Hey, so the other links are no longer valid to go see the pictures, so I have loaded them onto photobucket. I took them straight from facebook to photobucket, so the quality is not great, but the same as if they were still on facebook. Though I'm pretty sure the photos are all out of order now. Here they are anyway:
Getting Here and Calling it Home
Sevilla (Seville)
Foreigners, Halloween and Seville with the Kids
Enjoy!
Friday, November 26, 2010
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Counting the Days
Time to write again already? Yeah, I trail off after a while and don’t post as often. It’s already starting to happen.
Housekeeping: My address will probably be changing soon, but I will be able to get anything that is sent to me at the address I gave before. Check back for the change of address sometime. Also, new photos are up on facebook. Only a few. Here is the address for the new album:
Foreigners, Halloween, and Seville with the kids
Not a whole lot new to report. The government still has not paid me for the first time, meaning that I’m not off on grand excursions. If I spend my American money now to visit great places, I get hit with the exchange fees. Then I won’t visit all those places later because I already have, which means I won’t spend the euros tin my Spanish bank account, which means that I might have some left over. And then I would have to change that over to USD at the end of my stay and get hit with exchange fees on that side too. So what I’m attempting to do is not spend any more American dough and try to wait to travel until I have been paid. But my region has to have the paperwork from ALL of the Auxiliares (my title here) from my region turned in (and the paperwork includes the NIE—Identity card for foreigners—and direct deposit bank account information for each and every Auxiliar), approved, and whatever-ed before they can start paying any of us. So I’ve had all my stuff turned in for over a month, but that doesn’t really matter because they still have not paid me. I’m really rooting for Spain to get their act together on it.
And it’s turning out to be harder than I thought to not spend money. It’s cool though, because I’ve been doing a lot of things for free and getting creative on how to do things, but it really limits what I can do. I wanted to go to Don Benito or Mérida this weekend to see if I could catch a showing of Harry Potter if it was there, but alas, that will not happen just yet.
Not only that, but I’ve been eating myself completely out of food more quickly than I thought. I’m down to a package of linguini with no sauce to put on it, half a package of rice, a tiny can of tuna, two slices of bread, liver spread, four or five carrots, and an onion. Plus, I’m a shitty cook, so all these things don’t mean much except that sometimes I eat tuna right out of the can or plain rice. And the place where I live does not have spices. Well, it has about three different jars of pepper, three jars of sweet pepper, a pizza spice mixture, and two jars of coloring for paella. My current self-imposed poverty is making me a little hungry. Sometimes I wish for the days from a month ago where my nerves had me eating like a bird. Suddenly when I need that out-of-whack metabolism, I start eating like a horse instead.
Oh well though. I was doing pretty well for a while on cooking. This is the girl who has to learn how to cook something as simple as rice from her little brother. But I was making a wicked spaghetti sauce when I had tomatoes. And yesterday I tried to make caramelized carrots, which didn’t work, but they tasted pretty good. I was satisfied anyway.
Mom comes in three weeks! Of course, I have to make it through Thanksgiving first, but that shouldn’t be too bad. At least I don’t have to watch football. Or clean up the dishes while the men watch football.
I’m struggling to keep warm. I keep a radiator heater that is supposed to go under the kitchen table on in my room at all times and occasionally have to bring in the space heater to get the temperature up again. I have enough blankets, so sleeping is not a big deal, but there is no central heating, so I try to just heat one room—my room. But that makes the rest of the house pretty miserable. Which means then that I hate getting up in the morning because my room gets a little colder at night, but then also I know I have to venture out into the kitchen for breakfast and to the bathroom, both of which just make me like ice! I need to figure out something to deal with the cold.
The stupid part is that I’m cold ALL THE TIME. I was cold this last summer a lot. I’m trying to figure out if there is something actually wrong with me, or if I just need to stop being a baby. It’s been this way since I came home from Ecuador and I felt like Ecuador was a different kind of cold. Sure, it was perpetual spring there, but there was no indoor heating and the cold just sank into your bone, where it was almost impossible to warm up. My family can attest to how cold it could get, even if the weather was fairly tepid. I was in a winter of 60 degrees that was way worse than the winters back in Idaho of cold snaps that get down to -30 degrees and lower.
And now I don’t know how to make myself be a warm-blooded Idahoan again. I crave the sunshine, the heaters, and hot footbaths. I’ve tried to just deal with it, but it doesn’t work. I went through a series of tests last January checking for nutrient deficiencies or low thyroid and other levels (I was being tested for other reasons but I can apply the results to this too) and everything turned out to be normal. Compared to a lot of Americans, I’m on the thinner end, but I’m not too skinny. Certainly not scarily skinny. And it’s not that I wear too few of clothes… I bundle up, let me tell you. I’ve even gotten to the point where I’m wearing two pairs of pants in the evenings, and the poor kids at the school probably think I don’t have another sweater because I have to wear all my layers every day. I have no other symptoms, like it’s not that I have some other disease that has a side-effect of constant temperature regulation issues, because I don’t have any other noticeable side-effects. What could it be? Actually, if anyone has ideas about why I’m cold all the time, please let me know. It’s a mystery to me and is proving to make my life a little more challenging than I’d like!
My dueña (owner of the house) comes home sometime around December 10th, which is the day that my mum comes into town. So that’s a bummer. I can just see my mum having to hide in her room because Manuela just wants to chat her ear off, even though my mom speaks little Spanish and Manuela is unintelligible most times even to me. I have to find a new place to live. Victor, the head of studies at my school, is undertaking a search for me, but I don’t know what it is going to produce. There aren’t a lot of places available and I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything available that I could share with anyone, meaning that my rent is bound to be pretty expensive. Hopefully it would have central heating though!
I think I’m going to start doing shout-outs in the middle of blog posts to see if that person is reading. This post’s shout-out is David Kuhl. Love ya, bro.
I spent 15% of my net worth today on stamps. €1.56. Yep. I’m a little stressed about only having €8.44 left. And the lunch I ate today consisted of chicken soup (boiled water with a bullion chicken cube mixed in) and linguini noodles with fried garlic and olive oil on top. Last night I was going to eat my last can of tuna with some bread for dinner, so I opened the can and put it in a bowl and then accidentally dropped it to the floor, where it splattered over everything—on the floor, the fan, the refrigerator. It was tuna in olive oil and I spilled it on my favorite pair of slacks, so I pulled them off quickly, got another pair of pants and went to my creepy internet-mooching corner to look up olive oil removal from fabric without much hope of fixing it. I was supposed to blot with paper towel, then spread baking soda or cornstarch on it, and if it still remained, dish soap. I had no paper towels, so I tried to use toilet paper as a substitute. That doesn’t hold up as well as paper towels. No baking soda or cornstarch in the house. Less than a teaspoon of dish soap. I did the best I could, but I don’t doubt that the slacks will always have a small oil mark on them.
And I just went shopping for what will probably be the last time until I get paid. It’s good for me to be counting up each cent that goes into my shopping cart, because I’m learning the true cost of things. I bought two large-ish cans of tomato chunks (I don’t know how to say it in English—cubed? But they’re kinda smashed and stuff) for spaghetti sauce, two packages of noodles that should feed me for a week I’m hoping, a loaf of bread, cereal, milk, and orange juice. Orange juice was not on the list, but they had it for really cheap and I figured it would help keep me a little less scurvy-ish. Now if I can just control my appetite a little better, I think I’ll do fine.
The only problem is that I eat when I am stressed. I crave the feeling of being stuffed with carbs and I eat until there is nothing left. And I think to myself, if I just eat myself out of bread, I’ll stop craving the carbs because I won’t have any left. But then I just start eating things like liver spread straight out of the jar.
After-school classes went well this week. We talked about lots of things without much awkwardness in my class with the two older kids and we made “Thanksgiving Books” with the younger kids. My markers are not going to make it through the time with the younger kids. They really do a number on them.
And normal classes are going pretty well, although I still feel a little silly and ineffective. I definitely don’t like being an ineffective person. But I got to go with the 5th and 6th graders this last Monday to Seville, which was cool. I got to get into all the museums for free. Of course, I had already seen all of the museums we went into, but there were other portions of them open this time that were not open the last time. For instance, in the cathedral, the tower was open, so I got to climb somewhere around 15 stories by way of a cool stone ramp up to the top of this tower that overlooked the city. It was great. Plus, 11 year olds move slower than my last traveling partner, so I didn’t feel bad about taking my time to look at something this time around.
Today is a lazy day. I’m hanging out in my living room typing out correspondences in Word and then going to the corner near the school to catch enough internet to send them off to their recipients. I’m doing my best to not want snacking to be a part of my lazy day. There’s not much else to report, so please have a good week and a good Thanksgiving. Please eat some extra yams for me and for my immediate Kuhl family: eat some extra of mom’s amazing cranberry relish for me. Love you all.
