Thanksgiving, Birthdays, and Other Business

Phew, I feel like a lot has happened since the last time I wrote, and I want to write about everything, but I don't want to drag on forever. Basically, school has continued for the last 3 weeks, and it has been flying by. With classes, working in the tourist office, and doing my intercambios (conversational exchanges), I have barely noticed that November has almost completely passed me by.

La Granja

One occurrence of interest: last Saturday, we visited the palace of la Granja de San Ildefonso. It is an amazing palace with incredible chandeliers (which kept me craning my neck towards the ceiling the whole time) and extensive gardens. Unfortunately, it has just been getting cold here; it's not cold enough to be terrible, but just enough to make wandering through gardens slightly miserable. I can imagine, though, just how enchanting the gardens could be in the summer or spring.

This last week was my birthday! It was a little funny that I turned 21 in Spain, a country where that means absolutely nothing. Nonetheless, my host mom made me curry (she'd never made it before) and cake for my birthday. It was such a wonderful surprise, and it made me miss home a little less. I don't think I have eaten anything with that many spices in it since August.

The next day was Thanksgiving. To celebrate the day, the program puts together a potluck lunch with all the students and faculty. It was wonderful doing something with everyone on Thanksgiving, but it really made me miss home. I only made one dish, and I felt like I was lacking something because I wasn't running around a kitchen frantically pulling things out of and putting things into the oven, stirring contents of pots, and reorganizing the refrigerator with my mom.

This week, in my European Union class, we were given the assignment of doing some surveys of Spanish people we knew (not including our host families) in order to see how much of the material that we learned in class was known by the general population of Spain. I took the surveys to the tourist office with me today and I asked the questions to my co-workers. Questions included things like "How many countries are in the EU?", "How many countries have the euro?", "When did Spain enter into the EU", and "What does the EU flag look like?". Marian, our professor, warned us that Spanish people are very proud and would get very defensive if they didn't know the answers. I was a little skeptical, but it soon proved to be true. My co-workers were very defensive about not knowing the answers and attempted to look them up on the internet. I tried to explain that they weren't really expected to know all these things. I tried to make them feel better by saying that I didn't know that much about the U.S. But to no avail; they were really distressed that they couldn't respond to all the questions. It was certainly a lesson in communication and culture; perhaps I should have gone about the survey in a completely different way.

As today is a Saturday night, my host siblings will be heading out for the night, leaving at about midnight and coming home sometime around 5 a.m. I am not a very big fan of going out at night, but it is a huge part of the culture of the youth of Spain. I find myself aligning myself more with the opinion of my host mom and my intercambio, who is also a mother, in that it seems a little to crazy for me. For other people, yes, but I can't imagine finding the energy to go out for that long, that late, when I would much rather be sleeping. I think that I feel a little alienated from the Spanish youth that I have met because of my reluctance to go out (though I am perfectly ok with that). 

I can't believe my time here is winding to a close. I hope to make the best of the remainder of my stay.

'Ta luego!