Victories and near-victories

This third week in Spain, I've been through a cascade of experiences that I suppose won't have a substantial impact on my life overall; nevertheless, I'm going to tell you alll about them. Be forewarned that a lot of this is going to be jumbled thoughts awkwardly organized.

I don't want to backtrack, but let's forge ahead with a recap of last week anyway. We started classes on Monday the 17th, so I've had almost two full weeks of class so far. We're still in the drop/add period, which means that we don't officially register for classes until Tuesday the 1st of February, but I'm pretty well settled in to my 10-hour a week Spanish class and my 3-hour USA/EU Transatlantic Relations class. The other two I plan to dive into are Law of International Trade and Law of the European Union, but those don't start until Tuesday, are regular University of Deusto classes, and have 3-week drop/add periods of their own. This is all really confusing, but I think I've got it under control. Anyway, I'm learning so much Spanish everyday! If you want to learn a language, I totally recommend this course of action, aka the zero to hero method. Since I knew about 40 words of Spanish before I got here, I was virtually a blank slate slated to sink or swim depending on my reaction to the world of immersion in which I find myself.

12-second break to marvel at that masterpiece of a sentence.

And we're back. Re: above sentence, I'm treading water so far but I don't know if I'm nearing a breaking point. I'm pretty sure that I can keep it up, but learning a language at hyperspeed can be exhausting. Obviously I'm just being impatient, but it's frustrating when I want to say something that doesn't seem complicated at all in English but is impossible for me to say in Spanish because it's apparently in the imperfect subjunctive tense or employs some obscure grammar rule with which I'm not yet familiar. It'll all come in time, but at present I'm starting to get really adept at speaking in the present tense. So that's a victory.

Re: the title of this entry, which I started about four days ago and haven't got back around to until now, all of my near victories involve encounters with local people. One such example is the tale of how I bought a phone (almost) by myself and talked in Spanish the whole time! Another great one is the story of how I (almost) opened a local bank account to avoid ridiculous international ATM fees, but alas, that one turned out as another near victory as I don't have an official stamp of approval from the Bilbao police - at least I'm pretty sure that's what the bank teller told me.

All in all, I'm doing well adjusting to living in the city, even though it's a struggle to adapt to the different customs. Bilbao is one of the most beautiful places I've visited; walking to school every day along the river (technically estuary) is awesome, and even though the weather has been pretty chilly and overcast almost every day, the climate is pretty similar to that of the Pacific Northwest, so I can appreciate it for what it is.

(Placeholder picture from Viaje Jet until I upload one of my own. But this captures the essence of the weather recently)

ALSO this weekend is my 21st birthday, and I don't have any big plans. For the last two years I've had birthday adventures to two of the fantastic botanical gardens of the world, both conveniently located in Arizona (The Desert Botanical Garden and the Boyce Thompson Arboretum), and I think we have some botanical gardens in Bilbao (jardines botánicos), so I might make an excursion out to one of those. Basically, the main purpose of this post is to remind you of my birthday. Don't forget! Visit a botanical garden in my honor.

Número uno

Since I've just passed the one-week mark of being in Spain, I realized that I had better start this blog before it gets too late. Quick overview of the last 10 days: Thursday the 6th I took a flight from Seattle to Chicago, and then a flight to Boston. Here's where it gets a little sticky though - I missed my connecting flight from Boston to Madrid due to a few miscommunications between American Airlines and me. I ended up spending the night in Boston (shout out to Nora, Hugh, Kyle, Brianne, and Bridget for rescuing me and letting me stay at their house!) and returned to the airport at noon on the 7th, all ready to take a flight to JFK and then to Madrid. Of course, that would have been too easy, so my flight to JFK was delayed long enough that I would have missed the connecting flight there, and I hopped on a 7 pm plane to London and an 8 am flight (finalllly) from London to Madrid! Aha, but there's another twist. My luggage didn't get the memo to fly with me from London; apparently it was lazing around in the Heathrow airport while all the dutiful luggage flew on their connecting flights. Anyway, it was a journey and a half, but I survived! My luggage arrived the night we got to Bilbao, Monday the 10th. But first, some stories from the days preceding Bilbao!