Emily
Housekeeping: My address will probably be changing soon, but I will be able to get anything that is sent to me at the address I gave before. Check back for the change of address sometime. Also, new photos are up on facebook. Only a few. Here is the address for the new album:
Foreigners, Halloween, and Seville with the kids
Not a whole lot new to report. The government still has not paid me for the first time, meaning that I’m not off on grand excursions. If I spend my American money now to visit great places, I get hit with the exchange fees. Then I won’t visit all those places later because I already have, which means I won’t spend the euros tin my Spanish bank account, which means that I might have some left over. And then I would have to change that over to USD at the end of my stay and get hit with exchange fees on that side too. So what I’m attempting to do is not spend any more American dough and try to wait to travel until I have been paid. But my region has to have the paperwork from ALL of the Auxiliares (my title here) from my region turned in (and the paperwork includes the NIE—Identity card for foreigners—and direct deposit bank account information for each and every Auxiliar), approved, and whatever-ed before they can start paying any of us. So I’ve had all my stuff turned in for over a month, but that doesn’t really matter because they still have not paid me. I’m really rooting for Spain to get their act together on it.
And it’s turning out to be harder than I thought to not spend money. It’s cool though, because I’ve been doing a lot of things for free and getting creative on how to do things, but it really limits what I can do. I wanted to go to Don Benito or Mérida this weekend to see if I could catch a showing of Harry Potter if it was there, but alas, that will not happen just yet.
Not only that, but I’ve been eating myself completely out of food more quickly than I thought. I’m down to a package of linguini with no sauce to put on it, half a package of rice, a tiny can of tuna, two slices of bread, liver spread, four or five carrots, and an onion. Plus, I’m a shitty cook, so all these things don’t mean much except that sometimes I eat tuna right out of the can or plain rice. And the place where I live does not have spices. Well, it has about three different jars of pepper, three jars of sweet pepper, a pizza spice mixture, and two jars of coloring for paella. My current self-imposed poverty is making me a little hungry. Sometimes I wish for the days from a month ago where my nerves had me eating like a bird. Suddenly when I need that out-of-whack metabolism, I start eating like a horse instead.
Oh well though. I was doing pretty well for a while on cooking. This is the girl who has to learn how to cook something as simple as rice from her little brother. But I was making a wicked spaghetti sauce when I had tomatoes. And yesterday I tried to make caramelized carrots, which didn’t work, but they tasted pretty good. I was satisfied anyway.
Mom comes in three weeks! Of course, I have to make it through Thanksgiving first, but that shouldn’t be too bad. At least I don’t have to watch football. Or clean up the dishes while the men watch football.
I’m struggling to keep warm. I keep a radiator heater that is supposed to go under the kitchen table on in my room at all times and occasionally have to bring in the space heater to get the temperature up again. I have enough blankets, so sleeping is not a big deal, but there is no central heating, so I try to just heat one room—my room. But that makes the rest of the house pretty miserable. Which means then that I hate getting up in the morning because my room gets a little colder at night, but then also I know I have to venture out into the kitchen for breakfast and to the bathroom, both of which just make me like ice! I need to figure out something to deal with the cold.
The stupid part is that I’m cold ALL THE TIME. I was cold this last summer a lot. I’m trying to figure out if there is something actually wrong with me, or if I just need to stop being a baby. It’s been this way since I came home from Ecuador and I felt like Ecuador was a different kind of cold. Sure, it was perpetual spring there, but there was no indoor heating and the cold just sank into your bone, where it was almost impossible to warm up. My family can attest to how cold it could get, even if the weather was fairly tepid. I was in a winter of 60 degrees that was way worse than the winters back in Idaho of cold snaps that get down to -30 degrees and lower.
And now I don’t know how to make myself be a warm-blooded Idahoan again. I crave the sunshine, the heaters, and hot footbaths. I’ve tried to just deal with it, but it doesn’t work. I went through a series of tests last January checking for nutrient deficiencies or low thyroid and other levels (I was being tested for other reasons but I can apply the results to this too) and everything turned out to be normal. Compared to a lot of Americans, I’m on the thinner end, but I’m not too skinny. Certainly not scarily skinny. And it’s not that I wear too few of clothes… I bundle up, let me tell you. I’ve even gotten to the point where I’m wearing two pairs of pants in the evenings, and the poor kids at the school probably think I don’t have another sweater because I have to wear all my layers every day. I have no other symptoms, like it’s not that I have some other disease that has a side-effect of constant temperature regulation issues, because I don’t have any other noticeable side-effects. What could it be? Actually, if anyone has ideas about why I’m cold all the time, please let me know. It’s a mystery to me and is proving to make my life a little more challenging than I’d like!
My dueña (owner of the house) comes home sometime around December 10th, which is the day that my mum comes into town. So that’s a bummer. I can just see my mum having to hide in her room because Manuela just wants to chat her ear off, even though my mom speaks little Spanish and Manuela is unintelligible most times even to me. I have to find a new place to live. Victor, the head of studies at my school, is undertaking a search for me, but I don’t know what it is going to produce. There aren’t a lot of places available and I’m pretty sure there isn’t anything available that I could share with anyone, meaning that my rent is bound to be pretty expensive. Hopefully it would have central heating though!
I think I’m going to start doing shout-outs in the middle of blog posts to see if that person is reading. This post’s shout-out is David Kuhl. Love ya, bro.
I spent 15% of my net worth today on stamps. €1.56. Yep. I’m a little stressed about only having €8.44 left. And the lunch I ate today consisted of chicken soup (boiled water with a bullion chicken cube mixed in) and linguini noodles with fried garlic and olive oil on top. Last night I was going to eat my last can of tuna with some bread for dinner, so I opened the can and put it in a bowl and then accidentally dropped it to the floor, where it splattered over everything—on the floor, the fan, the refrigerator. It was tuna in olive oil and I spilled it on my favorite pair of slacks, so I pulled them off quickly, got another pair of pants and went to my creepy internet-mooching corner to look up olive oil removal from fabric without much hope of fixing it. I was supposed to blot with paper towel, then spread baking soda or cornstarch on it, and if it still remained, dish soap. I had no paper towels, so I tried to use toilet paper as a substitute. That doesn’t hold up as well as paper towels. No baking soda or cornstarch in the house. Less than a teaspoon of dish soap. I did the best I could, but I don’t doubt that the slacks will always have a small oil mark on them.
And I just went shopping for what will probably be the last time until I get paid. It’s good for me to be counting up each cent that goes into my shopping cart, because I’m learning the true cost of things. I bought two large-ish cans of tomato chunks (I don’t know how to say it in English—cubed? But they’re kinda smashed and stuff) for spaghetti sauce, two packages of noodles that should feed me for a week I’m hoping, a loaf of bread, cereal, milk, and orange juice. Orange juice was not on the list, but they had it for really cheap and I figured it would help keep me a little less scurvy-ish. Now if I can just control my appetite a little better, I think I’ll do fine.
The only problem is that I eat when I am stressed. I crave the feeling of being stuffed with carbs and I eat until there is nothing left. And I think to myself, if I just eat myself out of bread, I’ll stop craving the carbs because I won’t have any left. But then I just start eating things like liver spread straight out of the jar.
After-school classes went well this week. We talked about lots of things without much awkwardness in my class with the two older kids and we made “Thanksgiving Books” with the younger kids. My markers are not going to make it through the time with the younger kids. They really do a number on them.
And normal classes are going pretty well, although I still feel a little silly and ineffective. I definitely don’t like being an ineffective person. But I got to go with the 5th and 6th graders this last Monday to Seville, which was cool. I got to get into all the museums for free. Of course, I had already seen all of the museums we went into, but there were other portions of them open this time that were not open the last time. For instance, in the cathedral, the tower was open, so I got to climb somewhere around 15 stories by way of a cool stone ramp up to the top of this tower that overlooked the city. It was great. Plus, 11 year olds move slower than my last traveling partner, so I didn’t feel bad about taking my time to look at something this time around.
Today is a lazy day. I’m hanging out in my living room typing out correspondences in Word and then going to the corner near the school to catch enough internet to send them off to their recipients. I’m doing my best to not want snacking to be a part of my lazy day. There’s not much else to report, so please have a good week and a good Thanksgiving. Please eat some extra yams for me and for my immediate Kuhl family: eat some extra of mom’s amazing cranberry relish for me. Love you all.
Emily
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Amanezco
I have some photos up! Here are the links. They’re up on facebook for now, but they should be accessible to everyone. These are photos from Madrid, Castuera, diving and Seville.
Madrid, Castuera, Torremolinos
Seville
Also, I need to be sure to correct the address I have listed for myself. It is similar to the one I already gave (and if anyone has sent anything to the address I gave, it should still arrive as one piece of mail already has with an incorrect address on it), just some numbers have been switched around. Here is the CORRECT address:
Emily Kuhl
C/ Pedro de Valdivia 6
06420 Castuera (Badajoz)
España
In one month, I get to go to Madrid, where I will pick my mother up from the airport. :) I can scarcely contain my excitement for this!
And it also sounds like I won’t have to spend Christmas alone this year either, which is an amazing blessing. My Christmas two years ago was the loneliest I’ve ever experienced. I was very ill and my host-mother seemed only to notice because it inconvenienced her and she was afraid of getting sick herself. I used to think it was silly that people missed their families more at Christmas than any other day, but it’s true. It really hits hard when you think of how everyone is together and you’re not there. Luckily I shouldn’t be alone this Christmas and that will make the day so much more bearable away from the Kuhls.
