to be in Spanish. I don’t think so, since half the music we’re listening to isn’t Spanish, and it’s supposed to be a “creative” endeavor, but you never know. (Maciek suggested we write a song in Polish and then it wouldn’t matter if it was good or not since nobody would understand it, but since that translates more to he’ll write a song in Polish and this is supposed to be a group project, I don’t think that’s going to work either.) Anyways, I figure if we start soon, and we can actually come up with something good and get to the point where we…meaning I…feel confident enough to sing it in front of someone else (assuming my voice doesn’t die when I get up there) then fine. Otherwise, we should have time left to cobble together a nice literary analysis thing over Christmas. At any rate, it promises to be interesting. Maciek and I have the tendency to take opposite views on just about everything possible…kind of like Rhiannon and I in high school…so first he asks, “So, d’you wanna be partners for the project?” and I’m like, “Sure,” and then he’s like, “Great. Now we’re going to kill each other.” And sure enough, then he wants to go with the “creative” option. Go figure.

So, I got this email from the UA Anthro listserv on a panel discussion taking place this week, and I find myself hoping they record it, ’cause I’d really like to hear it when I get back. Basically, it’s on the fact that the U.S. military is now hiring anthropologists as consultants in their counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course you can imagine the ethical debates raging over that one…but I find it of particular interest, not just because of the politics involved, but because it’s part of a deeper and more longstanding ethical question over what, exactly, anthropologists should and should not be doing with their research. Are we just there to passively record what we see? Is the pursuit of knowledge in and of itself enough to justify our existence, or does there need to be a more concrete application to our work? Since I do consider anthropology a science, I have to point out that it’s odd that this question even comes up in anthropology, while in most scientific fields–biology, for example–research for its own sake, without any manifest application is considered anathema.

But if we agree that science is there specifically and primarily to improve people’s lives in concrete ways, that brings us “applied anthropologists” to an even trickier question, which is how we ought to apply anthropology, what is ethical and what isn’t. Obviously again, as in any science, the research you do should first and foremost benefit the people on whom the research is conducted. That’s basic ethics. But the problem is, in anthropology, the question of what’s “beneficial” and what’s not gets a lot sticker than in, say, medicine. I suppose you might equate the debate to that going on in genetics, and the question of genetic engineering. Does the anthropologist, or the geneticist, have the wisdom or the right to dig into someone else’s genes/culture and start tweaking things? Of course there are plenty of examples you could give in support of both sides; “silencing” genes that result in mental or physical disabilities is a good argument in support, but then what if you make things worse? Likewise, I just read an interesting argument about how stopping the spread of a virulent disease among a certain people group meant their changing very long-standing and cherished mortuary practices…

So given that background, of course the question gets ten times as sticky when it comes down to military operations. Are these anthropologists supporting cultural imperialism, the occupation of one country by another? Or, in a perhaps unrelated question, does the mere fact that their research is covert, and that the people on whom it is being done are not being given access to it–does that in and of itself make it unethical? Or is the argument that their research prevents civilian casualties and brings a speedier end to the war enough to support their work?

There’s a very interesting blog on the question–follow the link below–which is being kept by an anthropologist at Stanford, not taking one side or the other, but just sort of meditating on the question and linking to various news articles of interest. As he points out, a lot of it really is less a question of principles than of practice…what exactly are these anthropologists up to on the ground out there?  Are they just trying to help the military figure out how to distinguish civilians from insurgents, or are they helping the military to figure out better ways to take out insurgents?  If the latter is the case, of course that’s a tougher issue to address than the first.  And that’s where the question of covertness comes into play, too…protecting military operations and troops versus being held responsible to a higher body for their ethical practices, as is the custom in science to prevent abuses…

http://www.savageminds.org/

So, I’m sorry, I’m just having a horrible homesickness moment and I had to wail about it.  I’m still on all the UA listservs, see…seemed easier than getting off them all and then getting back on again when I came back…and I just got an announcement from the Refuge that they’re all going to this corn maze at one of the farms on the southwest side, this Friday.  I remember that corn maze from last year…it was SO MUCH FUN, and it was HUGE…fall just isn’t quite the same without Halloween and Thanksgiving.

I wonder if I’ll be able to find a turkey to roast?

