I just recently started thinking in Spanish again.  That is, I will put the thoughts from the inner conversation I have running in my head into Spanish.  Just because.  I like playing this game where I ease-drop on people speaking Spanish on the streets or in the markets, linger a bit more slowly in the range of their conversation (discretely, of course) to test if I can understand what they are talking about and how quickly I can do it, maybe even guess which country they are from.  It’s a nice pick-me-up.

Friday, I ran into a guy from the lab who’s from Columbia and, instead of chatting in English, we reverted to Spanish.  I was definitely a bit rusty.  (He admitted to it, too, after living in an English-speaking country for so long.)  But, boy, do I miss Spanish.  I miss reading the labels and signs in Spain (or even in the US), hearing it all around me and being pleasantly surprised and proud when I could figure out what was going on.  Speaking is what I miss most.  That constant struggle for the word, pronunciation, correct grammatical structure–all while trying to keep your cool and enjoy the flow of the exotic, foreign words coming out of your mouth.  It’s about optimizing the skills and tools you have on-the-fly in order to achieve some pre-determined goal (i.e., having a conversation).  This is exactly the challenge I love about research, engineering, even cooking, though I never thought of it that way.  Apparently my brain is craving some mental stimulation.  Speaking “Canadian” English certainly doesn’t afford to these same types of mental exercises, but I do like the surprise little chuckles I get when I hear a different pronunciation or word choice than I am used to.

I love food.  It’s more than oral fixation and sensual infatuation.  More than satisfying cravings or rumbly tummies.  It’s about the preparation process and the excitement of what may come.  It’s an appreciation of high quality products and the chase that it might entail.  But, most importantly, it’s about the shared experience surrounding food, the creation of new memories and, if you’re lucky, stirring up a fond nostalgia past ones.

Following this philosophy, I started my first day in Toronto with a batch of my Oat Everything Cookies.  That grew to a blooming tea party, exotic Asian fruit tasting day and a semi-regular routine of making ice cream using the newly purchased maker.  We record our recipes and brainstorm crazy, can’t-be-found-in-stores flavors, on a group HCIceCream web page.  Already made are Nutella, durian, Italian espresso and cake batter ice creams, as well as a papaya sorbet.  Surprisingly (or not), many of the flavor suggestions revolve around alcohol (e.g., Guinness milk chocolate).

My parents were also kind enough to give/lend me a bread machine, so I have been taking advantage of all the new flours and other raw ingredients that are available in the markets near my apartment and sharing that with my suite- and labmates.

I create and discover new things all the time, almost exclusively with the intent to share them with any- and everyone I can find. Thank you for nurturing my love affair, Toronto.

Being in Spain is not like living in some third-world country or even another planet, so there are a lot of things in common in terms of brands, values, and personalities. But, of course, there are some differences–not all are uniquely Spanish, but just new to me. Some are just city life versus my suburban upbringing. Most variations were easy to adjust to, but there are certainly some I never got used to over my four months there. After taking oodles of notes, I am excited to present the multiple part, quite extensive observations on How to be a Spaniard. Your preparation includes information on How Spaniards Do It, Say It, Eat It, and Live It. In just a few hours you will know practically everything there is to know, so click on those links, read on and study hard.

My original intention was to do mini-posts or to update the individual pages (you can always find them in the note running along the right gutter of the blog) as I learned about these things, but that didn’t exactly workout as planned. Instead, I let the notes accumulate in a giant Word doc that I have just now finished sifting through. (What a big weight off my chest.) Almost every little item on the list has a story behind it, so feel free to ask or let your imagination do the explaining.

I haven’t written much about my classes (with the exception of those concerts) because they pale in comparison to my adventures as a tourist traveler. But, since the semester is over, I feel I can appropriately discuss them now. Some of my classes were taught by Spaniards so I was able to experience the “official” Spanish classroom setting and expectations, if not merely because they were reflecting the values and experiences they had as students.

I found that my Spanish teachers seemed to have low expectations of the students (enough so that they would often beg people to turn in assignments or do their homework instead of leaving them behind or failing them for not doing their work), but then they would grade extremely hard or proudly announce to the class how well we had all done and not give out a single A.

Exams were also a tell-me-everything-you-know style where we were given very broad, open-ended questions and then expected to write for the time given and hopefully say enough and the right things to get a good grade. So many times we would receive comments asking us to include things that we knew but just didn’t realized that was really what they were looking for. In contrast, the essay-type exams I have taken tend to force you to make a stance or state your opinion and develop some sort of driving thesis, often with comments to include dates, artworks, formulas, etc. as a hint of what specifics you should include or not in the short amount of time given. Being the purpose-driven person that I am, I was not particularly pleased with this form of examinations.