Since I wrote last, life in Castuera has gotten… well, here is the thing. A lot of times I find myself trying to say something in English that really doesn’t translate. Some mornings I get up and text a friend and I can’t help but use the word amanecer. It means to wake up, but it brings so much more meaning than just “wake up,” so I say, “Good morning, how did you amanecer today?” Yes, half in English, half in Spanish. Because there really isn’t a way in English to say, “How was your getting-up process this morning?” Unless I’ve totally missed it, we just don’t have the same thing. But by using the word amanecer, I’m asking, “How was your waking-up process this morning and how did you feel upon waking up?” It’s all rolled into one. Waking up in English seems to mean the moment you open your eyes, but in Spanish, there is more than one word. And amanecer is the process of it- the whole shebang.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I can’t say what I mean to say in English sometimes. Life in Castuera is… bettering. Can I say that? I would say life has gotten better, but that drags in a connotation that it was horrible before and that I’m clawing my way out of something. It is rising up? I don’t know, I don’t know how to say it. In Spanish I would say la vida sigue mejor, literally translated, life follows better. Life in Castuera follows the slow rise upward, better and better every day.
I still don’t communicate contextually very well with the people around here. I don’t understand the context in which people speak and they don’t really understand what I mean. I know the words, but I get lost when people talk to me about something because I lose the purpose of the sentence. Why is she telling me about her grown son? Was it because she had a question for me or because she wanted me to say something or just wanted to talk at me? I get confused.
And the people don’t have much patience here. My headmaster, for instance, only gives me one shot at understanding his Spanish. If I don’t understand what he says the first time, he switches over to English, which is not helping me to understand him at all! And if I ask someone to repeat something, they tend to say it just as fast and muffled as the first time. And I can only ask for repeats in a conversation so many times before I get left in the dust, as the speaker gets frustrated with me and gives up. Which in turn makes me a little frustrated. I know this language, I’m just having troubles being totally fluent right now!
Another thing I am struggling with is internet. I don’t want to pay for my own internet because it would be very expensive since I would not have the opportunity to split it with anyone, so I’m just mooching at this point. If I have a break during the day, I can use the school’s internet, but it doesn’t always work and it doesn’t give me access to many sites, like anything with the word “game,” which is a bummer for me because I try to plan games for my classes and can’t search for any. And the school is open again from 4:00-6:00 in the afternoons and I can use it then, but sometimes the teacher’s lounge is used by the chess club or by a reading group, etc, plus sitting inside gets really cold really fast at the school. The library is a pretty good option, but it is pretty far away and there are always a couple of girls that I meet there who know me and have added me on facebook that I despise. Why do I despise them? Because they laugh at me for not being 100% fluent in Spanish. I learned the word “cuadra” to mean city blocks, but they had no idea what that meant. Nevermind that I was using perfectly legitimate Spanish, just not Castilian vocabulary, apparently. And then I am reading things on my computer screen in English and they are half-giggling, half-speed-mumbling something to me in Spanish without really getting my attention beforehand and they expect me to understand them. No, I tell you, it’s not easy to do two languages at once. I can hardly do one at a time. So then when I don’t hear them, they laugh at me and make fun of me and I am partially absorbed in what I’m reading or writing and partially trying to ignore them and it just makes me angry. If they want an intelligent conversation with me, I can certainly try, but I think mostly they want someone to laugh at. That’s me.
I suppose you can guess their age level. High school. Don’t miss those days. Anyway, so the library sucks for the reason, as well as the fact that the warm spot in the library doesn’t allow talking, while the wifi spot that allows talking has to have the door open at all times, which means it has gotten super cold lately.
I can also leech internet off of an office building near my school, which has been nice on nights when the school’s internet isn’t working and I only need fifteen minutes of connectivity, which isn’t worth going to the library for. And it’s nice to be able to walk to that office if I can’t sleep just to send some messages and whatnot. The foreigners work in the office though, and it always seems like they are discovering me there, which makes me feel lame because it makes me feel like I don’t do anything but browse on my iphone. Plus, the people that live on that street probably think I’m a creepo because I sit out on the sidewalk sometimes. I just want to have a little box where no one can see me and stare (and alternately I would really like to not creep anyone out) so I could just use the internet in peace without feeling like “that girl.”
And I feel like I could deal with only a couple of hours of connectivity per day if I were just more organized. When I get a bar of wifi, I tend to waste time and not get the things done that I need to get done. I’m doing a little better because I’m trying to utilize lists, but I’m still a little exasperated, because it always seems like I’m getting shooed out of internet before I have accomplished all I need to. And then I really have no choice but to pack it up and finish everything some other time. So THAT is my internet struggle… how to organize myself enough to deal with very limited connectivity.
And I guess too it would help if I weren’t lonely. When I get a moment of connectivity I message parents or brothers or Katie or others because I just miss them all so much. I’m fine by myself, but to not even have the possibility of getting in touch without those precious few minutes of internet every day makes me want to use the minutes of being connected to message people, which then keeps me from getting things done sometimes. But I’m not willing to give those up. I have to stay connected with family and friends. I love it.
Anyway, since I last wrote, la vida sigue mejor. I have been hanging out with the foreigners in the town a lot, which is a relief because they are all kind of in the same situation as me. None of them are totally at home, which means we have something in common.
There is an English boy that comes over to Castuera from his neighboring town of Cabeza del Buey (Donkey’s Head!) and hangs with the foreigners here. I love it when he comes, because he has a really dry sense of humor, as the English are wont to have, and we can communicate almost in the same way with one another. I have always been told I have a dry sense of humor too. So when Katia and Katya are trying to talk to one another and find themselves in violent agreement but are just not getting there because they’re trying to make their points known in English, which is second language to both, Nick and I giggle at the misunderstanding. And we enjoy making fun of one another for saying things differently, like aluminum, etc.
Several weekends ago, I went to Seville (here they say Sevilla). I traveled with the other Auxiliar from Castuera, named Tom Hanley (no relation to Sean Hanley!). I went to Don Benito and spent the night on a surprisingly comfortable couch and the next morning Tom and I got up pretty early to get on a bus headed for the city of Seville.
We had hostel reservations beforehand, but we only had a vague idea where we were going. And it didn’t really help that Tom seemed to be a typical male who thinks his sense of direction is impeccable, which it most decidedly was not. But we finally found where we were going, checked in to the very comfortable hostel located on a side street in the center of everything, and then spent the rest of the day wandering around.
And, yeah, I have to complain because there’s an issue that has angered me (along with many other issues I encountered with the International Programs Office at the University of Idaho) for some time. While Tom was getting into most museums and sights for free or for very discounted prices (free instead of 6 euros, 2 euros instead of 8 euros) with his International Student Identification Card, I was paying full price. When I went to Ecuador, half of the people in my program were given these cards by the International Programs Office and half of us just didn’t get them. It’s like, someone decided to half-ass do their job, meaning that half of us were just plum out of luck.
And I could go on about IPO, but I will bury the rest of that for the sake of a better read. Ajkdaieruaq.w,mfnalxkjcfq,aemjdhflaert!!!
So anyway, I spent money rather quicker than I had hoped and I got tired a lot faster than Tom did. I love walking, don’t get me wrong, but walking the same streets again and again to find yet another museum got old. At least for me.
I love going away for the weekend because it usually means I have internet at hours that are reasonable in the United States. During the time that I am awake, Americans spend the first half sleeping and the second half working. And during the time that Americans are awake, I’m either sleeping or don’t have access to internet. At least in Castuera. So it is nice to go away because it means that I can leave Skype up when I browse the web and video chat with people. Sometimes I don’t believe text messages and facebook posts that people are still alive and breathing. Sometimes I wanna see that in person.
Tom and I saw the Cathedral (a picture of which is in my facebook album with the full moon above it), the palace in the city center, the Tower of Gold (didn’t have any gold in it, no idea why it has this name), the modern art museum that was surprisingly interesting, and other neighborhoods of the city beyond what would have been called in Ecuador, “Gringolandia.”
My favorite part of going anywhere is the food. I love to eat. And I don’t even care if it is a Chinese restaurant in the middle of Spain, I love it. I don’t have to have the 1,000% most typical thing of wherever I am. I like all of the consumables. I like to know what the Spanish version of Cashew Chicken is. So, we ate, though admittedly sometimes I got frustrated when Tom wouldn’t take me seriously when I said, yeah, let’s eat. I get grumpy if I don’t eat when hungry.
Last weekend we got together to say goodbye to Darma, the Taiwanese girl who came to my classes and did presentations for the kids and taught them to use chopsticks and make Taiwanese crafts. She is traveling for a bit and then is headed back to Taiwan. So we went out for a couple of nights, even managed to score free drinks and appetizers one night at a cultural event we didn’t even go to! That was also where I ate the testicles of some unknown animal. The waitress had a great time laughing at us when we asked what kind of meat it was.
