Finding a Routine and Making a Life in Madrid

I can't believe that two weeks have passed since my last post. It's amazing how you can go from feeling like a complete tourist-outsider one week and then become fully integrated and even inured to a place the next week. For better or worse, I think that I am undergoing such a process. I am starting to experience what were once new and peculiar phenomena as a part of my quotidian routine, just another thread in the fabric of my daily existence. I am trying to maintain my glasses of "objectivity" (what I would rather term my glasses of American subjectivity), but they seem to be quickly giving way to what is just a new way of seeing things. My life in Spain is really becoming my life and not just a brief stint away from it.

Perhaps more than anything, my mental, internal life has been undergoing significant changes more than the life of my physical surroundings these past two weeks. One profound change has been my sense of what constitutes a language, the concept "bilingualism," and the idea of acquiring a mastery of a foreign language. I am embarrassed to admit it, but I will say that I came to Madrid with lots of unquestioned assumptions about languages. Let me list of few of the ideas about language that I believed.

1. That English, though not a "superior" language to Spanish or any other language, was still somehow particularly "rich" in its ability to express nuance or any different number of linguistic registers because of its enormous lexicon
2. That English was not only more difficult than Spanish to learn but that it was one of the more difficult languages in the world in general
3. That I would "master" Spanish within the year and begin to think in Spanish, dream in Spanish, and speak with the fluency, accent, and words of a native
4. That I would then move on to "master" French and then any other number of world languages--like German, Russian, or Arabic

Yes, to a linguist or anyone who has attempted the enormous feat of learning the language of another culture, all of these assumptions are laughable for being not only culturally-elitist and individually-haughty (I didn't realize how cocky I could be!) but also just flat-out wrong. My growing realization of the error of my thinking has come about primarily from three sources: 1) Being in a school where English is taught as a foreign language, thereby forcing me to examine my language objectively to see how it would be taught to a non-native speaker, 2) Reading two fascinating books by Jon McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language and Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of the English Language, and 3) Simply living in a culture where Spanish, and not English, is the lingua franca. Let me explain, again in bullet points because it helps me organize the still slightly inchoate thoughts in my head, what I am learning to be true:

1.  English is not a superior language to any other. Ever since the introduction of what linguists term the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis into the lay public's imagination, the theory has spread and thrived, despite it sheer wrongness. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis essentially contends that a language is a receptacle of its speakers' culture and that a language's grammar and vocabulary reflect and limit the worldview of that culture. This theory is the idea that the Inuit can see different shades of snow and therefore have 20 different words for it, or that Greeks experienced different types of love than Americans do, since the Greeks had both "agape" and "eros" and we only have "love." I won't disprove this theory here, but if you believe it like I think I did unconsciously, it's worth looking into and supplanting if for no other reason than because this sort of thing, the frontier where language meets culture, is fascinating. Though English is a rich language with an astounding literary history, it is essentially a totally bastardized version of German, stripped of many of its grammatical superfluities, infused with some Celtic, Welsh, and Cornish grammar, and then amplified with the vocabulary of the French Normans and many other cultures. It too was once a "lowly" tongue when Latin was the language of the educated and elite.
2. English has some parts of it that are terribly difficult while others are quite easy. The same is true for Spanish and likely all languages (though all languages are not equally complex, I learned from my two books). My students, for example, don't have to memorize difficult conjugational endings like an Anglophone learning Spanish does. They only have to put an "s" on the end of the third-person singular verb to conjugate a verb in the present tense: "I run," "you run," "she runs," "we run," "you guys run," "they run." Really simple. They also don't have to learn the subjunctive, any of the other difficult verb endings for different tenses, or the totally foreign concept of non-biological gender that applies to every noun (in Spanish all nouns are either "feminine" or "masculine" for what are completely arbitrary reasons in most cases). However, Spaniards encounter an orthographical nightmare when learning English since the spelling of our words does not always correspond with their pronunciation. They also come from a language with fewer vowel sounds than ours and have a difficult time making the words "bird" and "beard" or "ship" and "sheep" sound different, for example.
3. Mastering a language, it turns out, is such an involved process. Languages that have existed for awhile all acquire almost countless odd turns of phrase, idiomatic phrases, and grammatical constructions that would probably take a lifetime to master. I feel the weight of this every day in Spain. I learned that you only really use "guapo" for people, that "bonito" works for a beautiful place or thing, and that "bella" is very literary and lofty sounding. "Hermoso" is hardly used at all, I was informed here in Spain. So while I thought I had four synonyms for the same concept ("beautiful"), I learned that they each have their own register and their own connotation that dictates their use in conversation. The same is literally true for every word. So while I generally have no problems communicating, I am aware with every word that I am not speaking like a native would. I have dreamt in Spanish two or three times, and every time it is a dream in which I am incapable of rendering my thoughts into coherent Spanish. Suffice it to say that these dreams were much less gratifying than I imagined "dreaming in Spanish" would be. :) Fortunately, my public library has books explaining lots of idiomatic phrases and how to use "discourse markers" like "so," "well," "um," and such in Spanish ("pues," "bueno," "entonces," "vaya," et cetera), so I am marching forward with my desire to increase my competence in Spanish. I am still putting forth enormous effort to listen to the Spanish radio, work through my grammar books, read in Spanish and make vocabulary flashcards, and such, but I realize that all of my efforts will likely never give me the native fluency that I so desired before arriving. And that is okay.
4. If my brief time in Spain has taught me anything so far about my life and my professional aspirations, it has disabused me of the notion that I could be an effective multilingual interpreter. I think such a job is better left to someone raised bilingual from childhood who then undertakes to learn their already native languages formally and thereby concretizes their knowledge of their languages. So I have successfully taken "become a UN interpreter" off the list of potential careers! I will still continue to study new languages all of my life because I find them so riveting and rewarding, but I am now no longer under the false assumption that I can master these languages with ease and rapidity.

Alberto with Alfredo, his father, and Catalina, his mother

Getting away from the heavy and the technical matters of life and language, everything has been going really well here. I have been able to be in contact with Alberto, Laura's and my Spanish friend from high school, and that has been great. For about a week we were hanging out every day--I met lots of his friends, I had dinner with his parents (they wanted American food, so we went to TGI Fridays which, I hate to admit, tasted so good and reminded me of home), he showed me a famous soccer stadium, and things of the sort. He is very busy working in a business firm, though, so things have slowed down this week. He and I are planning on visiting Valladolid (his hometown) and Toledo (where his grandparents live) sometime in the future, though.

I purchased a Spanish cooking book and am going to use it to force myself out of my very American eating habits. To the best of my abilities, I have avoided the large-jawed fish in my supermarket and have stuck to turkey sandwiches, cereals, pastas, and lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. However, I don't want to leave Spain having merely reproduced my American life and habits here in this foreign country. So once a week I am going to cook out of this book, be it mussels, shellfish, ham, or squid. I may not come home having found a new favorite dish, but I will always have a repertoire of Spanish recipes and will not feel as though I didn't try my hardest to integrate in all ways into Spain's beautiful culture. Why not open my mind and my palate while abroad, eh? My first experiment was perhaps on the conservative side--"albóndigas en salsa," or meatballs in red sauce. Though it looks simple, the marinara-like sauce is actually a homemade mix of many vegetables that are softened then pureed into a thick and delicious sauce. It turned out marvelously, and I fed it to two of my roommates and a Fulbright friend.