Right. What a weekend. Wow. Have I got a couple of great stories or what.

First of all, we had Friday off because it was the day of La Virgen de Pilar, who is the patron saint of Spain, apparently, so it’s a national holiday. So we decided to take advantage of the three-day weekend to head up to the Basque Country. One of the French students, Jeremie, organized the trip, and by the time the day arrived there were no less than twenty of us, all but one international students from two of Segovia’s three universities (yes, I found out it has three, though SEK is the only big one.) We squeezed into four rental cars and made it a road trip. And, as you must be pleased to see–I have some pictures.

So, it turns out that we picked quite a weekend to visit the Basque Country. It being a national holiday and all. And I think I heard something about how the Spanish president had made some rather unwise remarks on Spanish unification recently …it was hard to get the details, especially since when I got back and asked the other students about it, they had no idea what it was all about. There’s always something happening in the Basque Country, it seems, and nobody much bothers to keep up with it anymore. Anyways, let’s just say it wasn’t the quietest weekend the region’s ever had.

We started out in Pamplona. Honestly, if I’d known more about Pamplona ahead of time, I’d just as soon have skipped it. Three cities in three days is really way too much, if you want to really see anything, and I was pretty disappointed at how little time we got to spend in Saint Sebastian. It seems that, unless you’re in Pamplona during the Festival of St. Fermin, when they run the bulls, it’s not the most exciting city. Even less so on a national holiday when everything worth seeing is closed. So we spent most of our four hours there just sort of wandering around the city streets admiring the buildings. I have to admit, there were some really beautiful ones. Parts of the town still look almost medieval. Here’s a couple pictures, the first of the city’s cathedral, then a beautiful fresco over the cathedral doors, then there’s a couple of medieval-looking buildings, (the people in the first one are all from our group; the two girls in the foreground of the second one are Magda–Czech–and Melanie–Austria.) Then an arch in the old city wall, and the last one is a sign advertising–in several languages, including Basque–every single sign, from street signs to advertisements in the windows of banks and travel agencies and yes, Burger King, was bilingual, in Basque and Spanish–advertising, I say, a hostelry for pilgrims. Pamplona rose to prosperity during the Middle Ages when it was a prime rest-stop for pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela, the third-largest pilgrimage site in the world. It seems that pilgrims still pass that way.

Now for the really interesting part. On our tour of the city, we passed a rather large crowd of people carrying Basque flags and shouting something in Basque as they marched through the streets:

When we finally got back to the main square of the city, there was a crowd of a few hundred people–and getting bigger all the time–holding some kind of rally. All the speeches were in Basque, of course, so I’ve no idea what they were about, but it wasn’t really the size of the demonstration which was alarming, as the sight of at least thirty riot police, fully decked out, waiting on the sidelines like they just knew something was going to happen:

The picture doesn’t really do the scene justice. Whether or not something did happen, I never heard, since we left right after that. I do know that there were riots in Saint Sebastian the next day–the last of our cars to leave the city got redirected to go around the area. Thank God, though, that was the closest we got to any of it. But at any rate, as if all of this weren’t enough, it seems ETA’s ended the latest ceasefire, again. So we may be hearing more from the Basque Country…

Saint Sebastian, where we went next, was of course beautiful as ever, and despite there not being time to do much, I at least got to climb the giant hill with the giant statue of the saint himself at the top of it, which I didn’t get to do last time. I present you with two views from the summit:

And then this was a pretty little chapel in the ruins of a medieval castle at the top, next to the saint’s statue. I guess the giant statue of the saint is new, though, put up in the 20th century. I think he’s supposed to have his hand raised over the city in blessing:

We left Saint Sebastian about 2:30 Saturday afternoon (just, as I said, as the riots were starting, though this wasn’t intentional. I swear Someone was looking out for us) because we wanted to spend the afternoon at this quiet beach in between Saint Sebastian and Bilbao. It was really too cold to swim, although a couple of the guys did, mostly as a bravery thing I think, but we played games on the beach–including this rather rough and very fun one that involved two teams lined up at equal distances from a bottle, with each team member having a number, and whenever the judge called a number or series of numbers, those people had to run, try to grab the bottle, and get back across their team’s line without getting tagged by a member of the other team. We played it a bit like football, that you could pass the bottle to other teammates, and the “tagging” often turned into a bit of a scuffle whenever more than two people were involved, so that we all ended up pretty covered in sand, and one of the guys got thoroughly soaked. Oh, and get this: I hadn’t realized when I packed for the trip that we’d be at the beach, so all I had were these nice fur-and-leather boots Maisa gave me, which was hard: keep the boots on, or go barefoot and risk losing toes to frostbite? I tried keeping them on for a while, but eventually had to ditch them when we started playing the bottle game. Fortunately, sand brushes off leather well. And I still have all my toes. So all told, it was a pretty fun day. And of course, some of the girls also made a sandcastle–that would be Petra, Yana, and Elena, from left to right, all Czech:

As you can see, it turned into quite a fortress by the time it was finished, although even the multiple moats didn’t keep the ocean out eventually…sigh.

And then we headed off to Bilbao. And now the killer story. I think we can safely call this my worst case of culture shock to date.

So first of all, we couldn’t find a hotel in Bilbao on short notice with room for all twenty of us, so we had to split up: twelve in one hotel, eight in another. I was in the smaller group. We were four girls–me, Petra, Elena, and Yana–and four guys–Paul, Jose, Jonathan, and Maciek. Sounds relatively straightforward, right? Except, of course, that Yana and Paul are dating.

Now get this. I’m sitting in the car on the way there, and I’m thinking, Huh. What if they want to room together? That would mean that someone else would also have to room with a guy…and Petra and Elena will probably want to room together…what if they want me to room with a guy? But of course I thought, But no one’s asked me about it, so obviously that’s not what they’re planning. And if they do just tell them you’d rather not. Of course, then I thought, What if they don’t bother to ask me? But at that point, of course, I recognized that the line of thought was getting rather ridiculous. Stop being so paranoid, Mikaela; you’re always imagining the very worst things that could possibly happen. They’re perfectly nice people, they’d never be so rude or inconsiderate. Your life is not a sitcom.

So we’re in two cars, so four of us–Paul, Yana, Elena, and me–get into the hotel first. I get handed the keys to the first room, and the rest of them go off down the hall. So Yana and Elena must be rooming together, I thought, which meant Petra would be with me when she got there. Right. So when I hear in the hallway that the other half of the group’s arrived, I stick my head out and say, “Petra, we’re in here.”

Petra comes in with her stuff, looking rather puzzled. “But, where’s Elena?” she asks.

I shrug. “Down the hall with Yana, I guess.” Unless, as I suspect, Yana is down the hall with Paul, in which case I suppose Elena must agreed to room with one of the guys tonight.

Petra frowns and leaves the room. A few minutes later she’s back again to collect her things. “I’m not your roommate tonight!” she says. “I’m with Elena.”

Now I’m the one who’s confused. “But…then who am I rooming with?” I ask.

“Maciek,” she answers.

“With who?!?!?!” I yelped as I practically jumped out of my skin. You have got to be kidding me, I thought. She can’t be serious. This can’t actually be happening.

Petra laughed at my reaction, leading me to hope for a split second that she’d just been pulling a joke on me–but then she frowned, totally serious, if looking more confused and puzzled than ever. “Is that…a problem?” she asks.

Oh, now you ask, I think. “Yes it’s a problem! I can’t room with a guy!!!”

She stared at me, at a complete loss for words. This should have tipped me off that there was more to all of this, but it didn’t. See, I was still thinking that, different continent though it might be, things in Europe couldn’t work that differently. Sure, okay, it was more than a little surprising that they hadn’t bothered to ask me, like any group of American students surely would have…but perhaps it was just an oversight; of course it was just an oversight. I just needed to explain to them that I was not eligible for such arrangements, and they would apologize and re-arrange everything at once, of course. Because that’s how these things work. Right?

So I burst out into the hall, still rather flustered by this startling bit of news. “We have a problem,” I said right off. Of course, everybody was standing right there in the hall, so there was no way to take care of things quietly. “I can’t room with a guy.”

Every single doggone head turned to look at me, and they stared as if I’d just beamed in from outer space babbling nonsense. There was a moment of silence. Then someone asked, in a tone of voice which said they were completely astounded, “That’s…a problem?”