This weekend I was going to try and go with Katya to Cabeza del Buey to see Nick, but I got sick instead. Eating the same thing I have been for a month now, I somehow made myself violently ill. :( So I didn’t go anywhere. But I did get to go next door and have coffee with my neighbor, which was a highlight. They’re so nice. I felt awkward, but she’s this 72-year-old lady living with her retired husband and they’re just so nice and pokey and friendly. And I always get so happy when I see old couples just as content as ever living with one another. Sure, passion is a thing of the past, but they’re comfortable with one another, they don’t have any drama, they don’t fight, they’re just satisfied. Mariano and Fernanda, not needing to look anywhere else to make themselves happy. I’m a sap, but it’s not even about the romance, it’s just about being content. It’s a beautiful thing, I guess.
I now have two “clases particulares.” These are tutoring groups. The first meets on Wednesdays at 6:30 and consists of two fifteen year olds and the second meets Thursdays at 5:15 and consists of four eight year olds and one six year old. The younger group is proving to be more challenging because I have to work with a much lower level. They know words, but nothing of the structure of the language. They have been taught to repeat things like, “My name ees Roberto,” but it’s that they know how to make the sounds, not really what each part signifies and how to tear it apart, rearrange it, etc. I suppose I’m hoping for too much. After all, it has been quite a long time since I was at a very beginner level of Spanish, and even longer still with English. I just need to learn to work with their very low level, so that’ll take some time to figure out. In the meantime, I get to practice my Spanish with them and occasionally teach them vocabulary.
As for the rest of my teaching, it’s getting better all the time. I’m still not used to the noise. I come home at the end of a day of class and just want to sit somewhere in silence. The kids are SO loud. I know that it is partially because I am not used to being in a classroom full of kids, but also I think the kids here have a different kind of behavior. I think it is part of the culture that whoever is the loudest is who gets heard.
Another thing that I am not used to is when the teacher criticizes one of the students. I don’t remember it being that way when I was in elementary school, but the teachers seem to like to make examples of some students in the classroom when the students do something wrong. Like Thursday, this girl Tamara didn’t do her homework because she didn’t have paper, so he very much berated her in front of the whole class, even going so far as to mock her some. When another guy came into the class to ask a question, the teacher asked him if he had paper at his house and when the guy said yeah, the teacher said, “See, even he has paper. You can’t tell me you don’t have paper.” And he would go on and on. Again, I don’t really remember elementary school that well, but I don’t remember being mocked in front of the whole classroom by the teacher if I didn’t do something correctly.
And it makes me feel so awkward. It’s like that Dane Cook joke where he says, “daddy just hit mommy at the dinner table.” What do you do? I just kind of stand there at the front of the class and wait for it to end. But these attack sessions go on too long and I feel awkward. :( I don’t know how to deal with that yet.
That is all for now. Enjoy the photos! Leave comments! Send me your love because I'm sending you all of mine right.... NOW!
Madrid, Castuera, Torremolinos
Seville
Also, I need to be sure to correct the address I have listed for myself. It is similar to the one I already gave (and if anyone has sent anything to the address I gave, it should still arrive as one piece of mail already has with an incorrect address on it), just some numbers have been switched around. Here is the CORRECT address:
Emily Kuhl
C/ Pedro de Valdivia 6
06420 Castuera (Badajoz)
España
In one month, I get to go to Madrid, where I will pick my mother up from the airport. :) I can scarcely contain my excitement for this!
And it also sounds like I won’t have to spend Christmas alone this year either, which is an amazing blessing. My Christmas two years ago was the loneliest I’ve ever experienced. I was very ill and my host-mother seemed only to notice because it inconvenienced her and she was afraid of getting sick herself. I used to think it was silly that people missed their families more at Christmas than any other day, but it’s true. It really hits hard when you think of how everyone is together and you’re not there. Luckily I shouldn’t be alone this Christmas and that will make the day so much more bearable away from the Kuhls.
Since I wrote last, life in Castuera has gotten… well, here is the thing. A lot of times I find myself trying to say something in English that really doesn’t translate. Some mornings I get up and text a friend and I can’t help but use the word amanecer. It means to wake up, but it brings so much more meaning than just “wake up,” so I say, “Good morning, how did you amanecer today?” Yes, half in English, half in Spanish. Because there really isn’t a way in English to say, “How was your getting-up process this morning?” Unless I’ve totally missed it, we just don’t have the same thing. But by using the word amanecer, I’m asking, “How was your waking-up process this morning and how did you feel upon waking up?” It’s all rolled into one. Waking up in English seems to mean the moment you open your eyes, but in Spanish, there is more than one word. And amanecer is the process of it- the whole shebang.
Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I can’t say what I mean to say in English sometimes. Life in Castuera is… bettering. Can I say that? I would say life has gotten better, but that drags in a connotation that it was horrible before and that I’m clawing my way out of something. It is rising up? I don’t know, I don’t know how to say it. In Spanish I would say la vida sigue mejor, literally translated, life follows better. Life in Castuera follows the slow rise upward, better and better every day.
I still don’t communicate contextually very well with the people around here. I don’t understand the context in which people speak and they don’t really understand what I mean. I know the words, but I get lost when people talk to me about something because I lose the purpose of the sentence. Why is she telling me about her grown son? Was it because she had a question for me or because she wanted me to say something or just wanted to talk at me? I get confused.
And the people don’t have much patience here. My headmaster, for instance, only gives me one shot at understanding his Spanish. If I don’t understand what he says the first time, he switches over to English, which is not helping me to understand him at all! And if I ask someone to repeat something, they tend to say it just as fast and muffled as the first time. And I can only ask for repeats in a conversation so many times before I get left in the dust, as the speaker gets frustrated with me and gives up. Which in turn makes me a little frustrated. I know this language, I’m just having troubles being totally fluent right now!
Another thing I am struggling with is internet. I don’t want to pay for my own internet because it would be very expensive since I would not have the opportunity to split it with anyone, so I’m just mooching at this point. If I have a break during the day, I can use the school’s internet, but it doesn’t always work and it doesn’t give me access to many sites, like anything with the word “game,” which is a bummer for me because I try to plan games for my classes and can’t search for any. And the school is open again from 4:00-6:00 in the afternoons and I can use it then, but sometimes the teacher’s lounge is used by the chess club or by a reading group, etc, plus sitting inside gets really cold really fast at the school. The library is a pretty good option, but it is pretty far away and there are always a couple of girls that I meet there who know me and have added me on facebook that I despise. Why do I despise them? Because they laugh at me for not being 100% fluent in Spanish. I learned the word “cuadra” to mean city blocks, but they had no idea what that meant. Nevermind that I was using perfectly legitimate Spanish, just not Castilian vocabulary, apparently. And then I am reading things on my computer screen in English and they are half-giggling, half-speed-mumbling something to me in Spanish without really getting my attention beforehand and they expect me to understand them. No, I tell you, it’s not easy to do two languages at once. I can hardly do one at a time. So then when I don’t hear them, they laugh at me and make fun of me and I am partially absorbed in what I’m reading or writing and partially trying to ignore them and it just makes me angry. If they want an intelligent conversation with me, I can certainly try, but I think mostly they want someone to laugh at. That’s me.
I suppose you can guess their age level. High school. Don’t miss those days. Anyway, so the library sucks for the reason, as well as the fact that the warm spot in the library doesn’t allow talking, while the wifi spot that allows talking has to have the door open at all times, which means it has gotten super cold lately.
I can also leech internet off of an office building near my school, which has been nice on nights when the school’s internet isn’t working and I only need fifteen minutes of connectivity, which isn’t worth going to the library for. And it’s nice to be able to walk to that office if I can’t sleep just to send some messages and whatnot. The foreigners work in the office though, and it always seems like they are discovering me there, which makes me feel lame because it makes me feel like I don’t do anything but browse on my iphone. Plus, the people that live on that street probably think I’m a creepo because I sit out on the sidewalk sometimes. I just want to have a little box where no one can see me and stare (and alternately I would really like to not creep anyone out) so I could just use the internet in peace without feeling like “that girl.”
And I feel like I could deal with only a couple of hours of connectivity per day if I were just more organized. When I get a bar of wifi, I tend to waste time and not get the things done that I need to get done. I’m doing a little better because I’m trying to utilize lists, but I’m still a little exasperated, because it always seems like I’m getting shooed out of internet before I have accomplished all I need to. And then I really have no choice but to pack it up and finish everything some other time. So THAT is my internet struggle… how to organize myself enough to deal with very limited connectivity.
And I guess too it would help if I weren’t lonely. When I get a moment of connectivity I message parents or brothers or Katie or others because I just miss them all so much. I’m fine by myself, but to not even have the possibility of getting in touch without those precious few minutes of internet every day makes me want to use the minutes of being connected to message people, which then keeps me from getting things done sometimes. But I’m not willing to give those up. I have to stay connected with family and friends. I love it.
Anyway, since I last wrote, la vida sigue mejor. I have been hanging out with the foreigners in the town a lot, which is a relief because they are all kind of in the same situation as me. None of them are totally at home, which means we have something in common.
There is an English boy that comes over to Castuera from his neighboring town of Cabeza del Buey (Donkey’s Head!) and hangs with the foreigners here. I love it when he comes, because he has a really dry sense of humor, as the English are wont to have, and we can communicate almost in the same way with one another. I have always been told I have a dry sense of humor too. So when Katia and Katya are trying to talk to one another and find themselves in violent agreement but are just not getting there because they’re trying to make their points known in English, which is second language to both, Nick and I giggle at the misunderstanding. And we enjoy making fun of one another for saying things differently, like aluminum, etc.