Naturally because my school was smaller, the class size was as well (average 10 people) and the dynamics were quite different. It is true that Spanish students do not feel inclined to participate in class as many Americans know they should even if they choose not to.

Overall, I realized how badly I need an intellectual environment to thrive. Without a challenge present, I lost the invigorating aspect of academia that I so love. I went to class mostly for entertainment and to fill the hours, rather than to walk away thinking about some new concept or way of approaching the world. Information did not seem unique to me, but rather a regurgitation of so many other sources before and therefore unimpressive. Exams were something that, if I studied enough for them, I could get a good grade. In comparison to many exams I have taken at Penn (or many other American universities) in which no amount of studying would have changed my grade. I noticed the difference in the values and thinking styles of my peers abroad and it made me appreciate even more the intellectual environment at Penn.

Despite my intense disdain for the high-stress environment at Penn, I still missed my classes there. It felt weird to not have that huge crescendo of assignments, exams, and things to do at the end of the semester, though I didn’t exactly miss that chaos. It almost felt more like high school.

I am not trying to sound like a pretentious academic (because I would hope you know I am far from that), but merely acknowledge the differences and expose my realization for the need of an intellectual classroom and community to do and feel my best; something that I was always told by others but never quite internalized to this extent. Some of my peers also commented on this lack of academic regality, so it was not just a contrast that I was experiencing.

Another thing I never thought twice about was having a good library.  Our school library was very small, leaving us with problems of study space and poor resource selection.  This was particularly problematic for a final paper that I had to do because there simply were not enough books to thumb through, and my teacher had to restrict us and lower her expectations.  Surely it’s not the same, but I can see a bit more clearly what is meant by the disadvantage of being an inadequately funded school.  I also adore libraries in general, so I felt a little bit empty without one.  No adventures into bookland to find something new to pique my interest.  Looking back, I should have taken the time to explore a Spanish library, but I never got to it.

I will admit, though, that as much as it may appear to be, this is most certainly not a complaint about the semester, considering how difficult it would be for me have had so many adventures with a heavy course load. Though I have lived in Philly for three years now, I still do not know it nearly as well as any other city I visited for only 36 hours and have never gone to NYC, Boston, or D.C. like I was so determined to do when I chose to go to school out here. In fact, I probably don’t even know Detroit as well, and I have lived there for nearly all my life! By the time I graduate next year, I am going to change all of that. (Hopefully putting this in words and publicly declaring this will keep me honest.)

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away there was a little boy and a little girl. He lived in building #15, she in #12. Just around the corner from the bottom of their street, they both went through all their years of school before entering university and when they would later have children they, too, would attend this school. A block from the top of the street was their church and a bit further down, their post office. The park he spent hours running around in and she not as many, surrounded them on all sides except the East because that’s where the department stores and other little shops resided. A few minute walk to within that metropolitan area was a passage to the rest of the world. The carcenería, panadería, pharmacy, caf’é, bar, and alimentation store were also quite near, but with a little bit longer than that 2 minute walk there were plenty more choices. With everything so close to home, oh what a perfect place to live.

This land, of course, is Madrid and the two children are my host-mom and -dad. They really do have everything they need and use within a two block radius of their houses, granted that’s not saying too much because it is city living. As always seems to happen, they didn’t meet each other until after living over 10 years just a few doors apart and then it was another few years until they started dating.

The funniest part is that we are currently living in #15 where he grew up with his 15 brothers and sisters, though half of the flat was walled off and sold as kids moved out. In Spain, a large portion of the population lives with their family until they get married at around 26-30 years old, so it is not entirely remarkable that we have the same place.

This ‘passageway’ is the most connected Metro stop in Madrid, Moncloa, which gets me to the airport with one transfer and I can get back to it from practically any other site in the city. If I wanted to opt for the bus, at the bottom of the street is a stop on the most popular line that they use so often that they call it their ‘taxi.’

