A Day in the Life

Here's the lineup for your average Monday. 

• 2:00 am garbage truck stops below my window

This is really the first wake up call of the day. Gotta look out the window, give a bleary wave to the guys in neon orange, and roll over with the pillow over the head. It’s a daily ritual. 

• 8:45 wake up

...always a struggle, no matter what country I live in. 

• 9:00 breakfast

Breakfast is actually quite good, especially since Carmen made an effort to go buy some peanut butter (all but nonexistent in Spain). There’s usually lots of cereal, yoghurt, fruit, and toast. Lots and lots of toast. Too much toast. I started politely refusing toast on occasion, but Carmen was shocked. “No toast? Are you sure? Are you feeling okay?” “No thanks, Carmen, I’m still full from dinner last night really...” “No toast? No toast??”  

Carmen likes to make our toast for us, which means she comes in to the kitchen, puts toast in the toaster, and leaves again. Five minutes later, she returns, finds the toast burned, throws it out and starts again. Usually the second time around she is more timely, putting the toast on a plate and handing it to us. Why she finds us incapable of doing this job ourselves and saving her the trouble, I will never know. 

• 9:30 walk to the university 

From Carmen’s house to the university campus, there is a nice walk. It takes half an hour, roughly 20 minutes or so if you book it. At the beginning of the school year, I got a trial membership for a city-wide bike share system known as Sevici, but after getting frustrated with broken bikes, broken machines, a lack of open spaces, a lack of bicycles, and an unfair overuse charge, I gave up and resigned myself to hustling back and forth four times a day. It’s a pretty walk though in some parts, and I took to listening to a bunch of spanish music during the trip, so it turned into something of a joy. And it’s sure made me appreciate living a maximum of 2 seconds from anywhere on campus at home in New York. 

• 10:00 class: languages of the world

This class is rather interesting, especially considering my current position, but it seems to me at the end of it that philology is a relatively useless field. The professor for this class as a guy named Yanguas, a stout little Spaniard with glasses and going bald. He is multilingual, being a linguist, and is fluent in English; lucky for us Americans, a lot of the examples of linguistic phenomena that he uses are from the English language, leaving the Spanish kids confused and us Americans enthused. Yanguas tends to jump around a fair amount in his material, but by the end I sure knew a whole lot about languages. Did you know that Japanese and Korean are mysteriously completely unlinked to any language family? Or that next to no languages have grammatically arranged their sentences so that the object is said before the subject? I’m an encyclopedia for useless language details.  

• 11:00 visit the gym

In order to stay somewhat close to in shape for crew back home, I took it upon myself to find a gym somewhere with a rowing machine. This turned out to be Nadia's All-Women Gym, a little hole in the wall down by the city center. It's rather inconveniently located, being a half hour walk from my house and twenty minutes from the university, but it's an excuse to go wandering the very cute streets of Seville, and to get to know the downtown labyrinth a little. The gym is run by a spindly old guy, whose name I never did catch, but he absolutely loves that I row, and is regularly very excited to have someone under 40 pushing their heart rate over 130 in his gym. He talks quickly though, and there are a lot of "what?"s and "I'm sorry?"s from my end whenever he comes over and tried to make conversation while I sweat through a 10k row. The rowing machine itself is shoehorned into a corner next to a massage type machine, which is very, very loud right next to your ear, but the little space became my home more or less in the place. I could tell from the machine's memory that no one but me used the erg. 

• 1:00 return home

• 2:00 eat lunch

Lunch and dinner are usually at Carmen’s (on occasion, I would eat lunch at school, depending on the business of the day; this consisted of a bocadillo - a big baguette with Spanish ham or chorizo on it by itself - and lots of fruit). These two meals are basically interchangeable in terms of food served: cuts of pork, or spinach and garbanzo beans, or gazpacho, or Spanish tortilla, or a bean stew, or fried rice... Usually we will have two of these dishes, and not necessarily in any kind of balance-coordinated way. Often a salad will be tacked on as well - lettuce, tomato, olive oil, rock salt, and tuna. And always bread. Lots and lots of bread. I have to say though, one of my favorite things is dipping the bread in one of the various sauces from the other dishes. 