Several weekends ago, I went to Seville (here they say Sevilla). I traveled with the other Auxiliar from Castuera, named Tom Hanley (no relation to Sean Hanley!). I went to Don Benito and spent the night on a surprisingly comfortable couch and the next morning Tom and I got up pretty early to get on a bus headed for the city of Seville.
We had hostel reservations beforehand, but we only had a vague idea where we were going. And it didn’t really help that Tom seemed to be a typical male who thinks his sense of direction is impeccable, which it most decidedly was not. But we finally found where we were going, checked in to the very comfortable hostel located on a side street in the center of everything, and then spent the rest of the day wandering around.
And, yeah, I have to complain because there’s an issue that has angered me (along with many other issues I encountered with the International Programs Office at the University of Idaho) for some time. While Tom was getting into most museums and sights for free or for very discounted prices (free instead of 6 euros, 2 euros instead of 8 euros) with his International Student Identification Card, I was paying full price. When I went to Ecuador, half of the people in my program were given these cards by the International Programs Office and half of us just didn’t get them. It’s like, someone decided to half-ass do their job, meaning that half of us were just plum out of luck.
And I could go on about IPO, but I will bury the rest of that for the sake of a better read. Ajkdaieruaq.w,mfnalxkjcfq,aemjdhflaert!!!
So anyway, I spent money rather quicker than I had hoped and I got tired a lot faster than Tom did. I love walking, don’t get me wrong, but walking the same streets again and again to find yet another museum got old. At least for me.
I love going away for the weekend because it usually means I have internet at hours that are reasonable in the United States. During the time that I am awake, Americans spend the first half sleeping and the second half working. And during the time that Americans are awake, I’m either sleeping or don’t have access to internet. At least in Castuera. So it is nice to go away because it means that I can leave Skype up when I browse the web and video chat with people. Sometimes I don’t believe text messages and facebook posts that people are still alive and breathing. Sometimes I wanna see that in person.
Tom and I saw the Cathedral (a picture of which is in my facebook album with the full moon above it), the palace in the city center, the Tower of Gold (didn’t have any gold in it, no idea why it has this name), the modern art museum that was surprisingly interesting, and other neighborhoods of the city beyond what would have been called in Ecuador, “Gringolandia.”
My favorite part of going anywhere is the food. I love to eat. And I don’t even care if it is a Chinese restaurant in the middle of Spain, I love it. I don’t have to have the 1,000% most typical thing of wherever I am. I like all of the consumables. I like to know what the Spanish version of Cashew Chicken is. So, we ate, though admittedly sometimes I got frustrated when Tom wouldn’t take me seriously when I said, yeah, let’s eat. I get grumpy if I don’t eat when hungry.
Last weekend we got together to say goodbye to Darma, the Taiwanese girl who came to my classes and did presentations for the kids and taught them to use chopsticks and make Taiwanese crafts. She is traveling for a bit and then is headed back to Taiwan. So we went out for a couple of nights, even managed to score free drinks and appetizers one night at a cultural event we didn’t even go to! That was also where I ate the testicles of some unknown animal. The waitress had a great time laughing at us when we asked what kind of meat it was.
This weekend I was going to try and go with Katya to Cabeza del Buey to see Nick, but I got sick instead. Eating the same thing I have been for a month now, I somehow made myself violently ill. :( So I didn’t go anywhere. But I did get to go next door and have coffee with my neighbor, which was a highlight. They’re so nice. I felt awkward, but she’s this 72-year-old lady living with her retired husband and they’re just so nice and pokey and friendly. And I always get so happy when I see old couples just as content as ever living with one another. Sure, passion is a thing of the past, but they’re comfortable with one another, they don’t have any drama, they don’t fight, they’re just satisfied. Mariano and Fernanda, not needing to look anywhere else to make themselves happy. I’m a sap, but it’s not even about the romance, it’s just about being content. It’s a beautiful thing, I guess.
I now have two “clases particulares.” These are tutoring groups. The first meets on Wednesdays at 6:30 and consists of two fifteen year olds and the second meets Thursdays at 5:15 and consists of four eight year olds and one six year old. The younger group is proving to be more challenging because I have to work with a much lower level. They know words, but nothing of the structure of the language. They have been taught to repeat things like, “My name ees Roberto,” but it’s that they know how to make the sounds, not really what each part signifies and how to tear it apart, rearrange it, etc. I suppose I’m hoping for too much. After all, it has been quite a long time since I was at a very beginner level of Spanish, and even longer still with English. I just need to learn to work with their very low level, so that’ll take some time to figure out. In the meantime, I get to practice my Spanish with them and occasionally teach them vocabulary.
As for the rest of my teaching, it’s getting better all the time. I’m still not used to the noise. I come home at the end of a day of class and just want to sit somewhere in silence. The kids are SO loud. I know that it is partially because I am not used to being in a classroom full of kids, but also I think the kids here have a different kind of behavior. I think it is part of the culture that whoever is the loudest is who gets heard.
Another thing that I am not used to is when the teacher criticizes one of the students. I don’t remember it being that way when I was in elementary school, but the teachers seem to like to make examples of some students in the classroom when the students do something wrong. Like Thursday, this girl Tamara didn’t do her homework because she didn’t have paper, so he very much berated her in front of the whole class, even going so far as to mock her some. When another guy came into the class to ask a question, the teacher asked him if he had paper at his house and when the guy said yeah, the teacher said, “See, even he has paper. You can’t tell me you don’t have paper.” And he would go on and on. Again, I don’t really remember elementary school that well, but I don’t remember being mocked in front of the whole classroom by the teacher if I didn’t do something correctly.
And it makes me feel so awkward. It’s like that Dane Cook joke where he says, “daddy just hit mommy at the dinner table.” What do you do? I just kind of stand there at the front of the class and wait for it to end. But these attack sessions go on too long and I feel awkward. :( I don’t know how to deal with that yet.
That is all for now. Enjoy the photos! Leave comments! Send me your love because I'm sending you all of mine right.... NOW!
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Update with Up Spirits
Today I write on paper! The library closed for siesta at a different time today, so I have an hour and a half to kill before I have power to run my computer again. I got emails done at least before my battery ran out, so now I just use the ol’ pen to write my thoughts.
This weekend I went to the coast, technically on the Mediterranean Sea, but pretty close to the Straights (Straits?) of Gibraltar. There I learned to dive. I’m now certified to dive down to 18 meters. Yeah, I learned to dive metrically, which means I logged everything in terms of Celsius, meters, and bars. Who knows what a bar is? I sure didn’t. Turns out I still don’t know because neither did my teacher. PSI is easy because it is pounds/square inch. It’s a mathematical equation. But a bar? He said he thinks maybe it’s a measurement of atmospheres. Like a full tank before diving is 200 bars of air… so 200 atmospheres? What the heck is an atmosphere? How do you measure that? I wish I knew.
This came from Simon, my instructor from England who sounds like a joke. I’m not being mean, because I literally intend to say that he just sounds like he must be joking when he opens his mouth. If he were to talk like that in the US, people would think he was putting on an act all the time. Like when he answers his phone, he’s mostly yelling in this overly happy, stereotypically British banter and I wanted to burst out laughing ever time. Turns out he might’ve just been a rarity, because Ria (Rhea?) who works in the shop (she’s getting her divemaster for free by working some in the shop and getting awesome internship experience) sounds a little calmer. Almost cynical.
Then there was Jake too. He was Scottish and about to start his divemaster (you can’t technically do divemaster until you’re 18 and Jake is only 17 for another couple of weeks). And Duncan, the older short diver who took me out for my first two open water dives. He didn’t have as much patience as Simon, which doesn’t surprise me any since Simon is one of those interminably happy people (hance the super-dorky, super-eager telephone voice) off of whom mean jokes and criticisms bounce. I’m not sure where Duncan is from, but he seemed to be getting upset at me quite a bit when I had trouble with the compass. What can I say? I was never allowed in Boy Scouts!
My lungs are back to normal. I think I have a tendency towards hypochondria, but I’m really good at keeping it in check. Anyway, the top 20 % of my lung capacity (as in the bit just before being completely full of air) hurt to fill. I could breathe shallowly without a problem, but if I sighed or breathed deeply there was a pain in my chest that had me worried. Plus, if I expelled most of my air and used the last bit to cough, that hurt too. So I researched all of the symptoms of lung over-expansion just to be safe and then waited it out a little, I feel fine now, but it did make me nervous because I don’t really know how to go to the doctor here yet. Sounds silly, but it is a concern. Health care is different and I have some sort of insurance, but I’m not sure how to use it just yet.
I was diving with some sort of sinus trouble, which I worried would prevent me from finishing, but I did okay. My nose would get stuffy at night, but it would be mostly clear during the day, although my first couple dives I came out of the water, took off my mask and I’m pretty sure I had snot all over my face, which I’m sure was just lovely. Duncan didn’t tell me about it, which is fine because I didn’te say anything about the smears of white snot on his face either. But I kept discovering stuff on my face, which was a real pleasure.