The swim team continues to be incredible. I feel elated and powerful after practice as I catch the metro back home each night while listening to some feel-good music on my iPod. I have made good friends on the team and am particularly close with a 50-something named Jesús. He received his doctorate at Berkeley in sociology and teaches at a university here in Madrid. He is very brilliant but very down-to-earth, and he always helps me when I have a linguistic question since his English is so good. I have also begun to notice that our trainer, a stern and intense man named Daniel, has begun to warm up to me. He's a great coach who absolutely knows his swimming, but he can be a little spartan at times. However, I've gotten more "muy bien, Bob" comments lately, which has been gratifying. He also lent me a swimming technique book of his that I have been reading in order to help me improve my strokes. It's been a thrill.

Kelly at a business party, sipping a drink that has a rose-petal
in it. Also, notice all the peole in suits. I was way
under-dressed.

The roommate situation is still less than ideal. Laura is one of the hardest people to get along with that I've ever met. She got very upset with me for buying a little bucket to put our recycling in. I told her that she never had to take the recycling out, that I would always do it since it's a value of mine that need not cause her more work or stress. She said that she hated having to separate out her trash, so I got rather rude back to her and said that for someone who wants to be an orthodontist it didn't strike me as a very difficult task. Cheeky, I know, and not my most compassionate moment, but I can't believe the nerve of this woman. She is one of the most negative people I know. She drinks at least a liter of beer every night as she smokes in our kitchen. She feels no compunction destroying her roommates' lungs but insists that we deep clean random parts of the apartment every week. Suffice it to say that she's not my favorite person. Kelly, however, is a constant source of joy and relief. She is quite integrated into Spanish society and has let me piggy-back off of her social life, which has reaped great rewards, especially given that one of her friends is a 40-something business man who gets invited to promotional parties for rich people, invitations that he passes to Kelly and me. One of them occurred in a super ritzy hotel with a stunning view of Madrid, and it was an honor to be a guest at such a posh event.

My job is so rewarding, and it has been so pleasurable to discover a love of teaching. I love my students so much. They ask me questions like this all of the time (envision a thick Hispanic accent with all of this--make all of the vowels long and give the r's a slight trill): "Teacher Bob, have you girlfriend?" "Teacher, like you football? Which team is your favorite?" (All of my boys are passionate about football (soccer) and don't understand why I don't religiously follow the Real Madrid's games.) I teach in many different types of classrooms, including a couple of physical education classes, a music class, many English classes, and a few history and geography classes. Depending on the teacher, I am either used mostly to read aloud and to help with pronunciation or, in some cases, I am given much license and help to design and present the lessons. The teachers with whom I work are great people, and I see many budding friendships between the faculty and me. I am pretty tired, though, because I wake up before 7:00 AM to catch the metro and then the bus to my school, and I don't get back from swimming until after 11:00 PM (at which point I always cook an enormous meal after having burned so many calories in the pool!), so I'm still seeking a remedy for my exhaustion other than taking a siesta everyday which, though it sounds fun, just makes me feel groggy and sweaty, to be frank.

A photo of "deceased teachers" that I took while lying
on the ground outside Madrid's central plaza in Sol

Lots of public services in Madrid are undergoing privatization or are facing the threat of such. The public schools, for example, underwent large budget cuts this year, and at my "instituto" (high school, more or less), 8 teachers lost their jobs as a result. My teachers invited me to a protest against these budget cuts, and I attended. At the strike of 12:00 PM, everyone protesting collapsed to the ground while making moribund moans in order to symbolize the "death of public education." Teachers have been striking two days a week for the past couple of weeks, and in my school, this meant that 40 of the 50 teachers were gone on Tuesday and Wednesday! The strikes are very controversial among the teachers and have created schisms and factions. Some teachers refer to others as "esquiroles" (a pejorative term for a strikebreaker), while those who still come to school to teach think of their cohorts as not putting students first. It has been fascinating to observe this process, and though I don't have a sufficiently nuanced understanding of the underlying economics and politics to have a strong opinion about any of it, I merely hope it all works out for the best for Spain's citizens, economy, and general well-being.

All is well. I will try to update you all more regularly in the future. Can you believe I've been in Madrid a month already?