Week 8

By Aaron

Lost in Translation: If you read our week 7 post, you most likely assumed that we were mere hours away from finally getting internet in our apartment. And if this were another country, your assumption would have been correct.  But this, my friends, is Spain, where seemingly straightforward tasks tend to take a little longer than expected.  This past Saturday morning, a technician from Vodafone showed up to our apartment just as we had scheduled.  After intimately exploring some key places in our apartment walls (as well as a few other places in the building), the tech informed us that some existing wiring in the building was broken.  This meant that we had to wake up the building president, Rosa, and ask her to call an electrician.  By some stroke of luck, Rosa speaks English and is incredibly kind.  She explained that she would have to call Liliana (our landlady) and ask her about an electrician.  The following Monday and Tuesday, Joni received calls from Vodafone that seemed to be asking her to schedule another appointment.  To the best of her ability, Joni explained that she needed to wait until the electrician repaired the cable before the technician could return to install the fiber for our internet.  Each time, the person on the other end of the line appeared to comprehend Joni's response but simply stayed on the line.

Joni: ¿Tu necesitas algun más?
Vodafone: No, es todo.
Joni: Vale.
Vodafone: ...

It would be creepy if it didn't also seem very polite.  Perhaps the conversation had diverged from a flowchart and the representative didn't know what to do.  At any rate, Joni eventually hung up the phone.  On Tuesday evening we heard from Rosa that the wires would be repaired the following day, so we ventured to our neighborhood Vodafone branch.  After all, in-person awkward silences are much easier to interpret!  A woman at Vodafone told us that we needed to provide Cat's NIE # in order to reschedule the appointment.  Naturally!  She provided a number that we could call, so long as we had the NIE#.  After returning home and calling the number, Joni was on hold for 20 minutes (with an English speaker!) when she realized this phone time was eating up her monthly allotment of call time and that we should simply return to Vodafone.  We arrived 15 minutes before the store closed, but no more patrons were being allowed in.  So far today Joni has not received any calls from Vodafone, so we'll head to the store again to plead our case.  Hopefully next week the update will be that we have internet, full stop.

Exploring the City: Our neighborhood is located about a 20 minute walk from the Río

Manzanares.  It's a rather underwhelming body of water, little more than a large drainage ditch working in tandem with the M-30 roadway to cordon off Madrid's center.  Luckily there is a paved path for cyclists and runners, as well as some nice park area nearby.  Most impressive, however, is the Matadero, a former slaughterhouse-turned-art-space adjacent to the aforementioned river.  We headed there on Saturday to check out the Festibal de Bici, a glorious all ages jamboree with activities ranging from a vert skating competition to a "slow bike" race to an area filled with paper confetti for throwing about.  It was loads of fun, and we were proud that we could walk home.

After getting settled in our apartment we were ready to ingrain ourselves in the sacred neighborhood institution known as the library. Friday we visited the Biblioteca Regional Joaquín Leguina, a former brewery turned library within a ten minute walk of our home, and obtained library cards.  It is a beautiful building and a great space to go if you're seeking solitude to read or write.  The weird thing is that the books in this particular branch cannot be checked out.  It remains to be seen if this is the case for all libraries in Spain, or perhaps if it is a condition of a card issued to a person with a passport and not a resident card, but at any rate it is a place I imagine myself returning throughout our time here.

Memorable Meal: My parents and sister raved about the churros con chocolate they had in

Spain during Emily's semester abroad, so I had been looking forward to trying this traditional Spanish treat ever since we arrived. What better place to start than at our doorstep, right?  Well, unfortunately we were met with disappointment. First of all, we ate the churros for breakfast, which is a terrible idea, as they don't exactly make up a nutritious meal. Churros are basically just deep-fried bread served with a thick chocolate sauce. We thought this seemed more like a dessert, but the churrería near our apartment is only open during the morning hours, so churros for breakfast.  They smelled amazing, but tasted a lot like the breading of an onion ring, sans onion. I expected them to be covered in cinnamon and sugar, or powdered sugar, making the churro itself a delectable treat and the chocolate merely a bonus. These churros, however, had nothing on them and thus, alone, did not taste all that great. As for the chocolate, I expected a consistency similar to that of chocolate from a chocolate fountain (basically melted milk chocolate). Instead, it was more like a thick hot chocolate that was clearly made with water as the base. It was, however, the best part of the whole experience, despite its shortcomings. Needless to say, we will not be returning to our neighboring Churrería, but we are still more than willing to give the treat a second chance at a different location. 

Who’s Coming to Dinner: It was a relatively quiet week for dinner guests - most of it was spent chipping away at the pasta leftovers from the previous week. On Sunday we sought out company, once again in the form of Ben & Cat, and once again visited Massart.  (Sidenote: I learned that the Spanish word masa translates to dough in English, so there may be some wordplay going on here...albeit with an extra s).  This week's selection was the Barbacoa: tomato, mozzarella, barbecue sauce, ground beef, onion and corn. Twice in two weeks, I know, but we don't have our own oven and there are 28 tantalizing varieties of pizza on their menu.  I have no regrets.

En la clase: We are really enjoying our Spanish classes, which is good since it comprises

the majority of our days at the moment.  All the teachers we've had are wonderful, and each day we are pushed to expand our ever-filling base of vocabulary and grammar.  Much like our TEFL course, the Spanish classes have a very international feel. In my class I'm now the lone student with solely U.S. citizenship.  In addition to the time spent in the classroom, we have regularly scheduled cultural activities - all in Spanish - lead by our teachers.  Last Thursday we went on a scavenger hunt of sorts at an exhibit on costumes from productions of plays by Miguel de Cervantes and Shakespeare, commemorating the quadricentennial of their deaths.  I was a little disappointed, as I initially thought it was a conversation with designers about their stylistic choices connected to the text, but the costumes on display were worth the trip.  This past Tuesday we had a zumba style dance lesson from one of our teachers that incorporated steps from salsa and cha-cha.  In addition to elevating our heart rates, this activity gave us all the requisite vocab to conduct stretching exercises!

Final Notes: Job searching is tough.  It's not that there aren't jobs available, but rather knowing which to take and at what time.  English classes are typically conducted in the relatively early morning (7:30 - 9:30), the lunch hour (1 - 4) and then the "afternoon" (4 - 10).  If you aren't selective it would be possible to leave for work before 7 AM and not return until close to 11 PM.  The more interviews we attend the easier it gets to start feeling out how to efficiently fill our time slots while coordinating to ensure we get to spend some of our waking hours together.  No new news to report on this front, but we hope that things will become more certain in the coming days.

Perhaps more noteworthy than anything else in this post is that last Thursday I finally beat 2048.  It's been years since I started playing, and now I need another addicting game to drive me mad whilst wiling away my time listening to podcasts.