While in Torremolinos (the gay capitol of Spain) I had internet in my hostel, which made me happy. I got to Skype with loved ones some, which is proving to be difficult here in Castuera because of time difference. Also, I was invited to go out on the town with 13 intoxicated English (and one or two Scottish) chaps for a “Stag do.” This is the equivalent of our bachelor parties. But they were going to Benalmadena by taxi (a town ½ hour away) and I didn’t feel like spending the money to get stranded with 13 drunk and horny dudes when I had to dive early the next morning (call me crazy!). They seemed nice enough though. But I didn’t go, despite the drunken pleading! :)
I went out for breakfast with the dive crew on the last day. They took me to an English place and I ordered a typical English breakfast, which consisted of toast, egg, bacon (not like our bacon, it was more just like fried ham), baked beans, fried mushrooms and black pudding (oats, fat and blood). I drank coffee, which was not very British of me, but I couldn’t resist. Tea doesn’t usually make me as happy in the morning as coffee does.
I got stranded in the way home in Córdoba. I got a train from Torremolinos to Málaga and another super-smooth, super-cool train from Málaga to Córdoba. Then I found that the bus from Córdoba to Castuera only runs once a day, which means I was stuck there until 7AM the next morning. That wasn’t so bad though. I got internet for the night again, as well as Disney Channel mostly in English, beautiful clean white sheets, a clean towel, and a pristinely clean bathroom. They seem like simple things, but they really were amazing. I was certainly tired of hiking my backpack around in the rain looking for a cheap place to stay and when he said 30 euros and that was the best all the recommended hostels Lonely Planet could give me, I went for it.
But I did have to miss classes, which I felt pretty bad about. The headmaster of the school had a bad weekend when his mother fell and broke her arm, meaning that when I got into town at 10:30AM, the classes I would have actually made it to were cancelled or moved to another day, so that was a bummer.
And a bummer too for what my boss is going through. He’s so good with his parents. His father is old and crotchety and his mother has pretty severe Alzheimer’s, plus some depression as a result. At night when they come home from their daycare type arrangement, Gregorio (headmaster/boss) gets down on his knees in front of his mother, who has a hard time focusing her eyes on him, and he asks her basic questions to exercise her mind (what is your name, what is my name, how much do I love you). She doesn’t get these right usually, but he’s patient and gives her hints, sounding out the first letters of his name and waiting for her to guess.
I can’t imagine that. He kisses her forehead and hugs her and babys her, but I can’t imagine it’s easy for him. She sits on the couch staring at the TV with unseeing eyes and cries. Tears streak her face as she mumbles something unintelligible about life. It makes me want to cry and I am just filled with so much respect for Gregorio because he deals with that every day.
My own grandma is beginning to be forgetful. At first she was just asking the same question multiple times in one visit, then she was mixing up my brothers and couldn’t remember which of her sons they belonged to. Then she started to forget them entirely, which makes visiting hard. She has just started forgetting me, which makes me pretty sad. And repeating something 12 times during a half-hour visit is not uncommon. And no, 12 is not an exaggeration.
Everything in Spain is just a little different. Windows and doors are different. Shopping carts are different. Even the English is different. At first I thought they sounded funny because they were being taught English by non-native speakers, but now I am realizing that they have just been learning British English. They say things like “Hello” when seeing someone (yeah, you think that’s not so weird, but try saying “hello” and not “hi” or “hey” when it’s not answering the telephone or meeting someone new in a professional situation… trust me, it feels weird, it sounds so long and hard to get out) and “I’ve got two brothers” (Dave-bo, perhaps You’ve Got Mail sounds so wrong because it is British English and not American English).
They use the metric system, which means that when someone tells me the weather or how far something is, I still have no freaking clue. It means nothing to me. I think we ought to teach that stuff a little better in school.
Everything is tiled. The sidewalks are tile. The house is tiled. The backyard is tiled. It makes everything feel cleaner. There are no places for dirt to just lurk, unless someone really doesn’t clean ever.
And now I must spend the next month or so not spending a dime. I have about 10 euros in my pocket and I don't want to spend anything more than that until I get paid and I can stop getting slaughtered by exchange fees. I woulda had 30 more euros if not for that hotel in Cordoba, but oh well, it was unavoidable. I think I'll be eating little for a while. Fun.
I don’t really know that I can write much more right now. Another time, perhaps. And so I guess now is a good time to publish my CURRENT mailing address. I don’t know how long I will be at this address, so check in if you intend to send someone in more than a week. Put it in the following format and it SHOULD work, but I don’t really know. I’m hoping.
Emily Kuhl
C/ Pedro de Valdivia N° 6
Castuera (Badajoz) 06420
España
Thanks for the good thoughts and love you’re sending me. It’s getting me through. Chao!
Emily
This weekend I went to the coast, technically on the Mediterranean Sea, but pretty close to the Straights (Straits?) of Gibraltar. There I learned to dive. I’m now certified to dive down to 18 meters. Yeah, I learned to dive metrically, which means I logged everything in terms of Celsius, meters, and bars. Who knows what a bar is? I sure didn’t. Turns out I still don’t know because neither did my teacher. PSI is easy because it is pounds/square inch. It’s a mathematical equation. But a bar? He said he thinks maybe it’s a measurement of atmospheres. Like a full tank before diving is 200 bars of air… so 200 atmospheres? What the heck is an atmosphere? How do you measure that? I wish I knew.
This came from Simon, my instructor from England who sounds like a joke. I’m not being mean, because I literally intend to say that he just sounds like he must be joking when he opens his mouth. If he were to talk like that in the US, people would think he was putting on an act all the time. Like when he answers his phone, he’s mostly yelling in this overly happy, stereotypically British banter and I wanted to burst out laughing ever time. Turns out he might’ve just been a rarity, because Ria (Rhea?) who works in the shop (she’s getting her divemaster for free by working some in the shop and getting awesome internship experience) sounds a little calmer. Almost cynical.
Then there was Jake too. He was Scottish and about to start his divemaster (you can’t technically do divemaster until you’re 18 and Jake is only 17 for another couple of weeks). And Duncan, the older short diver who took me out for my first two open water dives. He didn’t have as much patience as Simon, which doesn’t surprise me any since Simon is one of those interminably happy people (hance the super-dorky, super-eager telephone voice) off of whom mean jokes and criticisms bounce. I’m not sure where Duncan is from, but he seemed to be getting upset at me quite a bit when I had trouble with the compass. What can I say? I was never allowed in Boy Scouts!
My lungs are back to normal. I think I have a tendency towards hypochondria, but I’m really good at keeping it in check. Anyway, the top 20 % of my lung capacity (as in the bit just before being completely full of air) hurt to fill. I could breathe shallowly without a problem, but if I sighed or breathed deeply there was a pain in my chest that had me worried. Plus, if I expelled most of my air and used the last bit to cough, that hurt too. So I researched all of the symptoms of lung over-expansion just to be safe and then waited it out a little, I feel fine now, but it did make me nervous because I don’t really know how to go to the doctor here yet. Sounds silly, but it is a concern. Health care is different and I have some sort of insurance, but I’m not sure how to use it just yet.
I was diving with some sort of sinus trouble, which I worried would prevent me from finishing, but I did okay. My nose would get stuffy at night, but it would be mostly clear during the day, although my first couple dives I came out of the water, took off my mask and I’m pretty sure I had snot all over my face, which I’m sure was just lovely. Duncan didn’t tell me about it, which is fine because I didn’te say anything about the smears of white snot on his face either. But I kept discovering stuff on my face, which was a real pleasure.
While in Torremolinos (the gay capitol of Spain) I had internet in my hostel, which made me happy. I got to Skype with loved ones some, which is proving to be difficult here in Castuera because of time difference. Also, I was invited to go out on the town with 13 intoxicated English (and one or two Scottish) chaps for a “Stag do.” This is the equivalent of our bachelor parties. But they were going to Benalmadena by taxi (a town ½ hour away) and I didn’t feel like spending the money to get stranded with 13 drunk and horny dudes when I had to dive early the next morning (call me crazy!). They seemed nice enough though. But I didn’t go, despite the drunken pleading! :)
I went out for breakfast with the dive crew on the last day. They took me to an English place and I ordered a typical English breakfast, which consisted of toast, egg, bacon (not like our bacon, it was more just like fried ham), baked beans, fried mushrooms and black pudding (oats, fat and blood). I drank coffee, which was not very British of me, but I couldn’t resist. Tea doesn’t usually make me as happy in the morning as coffee does.
I got stranded in the way home in Córdoba. I got a train from Torremolinos to Málaga and another super-smooth, super-cool train from Málaga to Córdoba. Then I found that the bus from Córdoba to Castuera only runs once a day, which means I was stuck there until 7AM the next morning. That wasn’t so bad though. I got internet for the night again, as well as Disney Channel mostly in English, beautiful clean white sheets, a clean towel, and a pristinely clean bathroom. They seem like simple things, but they really were amazing. I was certainly tired of hiking my backpack around in the rain looking for a cheap place to stay and when he said 30 euros and that was the best all the recommended hostels Lonely Planet could give me, I went for it.
But I did have to miss classes, which I felt pretty bad about. The headmaster of the school had a bad weekend when his mother fell and broke her arm, meaning that when I got into town at 10:30AM, the classes I would have actually made it to were cancelled or moved to another day, so that was a bummer.