At which point began what were perhaps the longest, most excruciating five minutes of my life, with the possible exception of this one oral report I had to give in sixth grade. Possibly. The upshot of it was that nobody had any idea what to do. They were first of all completely flabbergasted; it seemed to be practically inconceivable that they could have actually fallen in with such a relic from the distant past as to even put them in this situation. Elena in particular seemed to feel that I was being terribly rude and inconsiderate to be making a big deal out of this, and if it hadn’t been for the intervention of the guys–that is, Paul, who I guess had arranged everything in the first place and was now feeling a little bad about it–who basically put his foot down and insisted that Elena switch with me, I think I would have wound up rooming with a guy whether I liked it or not. Which of course would have been three times as awkward than if I just hadn’t said anything. Of course Maciek was standing right there through the whole discussion to boot, and once I realized that as far as they were concerned I was being the unreasonable one, I was terrified he would take the whole thing personally. He didn’t, thank God, but I was at the time I was almost certain he would be. After all, since for once the worst that I could imagine was actually coming true…and I mean, he’s one of the people I’ve been getting to be friends with over here. It’s not like I had to worry about ticking off someone I’d never see again.

I guess the thing is, as far as I can tell, people in Europe just don’t see gender as much as we still do in the U.S. Or maybe more accurately, the percentage of the population here that still takes the conservative view of such matters is much smaller than it is in the U.S. That’s the thing–if this had happened in the U.S., as I said, nobody would have been the least bit surprised at my reaction, even if they didn’t feel the same way. Here, it was like I was…completely unfathomable. Petra even asked me point-blank, once she’d returned to my room, “Why don’t you want to share a room with a guy?” I mean, how do you answer something like that? I’ve never had to answer a question like that. I always assumed it was something that people just…understood. Some people don’t feel comfortable sleeping in the same room with a member of the opposite sex. Period. I stuttered my way around the question for a minute, then finally settled for a rather lame, “I just don’t want my dad to come and shoot the guy afterwards.” Which actually worked better than I thought it would; she laughed, but at the same time her eyes kind of widened and she seemed to be thinking something along the lines of, Oh my gosh, that’s right, they have guns over there…she’s not…serious, is she? Sometimes coming from a country with the reputation of being rather trigger-happy has its advantages.

The odd thing is, I like their attitudes towards gender here. For the most part, I like being in a group of people where it practically doesn’t exist. It makes things so much less complicated. For instance, from what I can tell, at least, you don’t have to worry, if you make friends with a guy, that his girlfriend is going to get jealous. (At least, so far, that’s the impression I’m under; let’s hope I’m not being too optimistic.) People are a lot less likely, when they gather in groups, to unconsciously segregate themselves by gender. (A footnote here: I speak of the international students I’ve been hanging out with. The Spanish students at my dorm are a different story entirely. If anything I’d say they segregate themselves more than Americans do. But from what I understand Spanish culture in general is something out of the mainstream in Europe.) There just doesn’t seem to be this whole network of invisible barriers to navigate whenever it comes to dealing with someone of the opposite sex. And I love this, really; I wish it were more widespread at home. (I’m not saying that you never get this sort of interplay within groups of Americans, either–just that it’s not nearly as common as it seems to be here.)

But whether I agree with their worldview in principle or not, it’s simply not that easy to leave behind twenty-one years of cultural conditioning like it’s an old dress or something. Particularly not on thirty seconds’ notice.

So yes, that was my…adventure…for the weekend. Actually it was really embarrassing at the time, but at least looking back on it I can appreciate it makes a rather funny story. One of those this-would-be-hilarious-if-it-were-happening-to-someone-else moments. A rather sharp reminder that, yes, everyone here may be virtually fluent in English, and they may like eating at Burger King…but I’m definitely not in the United States anymore. Now, of course, comes the really tricky part: figuring out what rules they do play by. I mean, it really feels like that card game where the whole point of playing is to figure out what the rules are. And you just do it by trial and error, trial and error. I know there’s got to be some lines out there somewhere, but I seriously doubt I’ll realize it before I trip over them. Pray for me on this, please.

