The good, the bad, and the ugly

My 21st birthday!

Rent prices in DC...

Elevation chart for the Nike women's half marathon - holy HILLS

Feeling the love from hundreds of miles away

In my part of the world, I've been 21 for almost 15 hours and I have certainly felt the love. Thank you to everyone who sends their best wishes!

Yes, even you Ralph Castro and the Stanford Substance Abuse Prevention Program...

The above picture reads: "If you choose to celebrate with alcohol. Be Safe." And then goes on to list strategies to utilize in order to be socially responsible while drinking alcohol. I received this gem in my inbox yesterday as Stanford's way of encouraging me to be drink responsibly. 

Rockin' & Rollin' in Madrid

Have you ever run so much that you threw up? Ya, me either, but that was just one of the horrific images of race day going through my mind as I went to bed last night. I've had plenty of friends - soccer playing athletes who basically run for a living - who have told me of grueling workouts that ended with a reappearance of their breakfast.

You see, today I ran my first race ever: the Rock & Roll Madrid 10K. I knew I was being completely melodramatic, envisioning myself getting dead last behind all the 80 yr old runners (who actually rocked it out there), or worse- passing out somewhere along the course and having to get picked up by a race truck and getting carted to the finish line. I know it was just 10 km, which is just about 6.25 miles and not a big deal to most people, but I couldn't help feeling a little guilty for not training/taking care of myself the way I should in the days leading up to the race.

My family back home has jumped on the running bandwagon over the past year or so, and I have to admit that running a race has always been something I have wanted to do. It was one of those things I have never seriously tried - back when I ran track I always did sprints and as a cheerleader you need more stamina for intense bursts rather than running endurance - but I felt it would be a good thing to try at least once.

Back on March 9 I decided to sign up for a race in Madrid. I realized quickly that I do not like city running. All the people, the traffic, starting and stopping - it's hard enough for me to remain interested in it without all the distractions. That meant that whenever I didn't have my cozy little athletic park with a neatly marked track, I hardly did any running. I also decided to start celebrating my 21st birthday earlier this week, so by the time Saturday night rolled around, I feared I might not actually make it to the end of the 10 km.

I loved the energy at the race expo and lining up at the corrals in the morning was absolutely surreal. The first half of the course was uphill - which was just wonderful - right at the 4 km we turn a corner and start heading downhill (hallelujah!), and just as I was telling myself that the race-makers are merciful, I faced the hill of death.

It doesn't seem as awful on GoogleMaps as it did in person...

Finished off the rest of the course, thankful for the relative lack of hills and doing my best to not look like death in my race photos. I was pleasantly surprised to realize I felt pretty good throughout the race, and in the end, none of the terrible outcomes I had envisioned for myself came true - #winning! Now I have even more to celebrate this Tuesday ;)

This cannot be real life

I've lived my fair share of eccentricities - I mean, I go to Stanford for goodness' sake - but some moments are too ridiculous not to share.

1. Madrid zombie march- quite a strange gathering to stumble upon while on a leisurely stroll through the city. Yes, zombies are a thing here..
2. Walked head on into a parking meter yesterday. Completely sober. 
3. Witnessed a father holding his butt-naked child so she could pee in the street. Not discreetly in some alley, but rather in full view on one of the busiest streets in Madrid (Paseo de la Castellana).

Never a dull moment here in Madrid...

And now the countdown begins to the rest of my jam-packed spring quarter! Going back to normal college responsibilities is going to be so difficult after this...

April 22: Rock & Roll 10K race
April 24: MY 21st BIRTHDAY!!
April 28-May 2: Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage in Galicia, Spain
May 3-6: Barcelona
May 10-13: Marrakesh, Morocco
May 18-20: BING trip (destination TBA lolz)
May 25-27: Seville
May 31-June 4: Paris, France (I see you, Paris people!)
June 15: destination El Paso, Texas, USA

BOSP Stanford in Madrid, you have treated me well!

Words with Friends

I've written before about the potential linguistic hazards of immersing yourself in a foreign country, specifically the anxiety that comes with meeting the family that will care and (hopefully) love you for the next few months. You want to make a good impression, maybe crack a witty joke to ease the tension. But the trouble lies in the fact that sometimes the sounds that come out of your mouth are not quite what your inner thought processes were trying to say. 

