My First Week: "Could you please repeat that? Slowly?"

My first few days in Spain were full of culture shock and hapless gaijin blunders, but that’s half of what made them fun!

My study abroad program, Michigan-Cornell-Penn in Seville, put us up for the first week in a hotel smack-dab in the center of Seville, the perfect setup for us all to blindly explore. Everyone in the program wandered about together those first few days, in between program meetings and the beginnings of our month-long orientation classes (a culture class and a Spanish grammar class). Along the way, I learned a few things: 

• How to look like total tourists 

Chelsea & Callie demonstrate

This I easily mastered on day one. There are of course some pretty well-known techniques, like shuffling slowly through the plazas, squinting up into the sun, one hand on the camera dangling from your neck. There’s also constant map consulting, lots of pointing, and a generally bewildered and/or lost appearance. However, in Spain in particular, it’s only the tourists really who constantly buy ice cream. (For an added foreigner effect, you can spend several minutes spreading out all of the coins you have on the countertop, and then figure out which ones add up to 2.50.) We just couldn’t resist, though, all those flavors - pistachio, pine nuts and cream (surprisingly good), Ferrero Roche, pajamas, donuts, mixed fruit and yoghurt...especially when it’s a scorching 100˚F or more for half the day. Also, speaking of the heat, it’s also easy to look like a tourist when you’re the only girl in the bustling crowd not wearing some form of sandal, but are in closed-toed shoes instead. 

• How to meet people 

Callie, 5’3”, brunette, from Ann Arbor, Michigan. All there is to it. Callie is in the program with me, and this girl is an absolute hoot. She talks to anyone and everyone, and as long as you stick with her, you end up doing the same. Callie is not afraid to invite random fellow students to coffee or to jump into philosophical arguments with taxi drivers, and as a result my own interactions with all kinds of people, be it Sevillanos or fellow students in the program, are significantly more colorful, varied, and unpredictable. Considering that I tend to be on the shy side, hanging out with someone as outgoing as Callie has been great for my own forays into making local friends. 

• How to score a 100% on spanish grammar homework 

Well, that’s easy. Ask the locals! As for how to do that, see above. When I say Callie talks to anyone and everyone, I’m including random Spanish passersby. We would sit in a cafe at a table in the shade outside, poring over lists of idioms and subjunctive verb conjugations, and when we couldn’t answer a problem Callie would flag down a woman walking her dog, or a small group of teenagers laughing down the street, or an old couple taking a stroll. “Disculpa, do you have a moment? We’re doing some Spanish grammar homework and we’re stuck!” Our newfound friends were always a little confused at first by this question out of the blue, but they always loved the brief puzzle that was our grammar homework.  For the most part, they were right of course, and when they continued on their way, it was always with a smile. And once or twice, they were as stumped as we were.  

• How to pay a restaurant/cafe bill

One little cafe of many

To be honest, I still don’t know. It seems to me that the standard system is that the waiter brings you the tab, like in the United States, but the problem is, sometimes they never do. This occurs especially in the cafes with seats outside. It takes a good deal of hand-waving and neck-craning to attract their attention, and then it’s the universal, pen-and-paper “I’d like the tab” gesture once you have it. Every now and then, though, even this doesn’t work, and you have to go inside. This always turns out to be awkward, because these little cafes never have a designated cashier space, and we always end up paying over the bar counter - to a waiter who always seems confused as to why we didn’t just wait for the tab to arrive at our table. 

• How to buy a go-phone (HINT: do not use The Phone House) 

I used The Phone House. We (Callie, Maya, Josh, and I) decided to buy our phones at this fun little store because we thought the name pretty entertaining. It also had (what we thought was) a great deal on cheap little pay-as-you-go phones: .08€ per minute and .08€ per text? A steal. Only 30€ for the phone and the plan start-up? We’ll take that, thanks (after I run all the way back to the hotel and grab my passport, which I forgot was needed to purchase and register a telephone). Perhaps it was the language barrier thing, perhaps she was scamming us, but the nice blonde lady behind the counter certainly confused us by how our plan worked. Suffice to say, it’s definitely more than .08€ a minute for talk time. What’s worse, The Phone House set us up with Yoigo, a tiny little carrier that turns out to be so tiny because it’s rather spotty, but we didn’t know that at the time. What’s worse than that? The exact same model of cheap go-phone, with the exact same plan, with a better carrier and for half the start-up price, is available at The Corte Ingles. We found that one out the hard way (“Hey, Max! We have the same phone! Is that from The Phone House?” “No...”).   

• How to miss class  

It rains in Seville less that it rains in the California Sierras in the summer, but I picked the one day it rained to run around like a headless chicken. We had a meeting in the hotel, and I knew it was in the hotel, but when I went downstairs and saw not a single soul from the program, I thought I was mistaken and the meeting was in the program center. So, I dash out into the rain and go for a wet jog; ten minutes later I arrive at the program center. It’s closed. Fantastic! Another ten minutes later I slosh back in to the hotel lobby. The concierge is giving me some strange looks as I wring my hands and my clothes. If it’s not at the hotel, and not at the program center...but I could have sworn it was at the hotel... aha! Epiphany! The reunion is in one of those clandestine business meeting rooms hotels have tucked away, and I completely forgot. Suffice to say, it was a little embarrassing to squelch into the room 30 minutes late. 

• How to identify a restaurant for tourists 

It’s easy, really: they’re the ones that advertise, in big letters out front, that they sell sangria. Some are more subtle; you don’t find out until they hand you the fully English menu (since we apply most of the techniques in “how to look like total tourists”, this happens a lot), or the waiter arrives and asks where you are from in heavily accented English. Admittedly, both of these are sometimes helpful: although we all speak quite good Spanish, things like “eggplant” and “cod” aren’t exactly in our vocabulary yet. What’s more, here in the Spanish south the Andalucíans talk with a bizarre accent, dropping the last syllable of a lot of words, missing S’s, and skipping over D’s, and it tends to throw us newbies off. So when the waiter receives blank stares after telling us all something, it’s helpful when he or she can drop a few terms in English to clarify what was said. 

All in all, the semester ahead is looking like a fun one. With any luck I’ll be a seasoned veteran by the time December rolls around, forgetting my D’s and S’s with the best of them.