And a bummer too for what my boss is going through. He’s so good with his parents. His father is old and crotchety and his mother has pretty severe Alzheimer’s, plus some depression as a result. At night when they come home from their daycare type arrangement, Gregorio (headmaster/boss) gets down on his knees in front of his mother, who has a hard time focusing her eyes on him, and he asks her basic questions to exercise her mind (what is your name, what is my name, how much do I love you). She doesn’t get these right usually, but he’s patient and gives her hints, sounding out the first letters of his name and waiting for her to guess.
I can’t imagine that. He kisses her forehead and hugs her and babys her, but I can’t imagine it’s easy for him. She sits on the couch staring at the TV with unseeing eyes and cries. Tears streak her face as she mumbles something unintelligible about life. It makes me want to cry and I am just filled with so much respect for Gregorio because he deals with that every day.
My own grandma is beginning to be forgetful. At first she was just asking the same question multiple times in one visit, then she was mixing up my brothers and couldn’t remember which of her sons they belonged to. Then she started to forget them entirely, which makes visiting hard. She has just started forgetting me, which makes me pretty sad. And repeating something 12 times during a half-hour visit is not uncommon. And no, 12 is not an exaggeration.
Everything in Spain is just a little different. Windows and doors are different. Shopping carts are different. Even the English is different. At first I thought they sounded funny because they were being taught English by non-native speakers, but now I am realizing that they have just been learning British English. They say things like “Hello” when seeing someone (yeah, you think that’s not so weird, but try saying “hello” and not “hi” or “hey” when it’s not answering the telephone or meeting someone new in a professional situation… trust me, it feels weird, it sounds so long and hard to get out) and “I’ve got two brothers” (Dave-bo, perhaps You’ve Got Mail sounds so wrong because it is British English and not American English).
They use the metric system, which means that when someone tells me the weather or how far something is, I still have no freaking clue. It means nothing to me. I think we ought to teach that stuff a little better in school.
Everything is tiled. The sidewalks are tile. The house is tiled. The backyard is tiled. It makes everything feel cleaner. There are no places for dirt to just lurk, unless someone really doesn’t clean ever.
And now I must spend the next month or so not spending a dime. I have about 10 euros in my pocket and I don't want to spend anything more than that until I get paid and I can stop getting slaughtered by exchange fees. I woulda had 30 more euros if not for that hotel in Cordoba, but oh well, it was unavoidable. I think I'll be eating little for a while. Fun.
I don’t really know that I can write much more right now. Another time, perhaps. And so I guess now is a good time to publish my CURRENT mailing address. I don’t know how long I will be at this address, so check in if you intend to send someone in more than a week. Put it in the following format and it SHOULD work, but I don’t really know. I’m hoping.
Emily Kuhl
C/ Pedro de Valdivia N° 6
Castuera (Badajoz) 06420
España
Thanks for the good thoughts and love you’re sending me. It’s getting me through. Chao!
Emily
Sunday, October 3, 2010
I Even Impress Myself
Getting here has been… long. I am in Castuera, Spain, writing from my bed. I can hear the bats outside my window and I swear every twenty minutes Maria comes in to ask if I will eat anything. Apparently I eat like a bird. I consciously think about not being a “typical” American and try to keep the pounds off. Not that it’s difficult with a metabolism that’s always in high gear. Of course, this will change.
Here is where I give my warning about writing. First, I think I will be writing a lot at first, because I will have little else to do until I can get into a routine. But once that routine picks up, I promise to write at least once a month, but not any more than that. Just like Ecuador, which at times was less than once a month, but sometimes more.
Almost a week ago (Monday morning at 8:10am) my plane left Idaho. Saying goodbye was hard, but I have very supportive people in my life. I flew to Salt Lake City and then Atlanta, where I had a couple of hours of layover, which was good, because I could make my last phone calls. My friends back at home have been kind enough to take care of my rat while I am away, which is such an amazing thing, but it was certainly a process working out the details. I made many phone calls ending in the following transactions- my mother took down phone numbers to tape to the cage to keep people in contact with one another, then she took Rae to my dad’s co-worker Evan’s office, Evan took the cage to his little town where I assume he dropped it at Kat’s house, Kat left the next day for Moscow with Rae and the phone numbers, hopefully called John and left Rae with him, or perhaps called Conner when John wouldn’t answer and left Rae with Conner who would call John and deliver her to him later. It was a large scheme with a lot of ifs. I have heard no word of anything going wrong, so my fingers are crossed.
Then I got on the plane after some final phone goodbyes and flew to Madrid. I arrived in Madrid at 10am Madrid time. I found a taxi and went to my hostel (28€ is a little more than the $5 taxi rides across Quito) where they wouldn’t let me check in yet. I went to find my friend Jen in her 14-bunk room shared by strangers. Needless to say, she did not answer the door and the girl who did answer definitely did not know Jen. When I went downstairs to sit and wait, Jen came to the railing saying, “I thought I heard your voice,” with sleep still collecting in the corners of her eyes.
We spent two days walking around, napping, and paying way more for food than we should have. On the second evening we went out after a nap (the ciesta, by the way, is practiced much more by the Spanish than by the Mexicans) once we heard the chanting and singing and drums rolling past our blackout curtains. I didn’t leave on the 29th as originally planned because of the “Huelga General,” or General Strike. I was told at first that it was just going to be transportation that was shut down first, but it turns out almost everything was shut down. Many of the English teachers I would meet at orientation were delayed flying from the United States in to Spain because of the strike and they had to fly in to Lisbon (Lisboa) instead. It also turns out that many European countries were following Spain’s lead and having strikes that day too.
So we went out into the streets of Madrid and joined the strike, which we thought was huge once we got to the first big square a few blocks down. It was peaceful, even though we saw people actively spray-painting surfaces with differing ideas. But then we went into Plaza Mayor and it got so much bigger. People were coming in and leaving in waves. There were opposing views marbled into the plaza and yet the only disruption was when an ambulance had to come in for a heart-attack/stroke victim. It was pretty cool.
At the same time, I didn’t really understand it. Propaganda Spanish is hard to decipher because it’s word play, like English propaganda usually is. I read later that it was against austerity and the big bank bailouts. Some of it was outright against capitalism and seemed to have communist symbols on it.
So that’s what Jes and I did. We even stole flags as mementos.
The next morning I got up rull early to skype with a special lovely man-friend and then I left for the bus station for an 8am bus. I was still carrying around what felt like an obscene amount of baggage, which I hate. It makes me very obviously a tourist. But I lugged it around because I had no choice. I needed to get it all to Cáceres for orientation, which was still not the last stop. Oh, I forgot to mention the Atlanta airport really doesn’t mind if checked baggage gets wet, apparently, because my suitcase arrived wet, which meant that all of my clothing was wet along with my books, one of which bled onto my favorite tank top and my favorite skirt and stained them permanently. But I had to leave all that stuff in my suitcase until I could get somewhere more permanently. It was starting to smell.
A four-hour bus ride brought me to Cáceres and I took a taxi to the hostel for orientation, laid in my empty room for a while and slept. Then there were drinks, seeing Mattcito, meeting lots and lots of people I might never see again, and a couple hours talking about changing the schedule for the next morning. The meeting that night was pointless, but efficiency seems to be an American thing.
The next morning we had breakfast (I was finishing every part of my meal and no one else was, kinda weird) and packed up to go to Universidad Laboral, which is a school that is basically the second part of their high school. It’s optional where all levels before are required, but it is still high school of some sort. There we had more semi-pointless meetings, but I also got to meet Geraldo, my headmaster, which was good. I am teaching ages 6-12.
After an overwhelming session of Spanish and more Spanish explaining the process of getting papers for being in Spain and how to set up a bank account, I got in Geraldo's car with all my luggage and we headed first to Don Benito (40 minutes from my town- and I might live there) for lunch and then to Castuera.
All the highways seem fake. You know those roadways we used to have as kids with the little play cars and the colorful signs and pristinely painted lines? That seems to be Spain. It all just seems too nice to be real. The US has way too many roads to keep them all in such pristine conditions and the only other roads I’ve really experienced are those in South America, which are either dirt or perilous. Or both. This is a change.
Castuera is beautiful. Geraldo has taken me out for drinks, shown me the top view of the city, and given me a road-map to follow, should I need it. All the houses have little courtyards, everything is so nicely tiled or paved, but not in the cheap cement sidewalk way that America does it. The streets are SO clean. The people know that I’m a foreigner, but thank god I don’t feel automatically hated like I started to feel in Ecuador before leaving. I may have to work myself out of the habit of looking at my feet to avoid heinous looks though.
Already I am lonely. But I want to revel in it. I have this kind of host mother for now and I’m trying to be as polite and friendly as possible, but mostly I want her to leave me alone. I like being solitary because then when I feel lonely, I can submit to it and get it over with. Somehow that isn’t as painful as trying to mask loneliness with social interest. But Maria insists on making an appearance in my alone time at least every twenty minutes to ask if I want warm milk or coffee or to take a shower, or just assure me that I can relax. Yes, I can, but certainly not when there is a high-nerves woman checking in on me every so often!