Unfortunately, though, the household is not such a happy, fairytale place. The four of them have no respect for each other and can hardly talk for 30 seconds before starting some sort of yelling fit. They don’t listen to each other and constantly complain or order the others around. There is no such thing as a constructive conversation and it makes it incredibly uncomfortable for the three of us to be in the middle of it. He insists he is always right and will correct any one of us for faulting, even at times telling us we don’t speak English properly. There is no personal sacrifice to make things easier for everyone else, the perfect example being the broken dishwasher that he didn’t have time to fix until the end of the week, but still managed to get to bed plenty early with some late-night sitcoms to rock him to sleep, leaving the daughter and wife in the kitchen scrubbing dishes. These remnenants of machismo may be cultural and are only aggravated by having two teenage children, but I have certainly heard of and met other families here where this is not such a problem.

Despite having the best of intentions, nothing gets done in a timely manner and things are forgotten about and blamed on all the rest of us. I know everyone is entitled to disagreements and skirmishes, but this really is of a different, dysfunctional caliber. At least they have now taken two mini-vacations to el campo and their families’ pueblos leaving us in peace and quiet for a few days like this weekend.

Out of the 80 or so photos from 20 students who submitted in the school’s first annual photo contest, I found some beginner’s luck and took home a second-place cash prize (waiting for the exchange rate to be really bad to get some good Dollars out of it)!  Just as everyone liked the Garlic Merchant, so did the judges.  The first-place prize went to a sunset shot by a body of water with the face of a girl lit-up in the shadows of the right-hand corner of the frame.

Since my five submissions were all digital, the school printed and framed them all for a mini-exhibition of the entrants.  Never before had I seen one of my shots developed, so it was exciting to see the cross-over from digital to print.  They looked pretty good at their large size, especially compared with the resolution and clarity of the other photos.  Though I have surrendered any rights to the photos, I was told that I will be able to take home my five framed images at the end of the semester.

My life is a 24-7 game of Taboo. Taboo, if you are not familiar, is a game where you have to describe the word on a card to your team without saying a list of commonly associated words, an act which earns you an obnoxious buzz from this special remote. I go to say something and buzz I don’t know that word. buzz That one won’t work either. buzz buzz I don’t know what conjugation to use. Mental buzz censorship is everywhere I look.

After my first week of extreme buzzing, I finally adapted. One strategy is to use circumlocution and describe the word I want with the vocabulary I know; talk your way out of the problem. For example, needle would be ‘the thing you use to sew.’ It’s usually a poetry technique so as to not directly state the word, but works perfectly well here.

You have to be a flexible, creative thinker as if you are doing the Sunday crossword or some other word game. I like that it’s hard to say clichés (simply because I don’t know them) because, as much as I use them, I think they are too much of a crutch, an excuse to not express yourself fully. One of my housemates needs to learn this skill because she tries to do strict English-Spanish translation and always resorts to using one of us as human dictionaries, assuming there is only one way to express what she wants. I do run into problems, though, when I try to be creative to describe something only to find out that it doesn’t translate well into Spanish.

When reading signs, menus, and the texts for my Spanish classes I tend to have good luck using the roots of words and then guess its meaning. For a while, I would go through the pain-staking process of looking up every unknown word, but now I just aim for getting the overall point (which is a better strategy anyway, even for English texts).

My classes in Spanish are not nearly as hard as I was expecting (especially the listening part–it’s so much easier to understand than to respond or create) because there is a natural thought progression and you usually know where the professor is going with an idea. There are also a lot of cognates like information is información, privileges is privilegios. Just from knowing English things in Spanish can be easier to understand. I can’t imagine trying to go from a non-Latin based language. In contrast, I still run into a lot of trouble at the dinner table because conversations jump all the time and the topics are quite specific, often full of slang or idioms I don’t know and matters that I would never before have encountered.

Since the present tense is the easiest structure to use, I will use dialog when recounting stories to repeat exactly what I heard someone else say and try to engage the listener so as to mask my mistakes and still get the idea across. Infinitive forms of verbs are also easy to use, so I construct sentences in the same basic forms so as to just insert the infinitive and avoid sounding too ignorant. With “I need to___” or “I am going to___” you can actually say pretty much everything.

Of course, context clues are the best tool. The physical situation, facial expressions, and gestures all help more than you realize when speaking your native tongue. I have avoided phone conversations for this reason, but when I had a problem with an airline ticket with Spanair, I surprised myself at my ability to understand and communicate with the operator, though I was very nervous and blushing the entire conversation.

And the easiest strategy of all is the cop-out method, where you completely change your thought and not mention anything to do with the difficult term. In the more extreme case when none of the above strategies works, you just give up entirely or cave-in to dictionary use. You can’t call me a wimp for having to look up the word tacky or to use the whiteboard in the kitchen to draw a safety pin.