After all that, of course, Sunday was rather anticlimactic. We didn’t do much besides go to the Guggenheim and eat lunch in a really nice park before heading back to Segovia. The Guggenheim, ironically, was doing a special exhibition on American art which took up most of it, so I got to spend the time wandering around looking at portraits of George Washington and Sierra Nevada landscapes and early 20th-c. comic-book style posters or dadaist collages of pictures cut from the New York Times. There was actually one really cool painting of the battle between the U.S.S. Constitution and the H.M.S. Guierriere, because of course I was like, “Hey, I was on that ship just a few weeks ago! Look, that’s our ship, and that’s the British freaking out because their cannonballs are bouncing off our hull and we just demasted them. It’s a really famous battle…you’re not listening, are you.”

“It’s a really bad painting.”

“It’s an awesome painting!! What on earth are you talking about?”

“It looks two-dimensional.”

All right. Yes, it was a little flat. “It’s an early painting,” I pointed out.

“I’ve seen Medieval frescoes with better depth.”

“Now look here, this is a really famous battle we’re talking about, and–”

“And it’s a really bad painting.”

And so on. Maciek and I apparently have dynamically opposed taste in art. But you know how much I love to argue, so I really enjoyed myself. And there were quite a few really good paintings there–the one of the Constitution wasn’t that bad, but there were also some truly phenomenal ones, especially some of the later 19th-century ones, some of the landscapes–I wasted a lot of breath trying to explain that no, these were not overdramatized romantic-era paintings, it’s just that it actually looks like that–and some “scenes from everyday life.” Other than that, though, I’m sorry to say I didn’t get much out of the rest of the museum. Modern art just…I don’t think I will ever get it. One display was a big square of pieces of candy on the floor. And you were apparently allowed to take them. Another was a room with a few glowing green lines crisscrossing half of it; apparently it was supposed to make you feel that your personal space was being invaded. It sort of worked, in a small sort of way, but I’m still at a loss as to how that qualifies as art. Feel free to disagree with me.

I’ll say this, though–the Gugenheim building itself is really something quite spectacular. I’m not saying I’d want a house designed in the style, but it really does give you an incredible feeling of space when you’re inside of it–space and light, this huge, airy, floating feeling. And the outside of it really does look sort of like it was pieced together from the hulls of ships. We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside, and I somehow forgot to take a picture of the outside, but you can see it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guggenheim_Museum_Bilbao

And then here’s a picture of the park we ate lunch in. It was like this romanesque circular arbor with a fountain in the middle, all ivy and stone columns and flowers and water:

So, sorry I still haven’t written about this weekend. Since I didn’t study a bit, I’ve been a little swamped with homework. With any luck I’ll get a fair amount of reading done and still have time to write before bed tonight. Ack.

But I just had to mention, this Literature and Rock class struck me as really funny today. So the students taking this class are all like the perfect stereotype of someone who listens to lots of rock music: funky hair, dark, baggy clothes, Goth-type jewelry, with the occasional bright “punk” colors thrown in. So I walk into class today and I am particularly struck by this because, completely unintentionally, I was dressed today in a long blue velvet skirt, a turquoise, long-sleeved button-up blouse, a thick leather belt and leather boots, southwestern jewelry…and as I sat down I was just like, wow, I’m really lucky these people are in no position to recognize country when they see it. If this were America I’d get beat up after class.

Oh, and before I go, I tracked down some of those Whose Line Is It Anyway? skits that I thought were so funny–they’re called “Between the Lines.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ot47mPfglWU (on Bush)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RPTu79eqx8&mode=related&search= (also on Bush)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxOR8JtoVOI&mode=related&search= (on Kofi Annan)

http://tubearoo.com/articles/87138/Mock_The_Week_Between_The_Lines.html (on the Iranian president)

And if you like those, just search on YouTube or something…they make fun of EVERYBODY.

So today is a great day.  Why is today a great day?  Because the Internet is (FINALLY) up and working in my dorm, and I can now send emails and make phone calls on Skype without ever having to leave my room or pay money or sit a cold corner of the university hallway or anything.  I am very, very, very, VERY happy about this.

And as if that weren’t enough, I found out that Mommy bought me a plane ticket to come home for Christmas!!!  I guess London will just have to wait for another year.  So I will hopefully see you all sooner than expected: I’ll be back from December 24 to January 5.  And enjoying the warm weather very much, I might add.