• 2:30 walk back to the university

• 3:00 class: history of the “iberoamerican” independence

This class is taught by a Chilean woman with one of the highest voices I have ever heard.  A little hefty but with a big smile and clear spanish, Maria Petit-Breuilh was very nice to us Americans, confused as heck about what was going on for the first few weeks. We learn a whole lot here about everything under the sun between the years 1750 and 1820 in Latin America and Spain’s foreign (empiric) policy. I also learned a lot about Napoleon and the Battle of Trafalgar from my 10-page paper for this class. 

• 4:00 homework time...

• 5:00 class: writing workshop

This is the class that I take with my program, taught by a great guy called Juan Muñoz. Juan was fluent, more than fluent, in English, and worked as a translator for several companies in Britain and America in the past I think. He’s really friendly, rather fun, and a very good source of information about cross-cultural blunders and translation struggles (“Juan, is there a word for ‘awkward’?”) The class is structured more like a US one would be, with lots of small assignments and an exam going into the final grade as opposed to just one big test at the end deciding everything. We do a fair amount of reading for this class too, which is good practice and, hey, even might be culturally enlightening. 

• 6:30 hang out in the program center

The Michigan-Cornell-Penn in Seville program has a cute little space in an office building a five minute walk from the main part of the university. On the third floor, it overlooks the river. It serves its purpose well, providing computers and printers, a small library, and study space, as well as housing the offices of the staff. The program students come and go through here, attempting to work but usually ending up doing more important things, like playing cards. 

• 7:00 dance class

At the beginning of the semester, our program took us out to go see a Flamenco show. From that day forward I was determined to stick myself in a Flamenco class and see if I could teach myself to be a little more graceful by the end of the semester (no). There is a specific kind of Flamenco that is unique to Seville, a set of four short dances that a pair dance together in succession at a very famous fair held every spring. The four dances are known as the Sevillanas, and Rebecca and I set out to learn them with another girl from our program, Sonali. As it turns out, our dance class is one of the things I love most. Sandra, our teacher, is a very sweet, very talented, and very pregnant lady who was more than welcoming to us clumsy Americans. We come three times a week to stumble around in the complicated Flamenco fashion, along with three Spanish girls between the ages of 7 and 12 and two other old Spanish ladies somewhere north of 50. The class is great fun. The three girls love talking with us, although most of our communication consists of gestures and giggles (kids’ spanish is surprisingly difficult to understand). We’ve pretty much managed to master the Sevillanas, and Rebecca and I have turned out to be a pretty decent pair when we dance with each other. It’s on my bucket list to come back to Seville for the spring fair.

• 8:30 Pasapalabra

After our dance class, we usually return to the apartment in time to catch Pasapalabra, one of the few TV shows that Carmen consistently watches. The title literally translates to “password”, and consists of two contestants who, after spending most of the show in teams earning points, hurry to complete a rosco (round) of the alphabet: for every letter, a clue is read, and they have to provide the answer to the description - a word beginning with that letter. If they don’t know, they get to say “pasapalabra”, which pauses their clock and puts their opponent in the hot seat. If they manage to get every letter correct before the time runs out, they win a big jackpot, but if they get one wrong, the chance for that is lost. As long as the contestant has more letters right than their opponent by the end, though, they get to come back to the show and try again tomorrow. For most of the semester, this guy named Carlos was on the show every day. He just kept getting so close, but never quite completing the rosco, and you know, we all got very attached. Carmen would call us out of our bedrooms if he had a few to go so we would all stand in the living room, watching with bated breath. Rebecca and I also would get very, very excited when we knew an answer (maybe happened twice a week). 

• 9:30 eat dinner

Dinner is pretty much exactly like lunch. However, every now and then (more then than now), Carmen will sit with Rebecca and I. It's a rare event, but it's fun when it happens. Carmen is not a conversationalist, and it requires a large amount of effort on our part to keep things moving, but we love it when she joins us. 

• 10:00 procrastinate
• 12:00 bedtime 

Rinse and repeat!