I get by with my broken Spanish, though I wish it was better, of course. Sometimes I catch myself saying really stupid things, like using the regular rules for a word instead of the irregular that I know it is. I can only laugh when I translate what just came out of mouth because even I know it’s absolute garbage, let alone to a native speaker. On the other hand, I am both proud and excited to say that over the past few weeks clear Spanish has been just falling out of my mouth without having to think about it. Be it Spanish or even English, I think there is no hiding from the buzz.

Time sure does fly. Doesn’t seem like that long ago that I was posting my One Month Anniversary. Even though I have been traveling, studying, eating, observing, and experiencing Europe and Spain for three months (97 days, to be exact), I am excited to get back to the States. There are certainly times where I want more than anything to be back in the world that I understand, away from the excitement and adventures I find myself in out here.

But I trudge on, keeping in mind that “you don’t know the next time you will be in Europe” voice. Still planned are a trip Thursday to London (to see my mom!), Munich for a weekend, a bullfight, Real Madrid-Atletico Bilbao fútbol game, Nigel Kennedy concert, final exams, and a last hurrah to Sweden (to visit my only European kin) with a pit stop in London again (cheaper flight). Keep the reading going. It’s gonna be juicy.

I take pictures as if you were standing next to me and I wanted to point something out to you.  A tap on the shoulder and “hey, look at that!” moment.   If something makes me smile or catches me in the moment, snap, there goes another shot.  Maybe it’s a texture or represents something I learned that day.  And, of course, to remember what I’ve seen to share with the rest of the world that wasn’t there at that precise moment in time when I experienced something wonderful.

I am still quite timid about taking photos because there is this intrusive, mind-your-own- business aspect to it. In a creative writing class I took about telling stories out of photographs, I learned that it used to be a superstition that the camera would steal part of your soul and I, unfortunately for my photography attempts, tend to agree.

But I do love the challenge of trying to capture the scene and finding things that may have been overlooked by others, maybe even putting my own spin on a typical scene.  Since I am new to photography there is always something new to be learned from getting the settings right on the camera to a new technique.  My camera has been a great companion in all of my travels and adventures.  It gives me a purpose for being wherever I am, and makes me keep my friends and family in mind when they all are so far away–which can sometimes be a source of homesickness.

I first got semi-seriously interested in Photography last fall through our university’s newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian.  I was there Web Editor-In-Chief for a year and met some really interesting people in the Photo Department, so I was always jealous of their assignments and their expertise.   It was very easy to get involved because we always need bodies to put the paper out five days a week, especially with the over-scheduled lifestyle of Penn students.  They shoved an extremely fancy camera into our hands with the simple task of “take pictures of this event” and we were off.  I obviously have learned a lot since those first days of training, but I am still a toddler in the world of photography.

And in its own special realm of photography is photojournalism.  It is a different mindset than studio or artistic photographic because you must constantly be active; no posing or waiting.  Luck plays a huge role in success, as you have to be looking at the right spot at the right moment with your camera ready to get some of the most remarkable shots.  Thank goodness for digital photography to allow extremely fast, high quality practically unlimited images.  You need to be sentimental and able to capture raw emotion, but respectful so as to not make the subject uncomfortable or put yourself in danger.  You cannot be afraid of anything and the more daring, often the better.  Your mind should be open and your eyes always darting around, taking in the scene and both its trivial and important moments.  So there;s the mental peptalk of being a photog, as many call themselves.  Do that with some sweet gear and you are on your way!

With that said, I now feel justified for taking over 200 pictures the past 36 hours in Barcelona!  Watch out for those coming soon in a blog post at a computer near you.

My brain is not convinced.  Whenever I catch a few minutes of Spanish TV, it seems hard to believe that the words are actually coming out of the person who is speaking’s mouth.  I stare and stare like I am at an art museum to see if the movements align with the words cascading out of the person’s mouth.  I am one of those people who gets slightly annoyed with the screen and the sound get out of sync.  It’s not that I can read lips very well, but my brain somehow knows something is off and won’t let it be.

From Spanish classes in high school the only contact we had with “real” Spanish was through watching DVDs with the Spanish dubbing, so I naturally associate the TV and movies here with those experiences.   My host family here is always watching American movies that are dubbed over, so that doesn’t help to alleviate the habit.  It doesn’t matter if it’s the news or a sitcom or even a commercial that was obviously originally made in Spain.  It all just seems fake like part of the story is being censored (and that’s disregarding any translation problems I have), but it is quite an amusing mind game nonetheless.