When a pretty girl comes up to you at a club, carefully bats her eyes, and then asks you something you can barely hear, much less understand, how are you supposed to be the suave, ladies man you know you really are? Hypothetical situation, of course, but a fair example nonetheless of how much language shapes your perceptions and the way you wish to be perceived. 

So maybe you know a bit of Spanish and maybe you're confident that your good looks and charming smile will be enough to win this girl over (I mean, she walked over to you, right?), you're still in the danger zone that is the Spanish language. And what do I mean by that? Well, Spanish is a highly diverse language. Aside from the various forms of Spanish within the Iberian peninsula, the Spanish from Latin America is very different from the Spanish of Spain (as I have so comically learned over the past few months). 

On one of the very first nights of winter quarter when my roommate and I were getting ready to go out, my host mother gave us her best wishes and then said "no se preocupen en coger un taxi al fin de la noche." I stopped mid-whatever I was doing and furrowed my brow- I must not have heard correctly. 

For a moment, I forgot that "coger" in Spain means something very different from what it connotes in Mexico. While she meant to say "don't worry about getting a taxi at the end of the night," I (new to castellano Spanish lingo) was sure she had implied something about having sex in a taxi. Little things like that continued to happen throughout the quarter, though most of them had nothing to do with sex and those that were weren't made in compromising situations. 

Here's a YouTube video some Argentinean friends of mine showed me last quarter after a long weekend of intercultural linguistic exchange, which I think nicely sums up how hard Spanish is to understand even among our own kind: Que difícil es hablar el español (translation: it's hard to speak Spanish)

I'm currently taking a sociology class here that discusses behavior and the messages it communicates. (I absolutely adore this class and will probably write more about it later) but basically, this means that I have been constantly thinking about how our linguistic environment has shaped the roles that we play. Within our families, among our friends, while trying to flirt, even while trying to start up small talk just to get to know a person, how do we negotiate the language barrier in order to convey the right message? How well do we utilize and observe the multitude of communication cues outside of language? Our "words with friends" aren't always what we intend them to be, and to me that is absolutely fascinating.

p.s. a bunch of people in the spring program just came back from visiting Lisbon and it made me nostalgic - hence all the Portugal pictures- holla to all the ladies I traveled with! 

That is SO meta

After getting over the complete rant which was my last post, I realized that I made it sound as though Spanish social/nightlife is some sort of savage life fueled by alcohol and hormones. Let me edit that to say that that is not the message I was trying to get across- perhaps it would have been better to start off by explaining the weird transition from winter to spring that can only be explained by one word: META

Meta is a prefix added to a word in order to describe the concept reflected on itself. The first example given by Wikipedia is metadata: data (information like who produced it, where, why) about data. There is currently a course offered in my program about metafiction - works of fiction where the authors manipulate the craft because they are conscious of the fact that they are producing fiction, almost like a type of hyper-awareness of a situation.

My own participation in this "meta" phenomenon couldn't have been more clearly evident this afternoon when we met with the "chicos españoles" for a group activity after class. The chicos españoles are college aged Spanish students who help orient us throughout the quarter, and for most of the Spanish courses it is required to have weekly chats with one of these students. I got to know a couple of the chicos really well and actually had alot of fun during my weekly chats. 

This afternoon I had my first weekly chat of the quarter and I was pleasantly surprised at the ease with which I could talk to the chica española. It felt much more like catching up with an old friend rather than a program component (so is this what it feels like to have Spanish friends?).

As everyone else is trying to figure out bus routes, our weekly meal allowances, and who the heck these chicos españoles are - I'm reliving my own experiences from back in January. All the advice and anecdotes, which are only partly directed at me, jog my memories of Madrid which seem so long ago but are somehow so alive in my daily life. 

All of this has brought a hyper-awareness of my place in Spanish society. On one hand, I feel much more comfortable with my lifestyle here but I am also strangely aware of being the veteran in a new group. Madrid has become such a comfort to me that it seems odd to go through the process of adjustment with classes, classmates, and various shenanigans here and there. My observations about the nightlife were mostly a rant sparked by my place in limbo as not quite the insider yet but not quite the outsider anymore.

So if I can’t figure out how to deal with it yet, at least now I have a name for it. 