All this is particularly good news coming after a somewhat nerve-wracking weekend.  Details to follow later today, I hope.

Oh, so I’ve been meaning to tell this funny little vignette for a week or two now, and I kept forgetting whenever I sit down to write.  I’m learning so much about other European countries here, from the Erasmus students!!!  For instance, did you know that Belgium is having huge political problems right now?  It seems that the Dutch and French sections of the country have simply been completely unable to reach an agreement about something, and the government’s been dissolved and they’re rewriting the constitution again and aren’t able to agree on it either…so the two Belgian students here are actually being faced with the possibility that their country will cease to exist, that they’ll have left one country and return to find it is now two.  They don’t seem too cracked up over it, though, at least from what I can see.  Belgium, it seems, is not exactly Switzerland; not only do they not know very much about the French part of the country, they don’t seem to care much either, and much more interestingly, they seem to identify themselves far more strongly as Europeans and members of the E.U. than as Belgians.

I find this interesting because it was the same attitude the Dutch woman I met last summer in Scotland took, and it re-evokes the question whether or not we may one day see a United States of Europe.  But when I asked one of the French students about this, asked if she thought this was a common attitude in Europe or if there would ever be any prospect of its becoming a single political unit, she said it really depends on the country.  Britain, for instance, continues doggedy refusing to admit even its proximity to the European geographical continent, at least as far as the people are concerned, though politically speaking they may technically belong to the E.U.  They hardly see themselves as European at all, much less over and above their identities as Brits.  (Notes From a Small Island spends a bit of time talking about this phenomenon–a great book.  You should all read it.)  And she said that she didn’t think the European-identity attitude was all that extensive in France or Germany, either.  She definitely didn’t believe that any European government would ever be induced to cede its political power to a higher body, however economically united it might become.  But I dunno…by some accounts, economics is by far the most powerful force in the world, and even if the French or the Germans or the Spanish still see themselves primarily as French and Germans and Spaniards, I have noticed almost everywhere (outside of Britain, I mean) an apparently growing level of curiosity about the rest of Europe, the desire to be more familiar with other European cultures and languages…maybe it’s because I’m already hanging out with students who are doing study abroad, so I’m getting a skewed sample.  But for instance, there was, I understand, a very popular movie that came out last year in Europe, which is basically about the Erasmus program (which is the European Union’s study abroad program) and about a French guy who goes to study in Barcelona, and the other European students from various countries he meets there, and the various cultural and historical conflicts they come up against and how they resolve them…I just find it all very interesting.  And I think I will be watching the E.U.’s continuing development with very special interest.  Not just as a matter of curiosity, either–I mean, if they ever did succeed in forming a successful, unified federal government, it would say a lot about the potential of democracy, as well as the power of multiculturalism, since while Europe’s individual countries may have lost a lot of its political power on the world stage in the last century or so, if it ever really did unify like that, we’d definitely be looking at a new superpower.  People keep saying we’re focusing so much on the Middle East we’re completely ignoring China…well, we may not even need to look as far afield as China if we’re talking about superpowers sneaking up on us behind our Iraq-obsessed backs.  Although I think China is likely to become a superpower much sooner than Europe.  (It’s interesting, isn’t it…the same world superpowers keep resurging over and over and over again.  Two thousand years ago, the Romans and the Chinese were by far the greatest political powers in the world, and now we seem to be coming full circle.  With, of course, the United States thrown in–the entire purpose of our existence seems to be as a perpetual wild card messing up all of history’s nice little patterns, doesn’t it?  I really need to think about this more…)

Wow, so that was a major digression.  And you’re probably all still wondering what the heck the E.U. has to do with the title of this blog, the answer to which is–nothing.  I got distracted.  So the really funny vignette I mentioned–