But she is nice. I appreciate it. Just maybe I am realizing what I like and what I don’t like. Like? Time to think. Don’t like? Nagging mothers. Maybe I have no patience for it because my mother was way cooler. And it doesn’t help that I get exhausted speaking and listening to Spanish all the time. There are literally no other Americans in this town right now. And Maria speaks dirty Spanish… the kind were vas becomes vah and quedado becomes something like que’a’o. It’s tiresome, plus Maria has hearing aids, meaning that when she comes every twenty minutes to ask me if I want something, she can’t hear me respond, meaning that I have to get up and go have a conversation with her before getting back to whatever I’m doing.
Most of my life I haven’t understood my own motivation. I still don’t. I know that when I feel unmotivated, it is useless to push against that, so I sit quietly. When I feel like I can take on the world, I do shit like apply to teach English in Spain so that when I hit a trough again, the application is already submitted. That also can get me into trouble sometimes, evidenced by the hives I gave myself from sheer terror of what I’m doing now. Yeah, have I mentioned that? I gave myself hives because I was so anxious. Who does that? Who gives themselves hives because they’re that freaked out? Apparently I do. I just hope that this time the motivation I took advantage of to get here served me well. Otherwise this trough might be very deep and very difficult to get out of.
I’ve found that blind encouragement doesn’t help. I think I would know best that I am a strong woman, since I’ve been with myself during all the bad times when others have not. But right now I’m lonely and tired and afraid. I want someone to be here with me to talk to me in English at the end of the day and to actually fully understand the context in which I speak. I want internet so that in moments of panic I can get a hold of someone to help, but for now I wait. Eight months is a long time. How did I get here? I think sometimes I even impress myself.
Here is where I give my warning about writing. First, I think I will be writing a lot at first, because I will have little else to do until I can get into a routine. But once that routine picks up, I promise to write at least once a month, but not any more than that. Just like Ecuador, which at times was less than once a month, but sometimes more.
Almost a week ago (Monday morning at 8:10am) my plane left Idaho. Saying goodbye was hard, but I have very supportive people in my life. I flew to Salt Lake City and then Atlanta, where I had a couple of hours of layover, which was good, because I could make my last phone calls. My friends back at home have been kind enough to take care of my rat while I am away, which is such an amazing thing, but it was certainly a process working out the details. I made many phone calls ending in the following transactions- my mother took down phone numbers to tape to the cage to keep people in contact with one another, then she took Rae to my dad’s co-worker Evan’s office, Evan took the cage to his little town where I assume he dropped it at Kat’s house, Kat left the next day for Moscow with Rae and the phone numbers, hopefully called John and left Rae with him, or perhaps called Conner when John wouldn’t answer and left Rae with Conner who would call John and deliver her to him later. It was a large scheme with a lot of ifs. I have heard no word of anything going wrong, so my fingers are crossed.
Then I got on the plane after some final phone goodbyes and flew to Madrid. I arrived in Madrid at 10am Madrid time. I found a taxi and went to my hostel (28€ is a little more than the $5 taxi rides across Quito) where they wouldn’t let me check in yet. I went to find my friend Jen in her 14-bunk room shared by strangers. Needless to say, she did not answer the door and the girl who did answer definitely did not know Jen. When I went downstairs to sit and wait, Jen came to the railing saying, “I thought I heard your voice,” with sleep still collecting in the corners of her eyes.
We spent two days walking around, napping, and paying way more for food than we should have. On the second evening we went out after a nap (the ciesta, by the way, is practiced much more by the Spanish than by the Mexicans) once we heard the chanting and singing and drums rolling past our blackout curtains. I didn’t leave on the 29th as originally planned because of the “Huelga General,” or General Strike. I was told at first that it was just going to be transportation that was shut down first, but it turns out almost everything was shut down. Many of the English teachers I would meet at orientation were delayed flying from the United States in to Spain because of the strike and they had to fly in to Lisbon (Lisboa) instead. It also turns out that many European countries were following Spain’s lead and having strikes that day too.
So we went out into the streets of Madrid and joined the strike, which we thought was huge once we got to the first big square a few blocks down. It was peaceful, even though we saw people actively spray-painting surfaces with differing ideas. But then we went into Plaza Mayor and it got so much bigger. People were coming in and leaving in waves. There were opposing views marbled into the plaza and yet the only disruption was when an ambulance had to come in for a heart-attack/stroke victim. It was pretty cool.
At the same time, I didn’t really understand it. Propaganda Spanish is hard to decipher because it’s word play, like English propaganda usually is. I read later that it was against austerity and the big bank bailouts. Some of it was outright against capitalism and seemed to have communist symbols on it.
So that’s what Jes and I did. We even stole flags as mementos.
The next morning I got up rull early to skype with a special lovely man-friend and then I left for the bus station for an 8am bus. I was still carrying around what felt like an obscene amount of baggage, which I hate. It makes me very obviously a tourist. But I lugged it around because I had no choice. I needed to get it all to Cáceres for orientation, which was still not the last stop. Oh, I forgot to mention the Atlanta airport really doesn’t mind if checked baggage gets wet, apparently, because my suitcase arrived wet, which meant that all of my clothing was wet along with my books, one of which bled onto my favorite tank top and my favorite skirt and stained them permanently. But I had to leave all that stuff in my suitcase until I could get somewhere more permanently. It was starting to smell.
A four-hour bus ride brought me to Cáceres and I took a taxi to the hostel for orientation, laid in my empty room for a while and slept. Then there were drinks, seeing Mattcito, meeting lots and lots of people I might never see again, and a couple hours talking about changing the schedule for the next morning. The meeting that night was pointless, but efficiency seems to be an American thing.
The next morning we had breakfast (I was finishing every part of my meal and no one else was, kinda weird) and packed up to go to Universidad Laboral, which is a school that is basically the second part of their high school. It’s optional where all levels before are required, but it is still high school of some sort. There we had more semi-pointless meetings, but I also got to meet Geraldo, my headmaster, which was good. I am teaching ages 6-12.
After an overwhelming session of Spanish and more Spanish explaining the process of getting papers for being in Spain and how to set up a bank account, I got in Geraldo's car with all my luggage and we headed first to Don Benito (40 minutes from my town- and I might live there) for lunch and then to Castuera.
All the highways seem fake. You know those roadways we used to have as kids with the little play cars and the colorful signs and pristinely painted lines? That seems to be Spain. It all just seems too nice to be real. The US has way too many roads to keep them all in such pristine conditions and the only other roads I’ve really experienced are those in South America, which are either dirt or perilous. Or both. This is a change.
Castuera is beautiful. Geraldo has taken me out for drinks, shown me the top view of the city, and given me a road-map to follow, should I need it. All the houses have little courtyards, everything is so nicely tiled or paved, but not in the cheap cement sidewalk way that America does it. The streets are SO clean. The people know that I’m a foreigner, but thank god I don’t feel automatically hated like I started to feel in Ecuador before leaving. I may have to work myself out of the habit of looking at my feet to avoid heinous looks though.
Already I am lonely. But I want to revel in it. I have this kind of host mother for now and I’m trying to be as polite and friendly as possible, but mostly I want her to leave me alone. I like being solitary because then when I feel lonely, I can submit to it and get it over with. Somehow that isn’t as painful as trying to mask loneliness with social interest. But Maria insists on making an appearance in my alone time at least every twenty minutes to ask if I want warm milk or coffee or to take a shower, or just assure me that I can relax. Yes, I can, but certainly not when there is a high-nerves woman checking in on me every so often!
But she is nice. I appreciate it. Just maybe I am realizing what I like and what I don’t like. Like? Time to think. Don’t like? Nagging mothers. Maybe I have no patience for it because my mother was way cooler. And it doesn’t help that I get exhausted speaking and listening to Spanish all the time. There are literally no other Americans in this town right now. And Maria speaks dirty Spanish… the kind were vas becomes vah and quedado becomes something like que’a’o. It’s tiresome, plus Maria has hearing aids, meaning that when she comes every twenty minutes to ask me if I want something, she can’t hear me respond, meaning that I have to get up and go have a conversation with her before getting back to whatever I’m doing.
Most of my life I haven’t understood my own motivation. I still don’t. I know that when I feel unmotivated, it is useless to push against that, so I sit quietly. When I feel like I can take on the world, I do shit like apply to teach English in Spain so that when I hit a trough again, the application is already submitted. That also can get me into trouble sometimes, evidenced by the hives I gave myself from sheer terror of what I’m doing now. Yeah, have I mentioned that? I gave myself hives because I was so anxious. Who does that? Who gives themselves hives because they’re that freaked out? Apparently I do. I just hope that this time the motivation I took advantage of to get here served me well. Otherwise this trough might be very deep and very difficult to get out of.
I’ve found that blind encouragement doesn’t help. I think I would know best that I am a strong woman, since I’ve been with myself during all the bad times when others have not. But right now I’m lonely and tired and afraid. I want someone to be here with me to talk to me in English at the end of the day and to actually fully understand the context in which I speak. I want internet so that in moments of panic I can get a hold of someone to help, but for now I wait. Eight months is a long time. How did I get here? I think sometimes I even impress myself.
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