It's been one week

Hopefully this doesn’t bore you all to tears, but before I get into the good stuff, I figure I should talk some about my classes.

I just finished my first week of orientation classes, and they’ve been going really well. And by really well, I mean we never have homework and this course is pass/fail. Every morning we have two hour-and-a-half classes, one on Spanish history from 1931 onwards and the other on Spanish lit. I really love my history professor and my lit professor is just OK. It’s funny to look back now and think that I used to want to be an English major.

OK, I think that counts as enough about my classes.

After classes we generally have some kind of tour to go on, and we’ve seen some really cool places like the Alhambra and Generalife (Hen-er-all-ee-fey, not General-life as some of us thought). Thursday we had the day off though and I took one of the best siestas of my life. We’re all so exhausted from our very full days, and free time for us very often ends in a nap.

Friday night the monitores took us to a free outdoor rock concert literally right across the street from our hotel. I think that more free outdoor rock concerts would make the world a better place. Also, this past weekend we took a two day trip to Ronda, another town in southern Spain about 2 hours from Granada. As everything seems to be here, it was breathtakingly beautiful, complete with mountains, rolling hills, blooming flowers, and olive groves. Looking out from the edge of a cliff and seeing land for miles and miles is one of the most beautiful views imaginable. It’s a shame that America is losing what natural beauty it has to shopping malls and housing developments.

If I tried to tell you a coherent story about all the other things that have been going on this past week, this post would end up being obscenely long. So instead, I’m just going to tell you all the things I’ve learned during my first week and a half in Spain.

Spaniards smoke all the time and everywhere. People are allowed to smoke inside in most places, so going to a restaurant or a bar generally leaves my hair and clothes smelling like smoke. Spaniards also really dig ham, even in their vegetables.

Also, there are very few Jews in Spain. I guess expelling us all in the 1400s left a lot of Jews looking for real estate elsewhere. I ended up telling Cristina (the monitor) that I was Jewish, and she asked me whether Jews really had a lot of money or if it was just a stereotype. Clearly this wasn’t meant to be derogatory, she just plain didn’t know. It definitely took me aback a little though. Similarly, Spaniards have very different ideas about what is racist or offensive and don’t seem to have the same concern with political correctness that Americans do. One of the monitores made a comment about people of color that would be considered very offensive in the U.S. but is pretty socially acceptable in Spain. Another student on the program and I spent a good ten minutes trying to explain race relations in the US and why comments like that aren’t socially acceptable for us. Clearly, the language barrier wasn’t very helpful with that.

Personal space isn't really as big here as it is in the States either. If you're in someone's way, they will likely touch your waist or your shoulder to move you out of the way in addition to saying the Spanish equivalent of "excuse me." Acquaintances are greeted with a kiss on each cheek at the very least, friends will walk down the street holding hands, and lovers make out all the time in public. Spain is a very sociable and physically expressive place as far as I can tell.

Also, moving to a country with a different language is hard and scary as hell sometimes. It really gives me a whole new perspective on what it must be like for immigrants who come into the U.S. and often don’t speak English. Sometimes it’s difficult just knowing that I’ll be here for four months, I can’t imagine what it must feel like to know that you’d never go home again.

Overall things are still going great here in Granada, though most people (myself included) are ready to move to Madrid so we can finally settle in. Granada is beautiful and really fun, but it’ll be nice when I’m no longer living out of a suitcase and sharing a tiny hotel room with two roommates (even though I couldn’t have asked for two nicer people to live with).