Madrid: I'm one of 15 in a group who signed up to study abroad in Bilbao with a company called ISA (International Studies Abroad). Our program fee includes tuition at Universidad de Deusto, room and board with our host families, excursions throughout the semester, and free admission to the museums and other sites we visit with the group. The 15 of us are already getting to know each other  really well, and I'm relieved we've avoided any group drama (at least thus far). We're from all over the country: we have students from California, South Dakota, Michigan, Maryland, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, possibly Minnesota, and of course, Washington! Everyone else arrived in Madrid on the 7th so they all met each other before I got there, but I only ended up missing out on a quick orientation and a museum. After I took a taxi from the Madrid airport to the hotel at about 1 in the afternoon, everyone met back up at 2 to go to the Reina Sofía Museum, which houses a lot of Picasso's work including his masterpiece, the Guernica. We also saw some of Salvador Dali's work, so it was cool to see original paintings by Spanish artists in person. Needless to say, following our visit to the museum, I was running on 12 hours of sleep distributed over three days (it's probably not actually that dramatic of a statistic, but the time change exacerbated it my exhaustion), and I fell asleep at about 6 pm and woke up at 8 the next morning for our whirlwind trip to Toledo.

Toledo: Beautiful! Seriously, if you're in Spain, Toledo has to be at the top of your list of destinations. It's a super old city with a giant wall around about half of it. There are cathedrals everywhere, some of which we got to tour. Sidenote: all our tours have been conducted in Spanish, so I've been in total immersion since I got here. I was frustrated at first because I couldn't adequately express myself whenever I tried to talk to the tour guides or locals (or other people in the group, for that matter; our program director, Genoveva, encourages us to speak in Spanish all the time so we get more practice). However, I've picked up some useful phrases and vocabulary and improving every day. Although I haven't kept track yet, I set a goal of learning 10 Spanish words every day. I might be learning more than that right now, but everything's still jumbled in my head, trying to keep track of grammar and tense and articles. I thought taking 5 years of German would help me learn Spanish, but most of the grammar is way different so I can't trust German sentence structure to help me out.
More Toledo... the city is famous for their swords, daggers and suits of armor. We were there on a Sunday so not too much was open, but we still went in a few shops that displayed some pretty impressive armor. Anyway, we checked into the hotel in the afternoon and had a pretty relaxing night. Food that day consisted of a delicious chicken doner kebab for lunch and a jamón (ham) and huevo (egg) sandwich for dinner. With the 14 hours of sleep I achieved Saturday night, I think I avoided jet lag altogether! At least one good thing came out of a whole mess of traveling.

Bilbao: Monday morning we left for Bilbao on our autobús (charter bus). It's about a 4 hour drive from Toledo to Bilbao, since Toledo is about an hour south of Madrid and Bilbao is about 3 hours northwest of Madrid. We took a quick stop in Burgos for lunch (I'm pretty sure it was a truck stop restaurant) and hopped back on the bus for the remainder of our trip. Even after the first couple days of being in Spain, I felt like I'd been here for weeks at least because we've been packing so much action into every day. Once we got to Bilbao, our host families scooped us up and brought us home (we took the Metro). My host family consists of María Jesús, my host mom, and Carlos, my 24-year old host brother. I have a roommate from the program named Lauren, and she's a lot better at Spanish than me so she's been invaluable in translating for me. She's also super nice. So we set ourselves up in the apartment, which isn't huge but has plenty of living space (3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room, a study, and a kitchen) and took a 2 hour walk around the city. Bilbao is the capital city of the Bizkaia province (Basque country), and its population is something like 450,000 in the metropolitan area. The downtown area is so clean! And it feels so safe, even late at night. We walked along the river, which is actually more like an estuary, and when we got back, my luggage was waiting for me.
The next few days consisted of orientations, tours of the city, the university, the Guggenheim, and the Museo de Bellas Artes. We took a placement test for Spanish classes (I may have gotten 2 or 3 right out of 80), learned about extracurriculars, and just about exhausted all the information we'll ever need to know for the next four months. I've been adapting well to the city scene so far, the food is delicious, and I'll be posting something soon in the next few days (or at least within the week) to catch up on anything I forgot and add more exciting events that are transpiring.

We start school tomorrow! My only definite class is a 10-hour a week Spanish class. I'll be fluent in no time!
Hasta luego!