¿Cómo se dice "PDA"?

Spring break + spring quarter orientation + Semana Santa in Madrid = 3 weeks of vacation (basically), clearly I live a hard life out here ;)

The glorious weather that teased us during the end of winter quarter was interrupted by a few days of rain and cold weather, but it seems like the next few days will be much more spring-like

After returning from Cataluña last weekend, everyone began settling in to new host-families, new classes, and all that comes with living in a foreign country. Life went on more or less as usual for me but I was particularly happy to get home-cooked meals again.

Since it was also Semana Santa - the week leading up to Easter - the whole city, it seems like, was on vacation and we got a long weekend off from class. Naturally, this meant travels (Sevilla, Granada, Cuenca & Toledo) and lots of nights out on the town.

Toledo, Spain (not Ohio)

I have also come to realize that, while I have managed to adapt to quite a few things in Spain during my stay here, there are some things that I think I will never get accustomed to. Take for example, the incessant PDA that surrounds you anytime you walk in a park or any semi-secluded area after about 8pm. And by PDA, I don't mean some kissing, hand-holding, or the occasional (unnecessary but generally) harmless hugging and clinging that you see in the US.

This is normal PDA put on steroids- I'll let your imagination take care of that one for me. During one of our tours through a little romantic spot in Madrid, a girl in our group rather appallingly commented to me that she saw a man standing about 5 meters from us with his hand up a girls skirt. I semi-brushed it off and said something like "ya it's normal" and thought about adding "you'll get used to it," except for the fact that you really don't.

Another related topic that just doesn't settle well with me is the club culture. Men, women, boys/girls, dancing, and alcohol all mixing together late at night are obviously a combination that can lead to some provocative outcomes. But being a foreigner, it's also interesting to see the ways men try to spin their invitations to seem innocent in order to convince you to dance with them. After a couple times, though, you realize that no matter what they say, they will try to get very "friendly" with you.

At a club once last quarter, a guy came up to me and tried to dance with me (without asking, of course). By this point in the quarter, I was fed up with creepers at clubs so I immediately stopped dancing and gave him a dirty look, which then prompted him to ask me why I didn't want to dance with him. I said I was doing just fine dancing with my girlfriends, to which he gave me a skeptical look and said something like, "wow there's no need to think dirty, all I want to do is dance with you, nothing else."

Everything about him- the way he approached me and the fact that he responded with that choice of words when I said nothing about doing anything other than dancing - signaled to me that he had other things on this mind. Poor fool.

I love dancing and I still really enjoy going out to clubs, but now I know to be prepared with my cara de perra

What should we call me

A new quarter begins today, with springtime weather and a whole new group of people- quite different overall from the winter group (but  maybe that's just my perspective as a veteran coming through). Our orientation was spent in Catalonia, with the first part in Barcelona and the second part in a coastal town in Costa Brava. 

The day we arrived in Barcelona was the day of a general labor protest in Spain. After the huge gathering of people we saw in Lisbon for their strike, the strike in Barcelona seemed much smaller but was still no less full of action. We had our usual educational portion of the trip where we visited the historic district and learned a bit about the history of this region. 

During our time off we took some went to see what the protest was all about - this is a part of the cultural experience, after all.

The highlight of the trip, and one of the primary reasons why I wanted to study in Spain in the first place, was visiting La Sagrada Familia, Antonio Gaudi's masterpiece in Barcelona- stunning in ways a photograph cannot capture. 

We got to see lots of Gaudi's work at the Park Güell 

and later visited Salvador Dali's museum

The next part of the trip was spent in a coastal town - I especially appreciate the fact that Stanford gives us swanky hotels on the beach for trips like these :) 

Beautiful location + lots of free time + late nights = good times right from the start. I have a feeling that the #whatshouldwecallme memes we passed around last quarter will make a reappearance.

Our trip back from Barcelona was long and tiring. We stopped about halfway through to visit El Monasterio de la Piedra, which was this beautiful reserve with waterfalls and a walking trail all around. It was the perfect way to stretch our legs and get the blood circulating back into our brains. 

I love traveling and I really enjoy our trips with the program, but I couldn't help but breathe a sigh of relief to be back in Madrid and know I can take some time to decompress from all the bus rides I have had over the past 2 weeks.