Well, mainly, it’s just that, it seems that in Poland they all have to take this class in school, on…I’m not sure exactly what to call it.  National security?  Emergency defensive measures?  I mean…it’s not just that the government or the school board of whatever there doesn’t seem to realize that the Cold War is over, but they seem to be going above and beyond the highest heights of American Cold-War-era paranoia.  Our parents had drills in school in which they all dove under their desks or evacuated to the bomb shelter.  The Polish students of today take entire classes in how to put on gas masks, anti-radiation protective suits, what to do if…well, to be specific: Maciek said he had a friend whose teacher for this class walked into class on the first day, pulled the cap off his pen with his teeth, threw it into the desk area and shouted, “Grenade!”  And gave a zero to anyone who didn’t immediately duck and cover.  Justyna (or maybe it was also Maciek, I don’t remember) said that in her class they’ve had relay races: run across the room, put on the anti-radiation suit, run back (apparently they’re hard to move in,) take it off, and pass it to the next person.  And I just got this sudden vision of Professor Moody (that’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, peoples…if you haven’t read it, READ IT) standing at the head of his class in Hogwarts and barking, “Constant vigilance!“

But I guess it’s understandable if you consider that, while no one may be planning on nuking or invading Eastern Europe anytime soon, they still have plenty of internal political issues which, combined with lots of former Cold War-era weapons sitting around in half-forgotten stockpiles, could understandably make people a little jumpy.  Still, the grenade thing was hysterical.  (Although, come to think of it, we might have some use for a “Defense Against the Dark Arts”-type class in America, too, with a slightly different focus.  I mean, I love that we learned how to disarm a gunman in my martial arts class.  What if everybody learned that?)

Speaking of the Polish government–random fact here, but apparently the government is currently headed by a pair of identical twin brothers: one the president, one the prime minister.  And the media in Poland apparently loves to do things like stop being in the street, get them on camera, and ask, “So, how do you tell the president and the prime minister apart?”  And people will come up with all kinds of answers, from, “Oh, it’s easy: the president is stupider,” to, “Well, if you look very closely at the prime minister’s cheek just a little above and to the left of his nose, there’s this tiny mole…”  I can’t even imagine.

I hope this post doesn’t come across as too disrespectful–part of it is that I’m getting all of this information from Maciek, who has a great sense of humor and absolutely no respect whatsoever for anything, his country’s government being near the top of that list.  But just to even the score, he’s introduced to me “Whose line is it anyway?” which you can get on YouTube, and the British version is especially hilarious.  They have this one game where one comedian stands up and pretends to be some famous political leader or other spotlight figure, and gives a speech–and then someone else stands up and translates.  They had a couple ones of Bush, which, I hate to say it, but–they were really apt.  And then one of the Iranian president (whose name I can’t remember) that’s just to die for.  You should check it out.

So, first of all, let’s get this straight: Spanish food is not (not, not, not) Mexican food.  No resemblance whatsoever, in fact.  Like, two totally different countries.  (Wait a minute…)  And it’s really…really…bland.  It’s sad–they don’t use sauces, like, at all.  You order a hamburger in a restaurant it comes without ketchup or mayonnaise or barbecue sauce or anything.  You have to ask for it, and then they look at you like you’re crazy.  (“Ketchup?  But…WHY???”)  Order a sub and they almost invariably have only one ingredient–some slices of ham, for instance.  They just don’t use sauce, especially with bread. At all.  Almost none of the foods have any sauce at all.  Fish filets, chicken breasts–even the French fries don’t necessarily come with ketchup.  And, what’s more, they put all their foods on separate plates.  I’ve taken to asking the cafeteria workers to dish all my food onto one plate and they think I’m crazy–one time she wouldn’t even do it, claimed I would ruin it.  *sigh*

So the culmination came last night when she was dishing me some potatoes that actually did have this sauce on them, (which hardly anybody seemed to have touched,) and when I asked for them, she warned me, “They’re a little spicy.”  Now, I don’t normally like *spicy* food but I thought, I can handle it if they’re just a little spicy.  So I sat down and tried them and…well, they only thing these potatoes were was–not bland.  Like, the sauce gave them taste.  But they weren’t even remotely spicy, like seriously, I was eating them looking for the spice, just a hint of spice, something…nada.  I don’t even know if you could find sauce that not spicy in Arizona.

So I have decided that all this immigration is definitely going to be a very good thing for Spain, if for nothing else than that there’s a peninsula full of taste buds that need to be awakened to their full potential.  And if you know any Mexican chefs, please…tell them their destiny awaits.